Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…

A.R. Gurney is both a gentle man and a gentleman. He’s the product of an upper-crust WASP family, an echelon of society he’s delineated with irony, wistfulness and affection in many early plays, including The Dining Room. But he’s also interested in politics, as is clear in 1992’s The Fourth…

In Diversions and Delights, Germinal Stage actor-director Ed Baierlein gives us a broken Oscar Wilde. The man who delighted in shocking London, the poseur who walked along the Strand holding a flower, the writer who told an American customs official that he had nothing to declare but his genius, the…

Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…

Bad Dates has the familiar feel of a long night spent with a girlfriend after she’s suffered a breakup, one of those nights when you can offer nothing but a shared bottle of wine, anything sweet you have lurking in the fridge and a loving ear. Playwright Theresa Rebeck provides…

For King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy, Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson has the characters argue, fight, rage, torment each other and grieve on an almost bare stage within the confines of high, forbidding gray arches and pillars. The beginning of the story has the symmetry and…

Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…

Edith Piaf, the French chanteuse her countrymen lovingly dubbed “The Little Sparrow,” died long before I had a chance to see her on stage. But I know her voice in my bones, as I imagine many of you do, too: that low-pitched, cigarette-and-whiskey-flavored sound with its profound vibrato, a voice…

Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…

I first visited the Country Dinner Playhouse with my parents-in-law — good, small-town, middle-American folk, who took my husband and me to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a special treat. I remember that the food was the usual steam-table fare and that I was a little surprised by…

I spend the first thirty minutes of 1001 in a state of irritated disaffection. This is the world premiere of an original play, and disaffection may be a legitimate response: Playwright Jason Grote has tried to do something original, something that I can’t slot tidily into any of the pre-existing…

Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…

I didn’t want to see Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman; I’d read the reviews from London and New York, which all said that the play — which deals with torture, interrogation, child mutilation and murder — was brilliant, but harrowing to watch. I’ve been trying not to obsess about torture (while…

I once contacted all the girls who had ever played Clara in Boulder Ballet’s Nutcracker for an article. Several were now college students, one at Princeton; one of them was dancing in Canada. In every ballet company — professional, amateur or somewhere in between — the role of Clara is…

I loved Our Town when I was sixteen and played Emily at school, but I didn’t remember much about it. I knew that Thornton Wilder’s play was a sweetly moving evocation of small-town American life at the beginning of the twentieth century, but with a plot involving perpetually kitchen-bound women,…

Yes, yes, yes, we all know that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, although I think it’s seduced more powerful men into selling their souls — like Henry Kissinger, the morally decayed author of that quote — than it has nubile young women into hopping in bed with the old goats…

There’s a historic tension between science and religion — at least between science and literalistic, primitive religion — and it’s become especially virulent over the last decade or so. The schism has never made much sense: Some religious people find that scientific advances only feed their sense of wonder and…

The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…

The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…

The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…

I went to Ebenezer expecting the usual hilarious, free-form mayhem of Heritage Square and encountered an unexpected solemnity. The company’s version of A Christmas Carol made up the first half of the evening, and it was swift and workmanlike, if lower-key than many of the group’s offerings. Still, there were…

The big draw for this Denver Center production of Sweet Charity is Molly Ringwald in the title role. Almost everyone remembers Ringwald from the films with which director John Hughes defined American teendom: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. A talented actress and physically beautiful — although not…