I don’t know how to assess John Orlock’s Indulgences in the Louisville Harem, currently playing at Germinal Stage Denver, because I don’t begin to understand it. Sometimes when you see a play that makes no literal sense, you still feel caught up in it, still find some recognizable emotional or…

Theatre 13 is a new Boulder company that occupies the small upstairs theater space at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art — previously a venue for all kinds of multi-disciplinary and experimental work. Orphans, Theatre 13’s second production, is a peculiar mix of amateurish and highly professional elements. It’s an…

Party of 1 offers a very pleasant way to spend an evening. It’s a good play to go to with a date, or to attend in hopes of finding one. The show is a sequence of cabaret songs dedicated to the joys and pains of singlehood, slightly reminiscent of I…

Boulder’s Dinner Theatre frequently transcends expectations, offering shows far better than the usual dinner-theater fare. There’s a lot of talent in the resident company, and the sets and costumes tend to be appealing and the direction sharp. But The King and I feels like a bit of a throwback. Some…

At the beginning, Bug seems hyper-realistic. We’re shown a drink- and drug-addled woman, Agnes, living in a motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. The set, by Charles Dean Packard, features a shag carpet and rumpled bed, and it’s entirely convincing. We have been here before. It is, among…

What a disappointment! Kent Thompson began his tenure as artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company with a terrific production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and a hugely funny version of Feydeau’s classic farce, A Flea in Her Ear. But the third offering under his tenure, Jose Cruz…

Buntport’s Horror: The Transformation is based on Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, a novel published in 1798, and inspired by the true story of a farmer who killed his wife and children. It’s not done as a period piece, though the clothes and setting aren’t strictly modern, either: At one point,…

No false advertising here: The show’s about naked boys singing. The real thing. The full monty. Seven of them, some younger, some a little older, a couple more buff than others, flaunters and flirters and would-be hiders, and every one of them gallantly baring his body and showing his all…

It’s amazing, really, the amount of sheer hard work and the level of perfectionism required to keep this bright bouncing balloon of a farce aloft. You get Scott Weldin’s sets — an elegant, intricate bourgeois living room in shades of beige, complete with patterned wallpaper, crystal chandelier and three oval…

The seven founders — and also writer-designer-director-performers — of Buntport Theater are exploring new territory. Known for a prankish and highly literate experimentalism, the team is currently showing Realism: The Mythical Brontosaurus, which, as the title suggests, is pretty much a realistic play. There are no lopped-off limbs here or…

Although the critical world seems almost united in proclaiming Death of a Salesman not only Arthur Miller’s best play, but one of the greatest twentieth-century dramas, I have always rather disliked it: the heavy symbolism, the self-consciously poetic language, the endless moralizing and the protagonist’s awful self-pity. To me, the…

For this ambitious production, Su Teatro artistic director Anthony J. Garcia has transposed the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to modern-day Mexico, intertwining it with contemporary politics and elements of Aztec myth and adding music by composer Daniel Valdez. It’s a fascinating concept, and parts of it work well, but…

I’m not the best audience for a scary show. At the movies, I cover my eyes during the gory parts. I also find that, for the most part, the real world provides all the grief and terror I know how to handle. Nonetheless — despite some moments spent cringing in…

Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys takes place in a teahouse in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, during the time of apartheid. The Master Harold of the title is a seventeen-year-old boy; during the play, his mother is manifest only as a voice on the phone, and we learn that…

Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? I know that Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting…

More than a decade ago, I attended a production at the Gaslight, a theater in the basement of a beautiful Victorian house in northwest Denver. The play, Bent, was new then and revelatory, a terrifying examination of the plight of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The play seemed almost incongruous in…

The Denver Center Theatre Company is beginning its first season under new artistic director Kent Thompson, former director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Thompson, 51, took the reins from Donovan Marley, who announced his retirement in January 2004, after 22 years. Theater buffs are wondering what to expect from the…

As a reviewer, I see a lot of theater productions, and it’s rare for me to want to see one for a second time. But Germinal Stage Denver has more than once mounted a play I’d have liked to re-experience. This is because artistic director Ed Baierlein picks works that…

At the center of Lynn Nottage’s gentle, appealing play, Intimate Apparel, is the figure of Esther, a black woman in her thirties living in a boardinghouse in 1905 New York City, and — like so many poor and displaced women before and since — making her living as a seamstress…

In the ladies’ room during the intermission of The Dead Guy, I heard one woman say to another, “Every play they do here has some kind of message.” “What do you see as the message of this one?” asked her friend. A pause. “Oh, you know, how shallow television is.”…