It’s cool and damp inside the harvesting room of Hazel Dell Mushrooms, where sprayers create a fine, pervasive mist. On row after row of shelves sit plastic bags filled with sawdust; inside the bags, fungal spawn of various kinds dream their strange dreams. Is there any foodstuff stranger than the…
A Midsummer Night¹s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most successful plays, weaving together not only several plot strands, but disparate worlds: human and fairy, courtier and tradesman, Hellenic and Elizabethan. It’s magical, funny, good-humored with only the smallest trace of melancholy, and filled with sublime poetry. But it also appears…
Deborah Curtis gives a strong performance in the Nomad Theatre’s Shirley Valentine, and director Donald Berlin scarcely puts a foot wrong. But all of this talent presents itself in the service of a trite and shallow script. As the lights come up, we’re introduced to the Manchester kitchen of Shirley…
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. — John Milton, Paradise Lost In Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, the mind — famously — gets a little help from other people. A man and two women find themselves trapped after…
This one’s easy to review: Just go see it. Oh, you want reasons — and I guess my editor needs a few more words. So here goes. From our first glimpse of the chorines in their glittery costumes and huge headdresses, we know that the Arvada Center’s Crazy for You…
First performed in 1947, Brigadoon was the earliest major musical hit for Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, the team that went on to create Camelot and My Fair Lady. Though the libretto for Brigadoon is slight and sentimental, the show is filled with wonderful songs — some as…
Along with The Mikado, Pirates of Penzance is probably one of the silliest, happiest and best of Gilbert and Sullivan’s brilliant oeuvre, full of nonsense and punning, spilling over with gorgeous music. The story concerns a young man named Frederic, who, having been mistakenly apprenticed to a band of pirates…
My Hungarian stepfather was a fussy eater. He wasn’t a gourmet. He was just following — rigidly, as he did almost everything — dietary restrictions imposed by various bodily ailments and psychological quirks. He had a weak stomach, he said, so he couldn’t eat garlic, onions or cabbage. Heart problems…
A talented young tapper makes it all the way from Wyoming to New York’s Carnegie Hall, but thanks to the malfeasance of a New York Times critic, his performance is a disaster. (“More stumble than silk,” sneers the reviewer the next day. “More slip than slide.”) From here, Thaddeus Phillips,…
With Macbeth, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival company has accomplished something close to impossible: It has enabled us to see one of the great tragedies afresh. You attend a Shakespeare play with certain expectations. There are scenes that move you every time you see them, such as Shylock leaving the courtroom…
For its production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Roundfish Theatre Company has taken over an art gallery set in the middle of a desolate Denver block, with painted brick walls, odd found objects dangling from the ceiling, and scribbly artworks. The place smells faintly of mouse droppings, and every so often…
In front of me sits a small cube of perfectly cooked salmon. Its pink flesh is accentuated by a pale-green bed of frisée, and shades into the red of a raspberry vinaigrette topping. There’s also a sauce: a deeper-red pomegranate reduction. The elements on the plate are beautifully designed, and…
What is there to say about the organization that reinvented the circus, losing the kitsch and keeping the razzle-dazzle, removing tormented performing animals and substituting the extraordinary potential of the human body, giving us clowns with intellect and soul instead of rubber-nosed horn honkers in tiny cars? If you’ve seen…
David Auburn’s play, Proof, garnered ecstatic reviews in New York and then went on to a triumphant run in London — though critics there seemed slightly more excited about the appearance of Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead than about the script itself (she “has the eyes of a lynx,” suggested…
Amy DeWitt calls herself “a little Miami Jewish girl” who was drawn to the Cuban culture early in life. “I started learning Spanish when I was ten years old,” she says. “When I got to Boulder, I missed Cuban coffee so badly. It was so white here, so barren of…
When Pigs Fly harks back to the days when gay theater was mostly an unabashed celebration of the gay lifestyle and the joys of being out. In the 1960s, Robert Patrick — who later wrote the acclaimed Kennedy’s Children — was putting on exuberant skits, shows and revues in tiny…
As you enter Germinal Stage Denver, you’re greeted in the lobby by Bill and Betty — you know they’re Bill and Betty because their name tags say so. Once you’re comfortably seated, they take the stage to welcome you. They explain with great excitement that Jason and Medea are about…
There are twelve of us seated around three tables in the basement of the building that houses the Boulder restaurant Trios. In front of each of us is an array of small plastic cups holding olive oil. There’s also a basket of bread pieces on each table, as well as…
Promethean Theatre deserves a lot of credit for tackling Cymbeline. Despite moments of humor, insight and beauty, it is, in terms of plot, one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. It’s as if he’d taken bits and pieces of action from half his other works — Othello’s jealousy, the parent-doomed love…
I have been hugely resistant to Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning play, Wit. I sat dry-eyed during the last moments of the Denver Center production last year as sniffling, Kleenex fumbling and stifled sobs broke out all around me. I was mildly seduced by the recent HBO version starring Emma Thompson, but…
From the moment you enter the LIDA Project’s theater space, your attention is focused on the set: a large square of earth that dwarfs the seats surrounding it on all four sides. Clearly representing a city lot, it reminded me of the bomb sites found all over London when I…
Lucile’s Creole Cafe brought just-squeezed orange juice, quality coffee and good, fresh food to Boulder back in the days when decent restaurants were few and far between. It continued to supply the same delicious and generally homey dishes through the era of excess — the conceptual decors, the menus selected…
