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.”…

Assassins seethes through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitude and raising a host of tormenting questions. This brilliant musical by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim is exactly the kind of project local companies should be taking on — and kudos to Next Stage for doing so. Sondheim…

I loved this production of The Fourth Wall when I saw it at the late lamented Nomad Theatre — directed, as now, by Billie McBride and featuring the same cast — and I fully expected to love it again at the Avenue. But I didn’t. The script remains witty and…

The plot of An Ideal Husband isn’t as absurd as that of Oscar Wilde’s best-known play, The Importance of Being Earnest — there’s no mention, for instance, of a baby in a carpet bag — but it’s still a featherweight thing. Husband concerns a politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, whose spotless…

In 1955, when Inherit the Wind was written, religious attacks on evolution seemed safely in America’s past, and authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee weren’t so much re-arguing the topic as using it as a metaphor for the stifling of thought in the McCarthy era. It’s astonishing to realize…

Oil begins with an unidentified, cowboy-hatted oilman leaning back in a chair and justifying drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The speech is droll — the work is so environmentally sound, the oilman tells us, that the caribou sidle up to the pipelines to keep warm — and the…

When you walk into the East Theater at the Dairy Center for the Arts, you see a man puttering quietly about the stage. The setting is simple: a white chair dead center; a set of coveralls suspended from a hanger to your left; a table holding sound equipment to your…

Denver Repertory’s Death of a Salesman is one of those low-budget shows that’s held together with chewing gum, string and ferocious determination. Which means it’s uneven. The set and lighting are minimal, because neither the company nor the John Hand Theatre has the resources to create the mix of dream,…

The Winter’s Tale, part of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is a peculiar hybrid of a play. It begins as tragedy, then lurches into full comic mode. There’s a sixteen-year gap in time, more comedy, and it’s back to gravitas for the final scenes. The play contains many familiar tropes –…

Twelfth Night begins with the lovestruck Count Orsino ordering up music to match his pleasurably melancholy mood. When his “If music be the food of love, play on” is answered by cheerful calypso sounds and he proceeds to practice a few dance steps, you know you’re in the hands of…

Central City Opera’s Madama Butterfly is beautifully sung, if a little over-directed. First performed in 1904, Puccini’s opera tells the story of an American officer, B.F. Pinkerton, who is stationed in Japan and enters into an exploitative union with a teenage geisha. Such fake marriages, which the groom could leave…

My friend Julia, 24 years old, tall and striking and a one-time ballet dancer, was wearing rhinestone-encrusted stiletto heels for the occasion. When she rose to her feet, put her hands to her hips and did “The Time Warp,” I knew the Avenue Theater’s Rocky Horror Show was a success…

This was the most fun I’ve had at the Arvada Center — in fact, the most fun I’ve had at the theater for a while. This venue generally attracts a pretty staid crowd, many of them middle-aged and older, and it was clear that some people were offended by The…

The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. He smelled of decay. His head was so large that he couldn’t sleep lying…

Independence is a story about three very different young women and their terrifyingly possessive, half-mad mother. Kess, the oldest daughter, left the family and remained out of touch with her mother for four years. She’s a successful academic, living in Minneapolis with her lesbian lover. At the beginning of the…

There’s a lot that’s good about Humble Boy, currently showing at the John Hand Theater. The play is literate, with eccentric characters, some absorbing scenes, occasional unexpected moments — but somehow the structure eluded me. And all the esoteric talk about space and time and the habits of bees seemed…

Summer Lovin’, at Heritage Square Music Hall, is a string of songs held together with a thin thread of plot. A traveling troupe arrives at an old theater planning to stage a play, only to discover that the place is closed while the theater board contemplates converting it into an…

Topdog/Underdog features two brothers in a dingy, inner-city room. Lincoln and Booth — their names were given to them by their feckless father as a joke — tell tall tales, spar and play tricks on each other. For a while their bickering seems lighthearted and affectionate. Lincoln, an expert at…

The set is spare and symmetrical, an apartment dominated by a bank of gray-lit windows and furnishings in varying shades of black and gray. This is downtown New York, ash-covered in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. We hear the sound of a plane engine getting louder and louder, newscasters’…