At the very beginning of his one-man piece, Jeff Key appears in his underwear, so the first thing you find yourself focusing on is his beautifully toned body, an image to which your mind returns periodically — and pleasurably — throughout the course of this very serious and soul-searching exploration…
The Hot L Baltimore. Director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever have, by staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel. The play is a kind of extended tone poem about life in a seedy hotel filled…
Iraq War, the Musical! has what so many political satires lack: teeth. It’s a sustained and ultimately serious attack on the Bush administration’s war and the lies told by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Writer-creator Paul Cross has clearly done a great deal of research on the topic, and through skits…
Two men in a room together: the torturer and the tortured. This is Uruguay in the early 1970s, and the victim is Pedro, a member of the revolutionary Tupamaros. The man who controls the torture — though he doesn’t administer it personally — is a colonel in the fascist country’s…
The Hot L Baltimore. Director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever have, by staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel. The play is a kind of extended tone poem about life in a seedy hotel filled…
One of the things I love about Buntport is how the company comes at a subject from a genuinely original, sideways angle. Dramas based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers are usually romantic swashbucklers. But the Buntporters, who create their scripts through a collaborative process, were more intrigued by news…
Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine for…
The man onstage (the character is actually called Man) begins by telling us he’s an unreliable narrator, and goes on to prove it in scene after scene. He tells a story about how he ran into Belinda, the girl he loved in high school twelve years earlier — or perhaps…
I wanted to sing along to the pulse-quickening rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” that closes Woody Guthrie’s American Song — as the cast of this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production was urging us to do, and everyone around me was doing — but I couldn’t, because I was crying…
Modern Muse Theatre Company, created by Steve Lavezza and Gabriella Cavallero and dedicated to mounting daring and relevant works, has completed its third year and is about to announce its fourth. Tonight the company presents Back to the Muse, a major fundraiser featuring Jamie Horton, who for decades was one…
Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine for…
Buddy…The Buddy Holly Story is basically a concert attached to a flimsy afterthought of a plot. Buddy Holly was one of the pioneers of rock and roll, and a huge influence on the musicians who followed him. He rose from obscurity as a country singer in Texas and then created…
By staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel, director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever enjoy in Denver. The Barth is home to many indigent seniors suffering physical or mental disabilities; it’s one of…
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Director Gavin Cameron-Webb has set this production in a summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917, just before America’s entrance into the First World War. The proceedings open with a long mime sequence, showing the flirtatious Jaquenetta being courted by her two swains — the absurd…
I couldn’t help worrying when I heard that End Days, the new play being mounted by Curious Theatre Company, featured Stephen Hawking, Jesus Christ, a goth girl and a teenage boy who dresses as Elvis — not to mention 9/11. Such a semi-hip assemblage seemed to signify a young playwright…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
I expected a lot more of Central City Opera’s fiftieth-anniversary production of West Side Story. I’ve been in love with Leonard Bernstein’s music since I first heard it decades ago, and over the past few years, I’ve listened to many gorgeous voices in the intimate and historic Central City Opera…
Director Gavin Cameron-Webb has set Love’s Labour’s Lost in a house in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917, just before America’s entrance into the First World War. The set, by Andrea Bechert, is green and appealing, with topiary trees, two slim stone statues flanking the stage and, in the center, a…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
Macbeth is one of the most familiar of Shakespeare’s plays, and with each new production, I look to see what the director has accomplished in the way of re-interpretation, depth of understanding or clarification. For this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, Lynne Collins has added a number of interpretive touches. Early…
The Last Five Years. This intimate two-person musical involves the breakup of a marriage. When Jamie and Cathy met in New York, he was an aspiring writer and she an actress. Success came for him fast, while she continued to inhabit the dreary, ego-pummeling world of auditions and summer stock —…
