Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri yields almost unalloyed pleasure. It’s about as light and frothy an opera as I can imagine, with a plot that reads like Gilbert and Sullivan at their sunniest and a number of songs as outrageously funny as they are melodically and rhythmically scintillating. Mustafa, the Bey…
Chicago is a dark musical that scorns the very idea of redemption. The characters’ venality reflects the corrupt society that spawned them. The only innocent is a desperate, non-English-speaking Hungarian woman, who is ultimately hanged for her faith in American justice. Although the milieu is completely different — Chicago is…
This revival of 42nd Street is a musical-comedy lover’s musical comedy, a self-referential tribute to an artform that’s already self-referential and artificial at its most sincere. Writers Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble don’t even try to create multi-dimensional characters or to imbue the hoary old plot (bright-eyed ingenue becomes a…
A life in art requires absolute dedication. We all know about the obsessive writing and rewriting, the pain-filled, sweaty workouts in the ballet studio and the hours of instrument practice of the serious artist. It’s this kind of passion that’s on view in Take Me Out to the Ball Game…
In 1998, a group of Colorado College students got together to put on a play called Quixote, a retelling of Cervantes’s famous tale, with chalkboard and erasers. They later toured it to fringe festivals in Philadelphia and in Canada. After graduating, they created a piece based on James Thurber’s short…
Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana is essentially a one-joke play. Fortunately, the joke is so savage, and it’s taken to such outrageous and unthinkable lengths, that the result is a startling and original evening of theater. It doesn’t hurt that the dialogue is always inventive and sometimes downright lunatic, or…
I really wanted to be a lot more amused by The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) than I was. Some of the bits were clever, and the three appealing actors — Keith Hershman, C.J. Hosier and Eric Mather — worked so damn hard. Sadly, the audience was tiny on…
When Mark Lundholm appeared at the Ricketson Theatre in Addicted: A Comedy of Substance last year, I was blown away by his talent as a performer but had mixed feelings about the material. It was often hilariously funny and sometimes insightful, but it was weighted down — particularly in the…
There’s a lot of excitement surrounding the production of The Elephant Man at the Miners Alley Playhouse in Golden. The playhouse didn’t exist until recently. What existed was the Morrison Theatre Company, which, under the direction of Rick Bernstein, mounted performances and offered acting classes in Morrison for over a…
Somehow, I’ve managed to get through many years of theater-going without ever seeing Tartuffe, so I’m grateful to OpenStage Theatre for the opportunity. Unfortunately, this is essentially a college-level production, with a few good moments, many puzzling ones, and others that are downright amateurish. It’s a shame, because religious hypocrisy,…
Jake’s Women, now being staged by the Nomad Theatre company, is a strange pastiche of a play. It’s clearly autobiographical, combining those snappy, comic Neil Simon one-liners with some thoughts on the relationship between fiction and life, as well as a serious attempt at self-analysis. The central concept is a…
The Bas Bleu Theatre Company stands in the heart of Fort Collins’s old town, a pleasant collection of galleries, eateries and shops that is less commercial than the downtown malls of either Denver or Boulder. The theater stages stimulating work in a tiny, beautifully converted auditorium that seats forty people…
In staging The War Plays, Promethean Theatre is trying to open a dialogue about the causes of war and its horrors. This is a good time for such a dialogue. Neoconservative ex-CIA director James Woolsey recently told an enthusiastic Denver audience that in conquering Iraq, the United States has won…
avid Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, Proof, has been much discussed and debated, both in the United States and in London, where Gwyneth Paltrow starred in it last year. As Proof opens, we learn that the protagonist, Catherine, interrupted her own life and education when her father, Robert, a mathematical genius, succumbed…
Some aspects of dictatorship — at least of certain kinds of dictatorship — are irresistibly funny. This has to do with what happens when a man possessed of a colossal ego finds himself in a position where that ego goes completely unchecked. Many dictatorships of both the right and the…
Terry Dodd’s First Night or Whatever was commissioned to be the first play performed in the Byron Theatre at the University of Denver’s new, multimillion-dollar Newman Center. It’s a fitting debut choice, because the play is all about theater itself. It takes place in a dressing room, where a cast…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Scapin or the Con Artist is such an intelligent, lively, tasteful production. Nagle Jackson’s translation of Molière zips along: It uses contemporary slang but doesn’t hit you over the head with desperate-to-be-relevant jokes. There are some hilarious rhythmic ping-pong bits and some amazing sequences of…
I can’t tell you how uncomfortable I was watching Brooklyn: The Musical, and how embarrassed. Embarrassed at having to witness this inane, dishonest, derivative piece of work, embarrassed for the actors performing it, and embarrassed for the rest of the audience — most of which, however, was whooping and cheering…
Ruthless! The Musical utilizes themes, quotes and various bits and pieces from All About Eve, The Bad Seed, Gypsy and doubtless a zillion other plays and movies I didn’t recognize. “Sing out, Louise,” a teacher calls to a child performer; a devilish child offers her mother “a bucket of kisses”;…
After twenty minutes or so of watching Relatively Speaking, I stopped taking notes and began laughing. Out loud and several times. This may not seem particularly significant, but consider the fact that as a critic, I go to the theater far more often than normal mortals do — which means…
It’s hard to fathom what the Holocaust means now, used for political leverage and simplified into totemic symbols that short-circuit thought. The Holocaust was the defining fact of my childhood and adolescence, but it wasn’t called the Holocaust then. It was the war. The war encompassed a lot of things:…
It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o’er the green cornfield did pass In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding: Sweet lovers love the spring. — From As…
