There is simply no way of explaining musical genius on the order of Mozart’s, and I think that’s the puzzle at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s glittering and celebrated play, Amadeus, which received all kinds of awards and attention when it first opened in London, in 1980, and again four…

There’s something about the idea of separating the mingled good and evil within each of us that won’t let go of the imagination. Part of the appeal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the early seasons lay in the character of Angel, the vampire with a human soul, the dark,…

Alone on stage at the Aurora Fox, working on a set designed as a grimy basement, actor Greg Price is in almost constant motion, shuttling between the phone on his desk, a wall intercom and the red phone of an alarm box adorned with a huge blinking red light. From…

When a writer wants to explore complex issues, it makes sense to pick a simple format. Lee Blessing has set his 1988 play, Two Rooms, in — appropriately — two rooms and limited the cast to four. There’s Michael Wells, held hostage in a dank cell in mid-1980s Beirut. And…

Ethelyn Friend is a wonderful performer. Working alone in the intimate upstairs theater space of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, she holds her audience spellbound for over an hour as she tells the story of her two grandmothers, both classically trained singers. Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me consists of…

The scene is a flowery, chintzy little apartment; a woman is reading on the couch, a man writing at a desk. Pretty soon they’re bickering. They rehash past relationships and their own history (they seem unable to agree on how they came together), discuss and dismiss the possibility of a…

Dorian, the musical version of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray now playing at the Buell, boasts some of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time. Unfortunately, everything else about the show is mediocre: It features stock characters, a dumb script, a pedestrian plot, some major…

For the first twenty minutes, I think I’m feeling alienated from what’s going on because a priest appeared on stage before the play and started to lead us in prayer — a real priest, not an actor in a clerical collar. There’s something disorienting about living in a culture so…

The Arvada Center’s staging of Neil Simon’s The Dinner Party makes for a pleasant evening of theater: mild, inoffensive, expertly staged and occasionally very funny. Two men appear in the chi-chi private dining room of an expensive French restaurant. The play’s contemporary, but the room, with its Fragonard-style mural, crystal…

I don’t think I’d call this a good production of Shakespeare’s high-spirited sexual tease of a play. The problem isn’t that the Theatre Group’s Twelfth Night is staged on a shoestring — a lot of local companies overcome that limitation — or that many of the costumes (with the exception…

My Children! My Africa! may not be South African playwright Athol Fugard’s strongest and most complex work — it’s single-themed, talky and repetitive — but it fully communicates his largeness of spirit and his humanistic approach to the anti-apartheid cause. Beautifully performed by the Shadow Theatre Company, the play packs…

The set is an arrangement of black platforms and boxes. It stretches a long, long way back so that — despite the overall intimacy of the theater — an actor standing in the rear looks very small and far away. Periodically, grotesque forms limp, shamble or crawl around this space…

In Oscar Wilde’s famed novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist remains youthful and beautiful through all the decades of his evil life. Only his portrait, hidden in the attic, reveals the ravages of sin and time. Dorian Gray, the OpenStage musical production now showing in Fort Collins, worked…

Mark Lundholm is a terrific performer. He holds your attention effortlessly. He’s vital, funny and charming, and he also communicates strong emotion, moving freely from anguish to laughter and back again. (If anyone wants to excerpt this review for publicity purposes, this is where to stop.) But even though Lundholm…

Perhaps this will give you some idea of the effect of I Love a Piano: The morning after seeing it, seated in my hairstylist’s chair while he snipped away, I started humming “Cheek to Cheek.” Just as I was beginning to wonder if I was embarrassing him and should stop,…

I wasn’t in the best of moods when I took my seat in the Buell Theatre auditorium for The Music Man, but I was expecting to get jolted right out of my doldrums the minute the production started. I remembered Meredith Willson’s songs as catchy and appealing. (I’m sure I…

The Boulder Dinner Theatre’s version of Paint Your Wagon makes for an enjoyable evening, although I suspect it has very little to do with Lerner and Loewe’s original musical. This production is primarily a vehicle for A.K. Klimpke, a onetime favorite of melodrama audiences at the Heritage Square Music Hall…

I walked into the Denver Center’s Stage Theatre harboring the darkest of suspicions. I’d read all about The Vagina Monologues — who hasn’t?–but somehow I’d managed to miss the show on its previous visits to Colorado. It sounded like a lot of other allegedly feminist phenomena that bother me. Take…

Cell Block Sirens of 1953 Cell Block Sirens of 1953is a campy take on women’s prison movies — both mainstream and pornographic — which plays on the gleeful general assumption that these places seethe with sadism and forbidden sex. The play begins with a drumroll. Then we see Hope standing…

Richard III think the main problem with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Richard III is that it’s such a monochromatic production. The play presents Richard’s murderous path to power, his brief possession of the crown and his bloody fall at the hands of the heroic Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII…