THURS, 6/2 Jeffrey Nickelson saw Topdog/Underdog, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, on Broadway in 2002 with Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def in the lead roles, and he knew immediately that he wanted the Pulitzer Prize-winning play for his Shadow Theatre Company. He was fascinated when he realized Topdog was written by…
Little Tina Denmark was born with talent. No one knows where it came from — her mother is a perky, cookie-baking,’ 50s-style housewife, her father always away on unspecified business — but dancing and singing are in her blood. So when Tina loses the lead in the school musical, Pippi…
Parallel Lives, at the Avenue Theater, begins promisingly, with two heavenly beings designing the human race. They discuss skin color — red, tan, yellow — and worry that those humans with ordinary white skin may feel left out or inferior. They decide that procreation will occur through sex and that…
What is there to say abou The Wizard of Oz at this point in time? The film — if not the original book — is etched in every American mind: Judy Garland’s solid little Dorothy with her child’s innocence and full, womanly voice; Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion; Margaret Hamilton epitomizing…
I found Shaking the Dew From the Lilies, now at the Playwright Theatre, enjoyable in the same way I found nights with girlfriends enjoyable in my twenties. Clad in pajamas or our underwear, we’d dissect each other’s relationships amid peals of satirical laughter at the general obtuseness of men, assure…
The few U.S. commentators who bothered to note the recent election in England marveled at the level of attack sustained in the run-up weeks by Prime Minister Tony Blair — and not just in print. While George Bush’s handlers make sure that anyone who disagrees with the president in the…
Over the past few years, some of the most reliably interesting theater performances in this area have taken place on the small, square stage above the galleries at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, under the aegis of artistic director Brandi Mathis. Mathis, who worked at the museum for five…
Opening nights are a strange phenomenon, paper houses filled with critics and theater people. The latter are warmly supportive of their friends in the play, and many of them express their support by responding so passionately — empathetic gasps, howls of slightly drunken laughter — that the rest of us…
Kimberly Akimbo, currently being staged at Nomad Theatre, begins with an elderly woman seated on a bench, huddled in her jacket against a surprising April snowstorm. (The first mention of the unseasonable weather got a big laugh on the snowy 30th of April in Boulder.) A younger man comes by…
In the last few years, Bas Bleu has become a beacon of theatrical inventiveness and energy in Fort Collins. Play selection is always intelligent and sometimes daring, and execution is usually exemplary. The company began this season with an ambitious endeavor: In conjunction with Openstage, they presented Angels in America…
The first scene of The Crimson Thread, currently showing at the Arvada Center, is somewhat promising, though it does have a bit of that golden-sunlight, Hallmark-card feeling about it. Mary Hanes’s writing is lyrical but rarely revelatory. The year is 1869. Two sisters, Eilis and Bridget, are talking on the…
Boulder’s Nomad Theatre, a converted World War II Quonset hut, has a long history. In 1951, the owner of the land on which the building stands deeded it to the Nomad Players — so called because their first-ever production took place in a tent furnished with chairs from a local…
In a culture where popular definitions of manhood are as rigid and narrow as they are in the United States (real men chop down trees, play sports and don’t drink lattes), the age-old ideal of the warrior-poet seems a contradiction in terms. Without question, however, this mythic figure was in…
I think of Alan Bennett as a chronicler of the lives of those inhabiting a certain stratum of British society: lonely, middle-class people, conventional, self-conscious and always slightly embarrassed at themselves, like the monologuists of Talking Heads or Bennett’s self-depiction as the unwilling host of The Lady in the Van…
Normally, I would trek through broken glass — well, okay, walk several city blocks in new high heels — to see Nicholas Sugar perform. It’s not just his humor and intense stage presence; it’s the fact that in the past he’s added interesting colors to roles that could easily be…
Pigeons on the grass, alas. — Gertrude Stein It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue…
Fire on the Mountain is an evocation of the lives of Appalachian coal miners in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Created for the Denver Center by Dan Wheetman and Randal Myler, who also directs, it is told primarily through song, with snatches of dialogue and narrative taken…
Edmond, currently being staged by the Denver Repertory Theatre Company, is about as nasty a play as I can imagine. When I see something that angers me this much, I usually try to figure out some interpretation I may be missing, something that justifies the enterprise. But for the life…
The Denver Center Theatre Company is presenting a version of The Madwoman of Chaillot, updated as simply The Madwoman and set in contemporary New York rather than Paris. The play was written by an ailing Jean Giraudoux during World War II and was first released in 1945, after his death…
Polonio Castro, the protagonist of Thaddeus Phillips’s El Conquistador!, is a Colombian peasant living out a fantasy. Although there are similar Everyman characters in many cultures, Polonio reminds me of the humorous little men who populate Czech film and literature — not too great a stretch, given that Phillips’s theater…
Paris on the Platte is a comic romp through early-nineteenth-century Denver history, focusing on Mayor Robert Speer and his dreams of “The City Beautiful.” The opening — a spoof on old-time melodrama — doesn’t quite work: It’s hard to tell exactly what’s being said by the yelling, gesticulating actors. But…
It takes time for major historic events to find expression in art (a serious body of literature about the Vietnam War didn’t emerge until almost a decade after the peace treaty was signed), and it seems to me that playwrights are just beginning to feel their way into the topic…
