Ellen McLaughlin’s Tongue of a Bird isn’t poetry, though it wants to be: It lacks conciseness, the sense of language reduced to its essence. Instead, it floods the stage with lyrical phrases and poetic images, as if the author were saying, “How’s this one? Didn’t move you? Didn’t quite work?…

Although it’s a comedy, The Merchant of Venice is far darker than such sunny Shakespearean offerings as Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also a difficult piece for modern audiences because of the central figure of Shylock. Shylock is the money-lending Jew to whom Antonio, the…

In many ways Noel Coward’s life’s work was being a blithe spirit — and an intensely elegant one at that. An actor, writer and composer of songs, he was as much known for his suave persona as for his hilarious plays. He wrote Blithe Spirit in 1941, while German bombs…

It was too loud. That was, I’m afraid, my prevailing impression of Hairspray. It was so loud that periodically I stuck my fingers in my ears. So loud that when a performer began one of those songs that starts low and intense, I found myself cowering in anticipation of the…

The massacre at Columbine High School has been so intensively covered in the media — minutely dissected when it first occurred, rehashed with every newly uncovered fragment of information and on every yearly anniversary — that it’s hard to figure out what remains to be said about it. So it’s…

Bat Boy: The Musical ends like a Shakespearean tragedy, with bodies dropping all over the stage, while horrified onlookers shudder and weep. It’s just that in Shakespeare, the bodies don’t rise up again to sing the finale. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the…

Boulder’s Dinner Theatre changed hands last fall. It was sold by founder-director Ross Haley to local neurosurgeon Dr. Gene Bolles and his wife, Judy; they hired a new artistic director, Michael J. Duran — who, just coincidentally, starred in the BDT’s first-ever production 27 years ago. Which — just coincidentally…

There’s no question: Larry Parr’s script for Hi-Hat Hattie is two-dimensional and sentimental, open to all the shortcomings of the form — a one-woman show that tells the story of a famed historical figure. You can be sure the subject will be prettied up, and any nastiness or meanness in…

Yasmina Reza’s Art begins and ends with an all-white painting. Or an empty canvas, depending on how you look at it. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has just invested 200,000 francs (about $40,000) in the painting, which features diagonal white lines on a white background. His friend, Marc, is appalled at…

With Carlyle Brown’s The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, Jeffrey Nickelson’s Shadow Theatre Company continues its mission of education and enlightenment. The play deals with a musical form that many of us would rather forget. According to a pre-show explanation by director Hugo Jon Sayles, minstrel shows did…

Critic and scholar Vivian Mercier once described Waiting for Godot as “a play in which nothing happens. Twice.” I went to the Bug Theatre’s production of Godot with no particular expectations. The days when the play puzzled and infuriated the theater-going public, garnering equal parts derision and passionate support, are…

Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage is a manic, farcical take on the myth of the West, mixed with a large dollop of gothic horror. Best of all, it’s a genuinely clever, funny and outrageous script. Bits and pieces of things you’ve seen before float to the surface — scenes…

The Denver Repertory Theatre is a new company inhabiting an old railroad station hard by Denver’s light rail. It’s a terrific building that houses a collection of artists’ studios and boasts shining wood, interesting rooms and crannies, bits of antique furniture and odds and ends of art. In other words,…

We go to a play by Harold Pinter with certain expectations. We expect ambiguity, eloquent silences, language used like a scalpel or to parody literary convention and ordinary use. There won’t be a plot, and the action will be puzzling, but it will involve mis- and non-communication between characters and…

Singer Alberta Hunter had an extraordinary life. At age twelve, she left her Memphis home for Chicago, where she got her start at a rough club called Dago Frank’s. She moved to New York City in the 1920s and became part of the Harlem Renaissance alongside such luminaries as Duke…

John Brown’s Body isn’t exactly a play; it doesn’t have one absorbing plot line. Instead, it’s an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous 1928 epic poem about the Civil War, and, like all epics, it’s a kind of episodic tapestry. There’s chanting and singing. Actors are sometimes specific characters, and…

Claire Boothe Luce’s The Women was recently revived at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, a production I happened to catch one evening on television. It featured Cynthia Nixon, best known as Miranda in Sex and the City, as the wronged wife Mary Haines and Kristen Johnston as her catty…

I enjoyed almost every moment of Visiting Mr. Green, but the title character’s Russian-style glass teacups disarmed me completely. During my teens, my Hungarian stepfather used to bring me tea with whiskey, lemon and honey in just such a cup whenever I was in bed with a cold. And the…

The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but he’s rigid and traditional in his thinking,…

Meshuggah Nuns is the kind of show that seems to have no real reason for being. It’s inoffensive and even amusing in spots, but it also feels like something created for the sole purpose of filling up time on stage. And in a world full of musicals with witty scripts…

What keeps a man alive? He lives on others. He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole if he can Forgets that they’re supposed to be his brothers That he himself was ever called a man. — Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera Suzan-Lori Parks has set Fucking A…