Calamity. Written by Stephen Wangh and Suzanne Baxtresser, Calamity brings Calamity Jane back to life, re-creating one of the Wild West shows in which she starred at the turn of the last century. But here Calamity also confronts the present — along with current ideas about just who she was…
The mythology of the West as depicted in dimestore novels and Hollywood fantasy has been pretty thoroughly discredited by now; since the 1980s, a rash of revisionist works have described lives of deprivation, hunger and dirt — not to mention greed and exploitation — on what historians no longer want…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. There’s enough good material here for a tight, funny, one-hour-long show, but this one stretches on and on. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through December 20,…
A middle-aged man is alone on stage, reciting a paragraph of prose. The stage behind him has an unused, dusty appearance — chairs, a few other bits of furniture. We realize we’re in a deserted theater. The man mumbles and hesitates, and then there’s an interruption from the audience. A…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through November 1, Garner Galleria Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed September 18, 2008. Microworld(s), Part 1…
Thaddeus Phillips is a magician of the stage. He likes putting disparate things together — objects, images, ideas — in service of a new and transformative vision. He is also an internationalist to the core. His characters are often bewildered travelers, and maps, boundaries and foreign languages play a large…
A Raisin in the Sun. This fifty-year-old play remains astonishingly relevant. The Younger family — grandmother Lena, son Walter Lee and twenty-year-old daughter Beneatha, as well as Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, and young son Travis — live in a roach-infested Chicago apartment with a down-the-hall bathroom. Travis sleeps on the…
A Raisin in the Sun was written over fifty years ago, but it remains vivid and relevant today. Though the final act is weakened by a sequence of preachy, 1950s-style dramatic speeches, in which each character in turn bares his or her soul, in every other respect these people are…
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. First produced in 1984, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the play that propelled August Wilson to fame, and it has everything that makes the playwright great: eruptions of humor, rage, pettiness and affection, all given resonance by a broadly humanistic sense of history and context. The…
When he wrote The Voysey Inheritance over a hundred years ago, Harley Granville-Barker intended to show the rot beneath the politely conventional exterior of Edwardian society. The plot concerns a solicitor who uses his clients’ funds to enrich himself and his family while managing to keep up with interest payments…
I knew that René Marie was a tremendous jazz artist — but I had no idea that she was also an amazing writer and an astonishingly powerful actress. Not until I saw Slut Energy Theory. Marie’s one-woman play has been promoted as a work about incest and abuse; performances are…
Die! Mommie Die! It’s been forever since we’ve had really good, outrageous, dirty-minded, over-the-top camp in Denver, so Die! Mommie Die! is a particular delight. Charles Busch’s play is a spoof of such 1960s Gothic horror movies as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. There’s no important…
For the children who compete in them, spelling bees are a very big deal. They represent an arena where poor kids, rural kids and the kids of immigrants can find identity and pride. Indian-Americans, like the winner of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Kavya Shivashankar, seem to do particularly…
In A Murder One Less, a quantum-physics-inspired piece, a man (Brandon Kruhm) sits on a bench, naked to the waist, contemplating his hands, his body tattooed with words you can’t quite make out. An Eleanor Rigby-ish young woman (Julie Rada, who also wrote the script) enters; two suitcases dangle from…
Yankee Tavern introduces us to Adam, a young man working in what used to be his father’s bar. He’s arguing with his fiancée, Janet, because the names he provided for her save-the-date notices were fictitious, and she’s furious. Adam’s father committed suicide here — or rather, we think it was…
Die! Mommie Die! It’s been forever since we’ve had really good, outrageous, dirty-minded, over-the-top camp in Denver, so Die! Mommie Die! is a particular delight. Charles Busch’s play is a spoof of such 1960s Gothic horror movies as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. There’s no important…
Jeffrey Nickelson, who passed away last week, made a huge contribution to the theater scene in Denver, both as an actor and a director. He created Shadow Theatre on a $500 donation, and — against all organizational and financial odds — kept the company alive and artistically kicking for a…
Every now and then, the Buntport troupe decides to remind audiences that they’re not just clever, funny, creative and entertaining; they’re also artists. And that’s just what they do with Indiana, Indiana, a production based on a novel by Laird Hunt of the University of Denver. The story isn’t complicated…
Dial ‘M’ for Murder. Frederick Knott’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder is one of those stylish, intricately plotted murder plays, though not a whodunit. We know early on that the villain is onetime tennis pro Tony, who wants his wife, Margot, murdered; we watch as he hires the man to do…
Shadow Theatre’s last celebratory opening took place over a year ago, when then-artistic director Jeffrey Nickelson unveiled the company’s comfortable, brand-new theater to a throng of elegantly dressed well-wishers. The show was Dinah Was, and though it featured the magnificent René Marie in the title role, both script and production…
Dial ‘M’ for Murder. Frederick Knott’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder is one of those stylish, intricately plotted murder plays, though not a whodunit. We know early on that the villain is onetime tennis pro Tony, who wants his wife, Margot, murdered; we watch as he hires the man to do…
Last spring, Jeffrey Nickelson — who founded Shadow Theater Company with a $500 donation from news anchor Reynalda Muse and kept it alive for more than a decade — unveiled the theater’s beautiful new home in Aurora. But a few months later, citing fatigue, Nickelson announced his resignation. Anxious speculation…
