The year is 1942, and England is at war. A revered but aging actor, identified only as Sir, is traveling the country, bringing Shakespeare to the provinces. Given the chaos of the times and the fact that most able-bodied Englishmen are fighting overseas, his is a depleted and ragtag company,…

Charity Hope Valentine is a loving and trusting soul, perpetually betrayed by the men she loves but always willing to give her heart again. She works at a dance hall, flirting and dancing for money. Sweet Charity, with a book by Neil Simon and songs by Cy Coleman and Dorothy…

When Freyda Thomas’s adaptation of Molire’s Tartuffe was shown at Circle in the Square a decade ago, it received a dismissive review from the New York Times. The seventeenth-century classic is about a religious con man whose false piety ensnares a prominent householder, almost destroying his home and family; translating…

There’s quite a bit wrong with Next Stage’s production of The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, but what’s wildly — and exactly — right is the group’s choice of a play to open its season, as well as the casting of the protagonist. Author Rolin Jones is now a writer…

The action of Hamlet all hinges on an injunction by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who appears on a bitter cold night to tell the prince he must kill his murderous and usurping uncle. Everything that happens in Something Is Rotten is also set in motion by a ghost –…

Aldo and Huey are friends. Huey is divorced, and Aldo — who never gained his father’s affection and is unable to sever the link with his overpowering mother — is unmarried. Huey has been behaving oddly since the divorce, wearing poetic, frill-sleeved shirts and unflatteringly tight black pants, mooning around…

The subject of I Am My Own Wife is German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde in 1928 Berlin, a collector of antiques who survived both World War II and the Communist years in East Germany. But the play is as much about author Doug Wright’s relationship with von…

Making theater where there has been little or no theater before — the small towns east of Boulder, for example — is an exemplary activity, and finding new plays to produce is doubly so. But the process is also highly risky. It takes thousands of scripts that are so-so, spotty,…

There are certain actors whose name on a cast list gladdens my heart. The presence of any one of them on stage pretty much assures that I’ll have a good evening at the theater, almost regardless of script, direction or supporting cast. These actors are hugely different in terms of…

As I stood in line for the ladies’ room during the intermission of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s The Tempest, the woman in line behind me asked me what I thought of the production. I murmured something noncommital. She herself liked all the actors, she told me, except for Prospero. She…

Something is happening at the University of Delaware’s theater program, from which the Colorado Shakespeare Festival has drawn a fair amount of its acting talent in the past few years. I imagine an elderly English actress running the place, dispensing advice on diction and elocution over china teacups. From the…

I remember a friend once talking to me about a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The melancholy nobleman Jaques has just joined his exiled fellows and is excitedly describing a recent encounter: “A fool, a fool, I met a fool in the forest.” In some of the most…

Actress Lucy Roucis, who’s playing the witch Addaperle in The Wiz, her thirteenth production with the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors’ League (PHAMALy), has a standup routine about the pros and cons of her Parkinson’s disease, which she recites softly during a break in rehearsal: Pro: Killer parking spaces. Con:…

Love is hard to find. If you find anything — anything at all — remotely resembling it, you should hang on for dear life. Or at least take a long, thoughtful second look, no matter how absurd the thing seems initially or how tempted you are to cut and run…

Because I grew up in London, where the ghosts of Roman soldiers, Saxon traders, Renaissance poets, Victorian merchants, Cockney fishmongers, bishops and queens and kings and murdered princes whispered beneath the pavement, it took me a long time to acknowledge that there was any such thing as Colorado history –…

There are many, many ways for a production to be awful, and The Yiddish Are Coming, at the New Denver Civic Theatre, hits on just about all of them. It’s a cheap little venture — small cast, easy set and costumes, empty-headed concept — put together for the sole purpose…

An old woman lies dying as her son sits by the bedside. Tension vibrates between them. Each character offers a poetic monologue that feels a bit forced; when a playwright has someone gaze out above the heads of the audience and wistfully emote, the writing needs to be more powerful…

The Tennessee Williams one-acts at Germinal Stage are tone poems, mood pieces, as much about language as they are about character and action. They are also about love, loss and despair. Couples reach for each other but are unable to connect; each play ends in stasis. Like all great writers,…

When Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was first produced in 1966, the idea of telling the story of Hamlet from the perspective of two minor players seemed truly daring. It’s less surprising now, but OpenStage’s production of Tom Stoppard’s play still yields intriguing moments. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, school friends of…

The scene is Deola’s dog-grooming salon, where Deola is also setting herself up as a psychic. Three of her friends meet here weekly to play bid whist, and on this occasion they are joined by a fourth, Edna, a newly divorced friend of Deola’s from Texas. Much of the first…

Andrew Jorgenson — whom everyone calls “Jorgy” — has been running his New England Wire and Cable Company with integrity for decades, avoiding debt, providing decent jobs and helping keep his community vital and solvent. He’s supported in this by his loving longtime companion, Bea. Enter the vulgar, doughnut-craving Lawrence…

Before the action begins, you contemplate set designer David Lafont’s rendering of a grimy one-room flat, filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. There’s a rolled-up carpet, an unusable gas stove, a toilet seat hanging below the ceiling and a porcelain toilet back leaning against a wall. A tennis racket…