The conversion of Scrooge at the end of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol always delights, whether you’re reading about it or seeing it on a stage. I remember Alistair Sim in the iconic 1951 movie, capering around the room in his nightgown, startling the maid on the stairs by insisting…

The Shakers were a utopian, egalitarian religious group, originally an offshoot of the Quaker community in eighteenth-century England, whose adherents dedicated themselves to God by separating themselves from the world and giving up all worldly pleasures — including sex. Shakerism was brought to the United States by a young woman…

You’re familiar, of course, with the old theatrical plot line in which the lead gets sick, the understudy is forced to go on in her place, and, after a hesitant start, the young woman wows the audience and becomes a star overnight. Something like that happened on the evening I…

No one goes to see a play in a vacuum, so let me put the evening I attended Cats in context: It came at the end of a week spent alternately reading student papers (in my other life, I teach writing at CU) and conferencing with the authors of those…

These are brilliant songs. They’re wonderfully performed at the Theatre Cafe by four singers and three musicians. And that’s all you need for an evening of pleasure and insight — along with a glass of wine, a table with a white cloth, and a single red rose for your hair…

These days, I can’t watch a Sam Shepard play without having my brain thronged with ghosts of Shepard viewings past. So as Chasm View’s Fool for Love unfurled in front of me, I found myself clicking off the expected elements in my head. A cheap motel room. Check. Somewhere in…

Let’s start with the obvious: It embarrasses me to see a naked guy on stage. Not when he’s standing motionless, bathed in golden light and looking like a statue of Apollo, but when he’s wandering around a cluttered, filthy-looking room, spooning food out of a can with his fingers or…

Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home begins as a tart-tender look at an overworked topic — the way family dynamics become exacerbated, for good or ill, at Christmas time — and ends up floundering in sentimentality. The play’s defining feature, the thing that should have lifted it from the…

For the entire first act, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Boston Marriage is pure enjoyment. It’s light and fast, and the language is dizzying — clever and cleverly self-punctuating. The plot concerns two nineteenth- century women who live together in an arrangement termed a “Boston marriage.” Some such arrangements were…

No question, the Angel at the center of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a tricky creature — neither divine nor malevolent, sometimes comical, highly sexual. She’s not any old angel, either, but the angel of America, which accounts for the frequent stuttered iteration of the first-person pronoun: “I. I…

Nagle Jackson is an intensely visual director. For the Denver Center Theatre Company’s The Misanthrope, he utilized the talents of set designer Vicki Smith, lighting designer Peter Maradudin and costumer Andrew V. Yelusich, and the production is flat-out gorgeous. The set is simple and elegant: white alternating with panels of…

In putting together their original comedy Macblank, the folks at Buntport relied on the theatrical superstition that there’s a curse on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and that those performing it are in danger of unknown catastrophe. There really are actors who refuse to speak the play’s title in a theater, and it’s…

Would I have preferred not to know that John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story was an allegory about the struggle between Israel and Palestine when I sat down to view it? If I hadn’t known, the last line of the first act would have been a complete shock. Up until that…

Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was published in 1964 as fiction, but in fact described the author’s own teenage struggle for sanity and the help she received from Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Dr. Fromm-Reichmann had strong theories about the practice of…

Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain’s lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. — from “Autumn Song,” by W. H. Auden So much…

The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned away at the front desk: “I’m sorry. We’re all sold out.” When I first visited this place a few years ago, there were seven…

Donovan Marley has been the artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company for twenty years, but this season — which just opened with John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story — is the last under his leadership. When he announced his pending departure last year, a seismic shiver went through the…

Going to the Country Dinner Playhouse always feels like stepping back in time and into another America, the kind of place my in-laws would have recognized. They grew up on Colorado farmland, fell in love while they were in high school, even attended the kind of picnic dramatized in Oklahoma!,…

When Sue Leiser trudges across the stage and thumps onto a chair, she’s there. Really there. Solid. Present. Her face in a little moue of anger and disgust as she contemplates the malfunctioning of her bowels. The minute you see her enter in The Tale of the Allergist¹s Wife at…

The auditorium at the University of Colorado is full of students for this performance of Company: The Musical. Not a parent or a professor in sight, no one who appears older than 25. I see a few young men wandering the aisles looking lost, couples seated quietly together, women with…

Everything about The Chancellor’s Tale screams Quality Production. Pay Attention. Serious Topic. And, indeed, it’s a timely exploration of some of the issues currently tearing at the fabric of the Church: homosexuality, the Church’s responsibility for the poor, the struggle of priests to contain their own sexual drives. But the…

Playwright A.R. Gurney is angry. He considers the Bush administration a disaster; he condemns its boneheaded policies, its indifference to the plight of the poor, its preemptive war on Iraq. But Gurney is a kind-spirited, bourgeois, WASP kind of guy, and in The Fourth Wall, his anger is expressed through…