When you enter Buntport Theater, you find yourself facing what looks like the front of a long, low, open dollhouse with rooms on two floors. These spaces are inhabited by various eccentric characters. Theres Polly, the little girl who serves as narrator; a pair of gossiping old crones; the hapless…
With Season’s Greetings, estimable and prolific English writer Alan Ayckbourn has created an antidote not only to the usual Christmas saccharine, but also to all of the half-baked, skit-filled attempts to make the holiday hip. The play shows a dysfunctional middle-class family gathering for their annual celebration. These people have…
From its unappetizing title to its use of a narrator Lockstock, a police officer who pontificates humorously about exposition, metaphor and politics for the benefit of a quintessentially Dickensian orphan named Little Sally Urinetown is a self-consciously anti-musical musical. The songs are tuneful, varied and appealing, and almost every one…
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 want to like Arthur Miller’s plays — and I do like his politics. But the truth is, I have trouble with Miller even at his best — with his lack of humor, ponderousness and stultifying self-pity, with his dated tropes and florid language. And The Price, currently playing at…
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 had a great time at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre’s Crazy for You, and now I’m trying to figure out just why. First and foremost, I suppose, were the songs. You know how it is with musicals, especially those from the first half of the twentieth century, on which this show…
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 morning after I saw tempOdyssey, I was at the Boulder Farmers’ Market buying chicken parts for stock. “These are probably still warm,” said the poultry man, handing me a plastic bag of feet. “The chickens were running around on them yesterday.” This was an image I didn’t particularly want…
With its battered floors and bright galleries, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is an unusual venue for theater, but in some ways a very fitting one for Lee Kalcheim’s Defiled, or the Convenience of a Short-Haired Dog. In the first gallery — which you must pass through to reach…
Boulder has had first-rate restaurants for years — and lately, such eateries as Frasca Food & Wine and the Kitchen have brought the town national attention. Now an equally first-rate publicist is determined to further increase Boulder’s visibility. Kate Lacroix returned to town from New York two years ago and…
The novel Phantom of the Opera was written by Gaston LeRoux in 1911. Although it has inspired several films, most people know the story from the massive, windy Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, with its throbbing score and astonishing special effects. Before that version hit, playwright Arthur Kopit and songwriter Maury…
Almost everything about OpenStage Theatre’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan is superb, with the exception of the director’s basic concept — and that’s a very big exception. The cast, led by Jessica V. Freestone as Joan — a strange, stubborn young peasant woman of fifteenth-century France who emerges…
As I was going up the stair I saw a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away. — Hugh Mearns In Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, an unworldly young governess is employed by a wealthy Londoner to…
It was the end of the week, and I was so tired I was leaning on my friend’s shoulder as we waited for Someone Else’s Life to start. I could tell this was going to be a classy production by Conundrum. All the signs were there: the high-quality stock on…
Occasionally, it’s really 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 dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang, now at the Playwright Theatre, posits…
The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of The Weir is the third I’ve seen in six years, and it’s easily the best and most moving. One reason for this is director Terry Dodd’s strong and nuanced sense of place. The play is set in a rural pub in County Leitrim, Ireland,…
The Denver Center Theatre Company has staged a glittering, sumptuous version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus that focuses more on a clean, elegant delivery of the play’s text than on the passion at its core. The central figure, Antonio Salieri, was the best-known composer in eighteenth-century Vienna, an upright man dedicated…
Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, first published in 1890, is a play about the havoc wrought by an out-of-control woman, a woman who’s torn and driven by impulses she herself cannot understand or control. Hedda combines a certain romantic magnificence — think Shelley and Byron, think Emily Bront’s wild, wild Cathy…
Everything that playwright Lisa Loomer says in Living Out about the blindness of the middle class — even the kindest and most liberal-minded among them — to the problems of the people who work for them is true, and desperately needs saying. This is a cruel culture for poor people…
An animated cartoon by German humorist Walter Moers that’s causing a fair amount of international controversy shows Hitler sitting on the toilet in his bunker as the Allies move in, grumbling that the war isn’t fun anymore, no one’s listening to him, and it’s all Churchill’s fault. Later, wherever he…
Shadow Theatre Company’s latest offering, Plenty of Time, is sweet, smart and a lot of fun. Like Bernard Slade’s Same Time Next Year — which author John She’vin Foster admits as an influence — it chronicles a love affair in which the partners meet every year over an extended period…
