For years, writers Jane and Michael Stern have been eating their way across the country, frequenting places with names like Mamie’s, Al’s and the Busy Bee. They’ve described food and given recipes, but most of all, they’ve documented the way small-town eateries take their place at the heart of their…
The year is 1940. A young couple meets on a train traveling east from California. That is, the man sits down next to the clearly reluctant woman, talks to her, jiggles his leg, eats noisily. He tells her he’d intended to be a pilot but has been discharged from the…
I expect to be blown away by any August Wilson play. And I’m used to the fact that at the Denver Center, I’ll find skilled and generous-spirited actors, many of whom have held Wilson’s words in their mouths and felt his rhythms in their bodies over several years and through…
A Closer Walk With Patsy Clineis a tribute to the famed country singer; the slender plot is just an excuse for a string of songs. So everything hinges on the acting and singing talent of the actress playing the title role. Emily Walter has a strong voice and exuberant energy…
It’s a smart, funny, fantastical ride, with moments of real insight and some genuinely profound echoes, but I found the politics of Paula Vogel’s The Mineola Twins puzzling and a little disconcerting. Actually, my problem may be less with the script itself than with the way the playwright and director…
Since it opened two years ago with Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, Littleton’s Everyman Theatre has been one of the metro area’s best and most interesting small venues. Now the company has closed its doors, a victim of budget problems and shaky economic times. Everyman was housed in a fairly…
It’s fun to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet in an auditorium full of middle- and high-school students, as I did when I attended Openstage Theatre’s final dress rehearsal in Fort Collins. The students’ giggles at the raunchy bits, half-comprehending response to the milieu and genuine grief at the…
A new company called Rorschach Productions has put together a sequence of short plays that constitutes one of the more interesting evenings of theater around. It’s a combination of late-ish Samuel Beckett and very early Sam Shepard titled An Evening of B.S. In the first piece, Beckett’s Catastrophe, a director…
There’s a power to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that defies analysis. On one level, it’s a sentimental fable, a codification of the tamed bourgeois, Victorian Christmas that replaced the dangerous excesses of earlier generations, when drunken laborers took to the streets to sing, challenge the rich and turn propriety…
Children of Eden is a very literal rendition of two Bible stories — those of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood. These narratives provide a good excuse for colorful props and costumes, a large cast and lots of ecstatic singing. Other than that, it’s hard to figure out a…
The Nomad Theatre’s Cinderella, directed by Deborah Curtis, is perfect for children. It’s slight, charming, tuneful and funny. There’s no uncertainty about the story or how it will end, so you can just settle in and enjoy the talented performers and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs. The evening opens with the…
Rattlebrain Theater should have everything it needs to become a destination for the young and hip, a thronged local hot spot, the kind of place no in-the-know visitor to Denver would think of missing. It’s in a great location: the old D&F clock tower, slap-bang in the middle of the…
Nancy Cranbourne and Patti Dobrowolski, creators of the hysterically funny theater piece Two Woman Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization, are a Boulder institution. Or perhaps I should say “treasure.” Their newest offering, Mrs. Schwartz and Dober: Show and Tell for Grownups, is the first act on a double bill at the Boulder…
I tried to watch English director Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on video once, but I gave up after thirty minutes or so. Maybe there’s something about the combination of wretched and unlikable protagonists, aimless activity, a snickering approach to violence and lots of splattered blood that’s…
Two actors, a brother and sister, linger in the backstage area of a theater in a strange, unnamed country. There’s junky furniture, a round table with a painted rose at its center, a trunk covered with labels and a tall statue that could represent anything, godly or human, malevolent or…
The Denver Center complex hummed with activity last Saturday night. On the streets outside, cars circled aimlessly around the full parking structure. In the Buell, Tony Curtis maundered onto the stage in Some Like It Hot, and a stage away, playwright Martin McDonagh’s mean-spirited brothers tormented each other in The…
Elyse Singleton has been supporting herself as a freelance writer for years. She’s had articles and columns in the Denver Post, the Miami Herald, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune and Westword. She’s done a lot of travel writing and also turned out pieces for women’s magazines. But all that time,…
Most of us remember the 1952 movie version of Singin’ in the Rain for the inspired partnership of Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly and the infectiously upbeat songs of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. The plot revolves around Hollywood and the film industry just as America was discovering talking…
I must admit, I don’t see the point of Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, a play about a pair of hateful and hate-filled brothers, set in a bleak Irish village called Leenane (this is the third of a trilogy of plays set in this place). One of the brothers, Coleman…
There are evenings when my job seems like the best in town, and the Shadow Theatre Company’s Lady Day at Emerson¹s Bar and Grill provided one of them. The lights come up on a muted gray-green background, a piano, a nosegay of gardenias on a round table. Piano notes sound,…
The Full Monty began as one of those small, unassuming British movies about unemployed men in a gritty, industrial town — in this case, Sheffield, Yorkshire. These workers see their neighbors, wives and girlfriends rushing to a Chippendales-style male strip performance, and they decide to raise some money by staging…
Time, that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week, To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives. — W.H. Auden “My husband wanted to leave,” an attractive blond woman told me during the intermission for The Skin of Our Teeth,…
