Making great old songs fresh again is one of the best contributions of contemporary musical theater. The Boulder Dinner Theatre’s production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes reminds us why, more than sixty years after their composition, songs such as “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-lovely,” “You’re the…
Song, dance, dialogue, story, spectacle: These are the several pleasures of the American musical and, decade by decade, one or another of them moves into prominence. In the ’30s and ’40s, most musicals consisted of a string of comic or melodious songs, with whisper-thin plots holding them together. Then came…
Longtime married couples should attend the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Dinner With Friends, and so should young people in love. It’s a great date play. Not in the sense that it arouses desire or presents an idealized view of love, but because the playwright muses so knowingly on the topic…
Shakespeare’s Storms at the Buntport Theater reminds me of off-off-Broadway performances in New York City during the ’60s. It has the same funky, improvisational feel. Audience members — on the night I attended, there were about fifteen of us — sit in three rows in front of a wedge-shaped, stepped…
Apparently, controversy abounded when Contact won the Tony for best musical in the year 2000. The show has no original tunes (the music ranges from Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” to Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”), and though the cast dances itself dizzy, it never bursts into song. Critics, however, were rapturous. They…
A Skull in Connemara opens with two people talking in a shabby cottage in Leenane, a village on Ireland’s bleak western coast. The two are Mick Dowd, played by Lawrence Hecht and the aged Mary Rafferty, given shuffling, mumbling life by Kathleen M. Brady. Dowd is a handyman, and one…
The setting is the home of a wealthy Jewish family in Atlanta in 1939. A brightly decorated Christmas tree stands in a corner. Though Adolph, the breadwinner and de facto paterfamilias (he’s actually brother, brother-in-law and uncle to the numerous family members who occupy the premises), has read in the…
I suspect I’m in trouble when I’m told at the door that The Vow runs an hour and forty-five minutes without intermission. Is someone intending to put me through a transformational experience? I’m not very good at those. They tend to leave me helpless with laughter. Or are the creators…
Almost everyone has some idea what Edmond Rostand’s famed play Cyrano de Bergerac is about: a man with an enormous nose who, sure he can never win the woman he loves, selflessly woos her on behalf of a handsome, equally lovestruck compadre. The plot is so resonant, so filled with…
Theater is an art form capable of providing an astonishing variety of experiences. There are directors throughout the metro area transforming cramped, unlikely spaces and making magic with nothing more than a few dollars, a handful of actors, a decent script and some imagination. And then there’s Disney’s Beauty and…
George Bernard Shaw was an iconoclast and troublemaker. In his plays, moral and intellectual combat tend to replace action, but the dialogue is so brilliant that the results are engaging rather than static. Plot isn’t central, nor is strict continuity. In Mrs. Warren¹s Profession, a gun makes an appearance but…
The Everyman Theatre Company’s production of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz reminds us that theater isn’t necessarily about expensive sets and whizbang lighting, lavish costumes, a full orchestra or a plush auditorium. All it takes is ingenuity, talented actors and the right words. Everyman has colonized what must once have…
The Curious Theatre Company’s Coyote on a Fence is an artful, high-minded attempt to address the issue of the death penalty. As I watched the play last Saturday, at the end of a week filled with fear and confusion, sodden with grief, it was comforting to be in a place…
The Galleria at the Denver Center is a cabaret space; audience members sip or snack while, on a small stage, charming and energetic young people sing and dance for them. It’s rather like being at an Irish party, where, amid general merriment, one guest after another stands up and performs…
Glengarry Glen Ross has been hailed as a blistering critique of American business practice, but in fact, it explores a very small segment of the business world, and its principals’ maneuvering takes place far below the sightlines of the genuine corporate fat cats. In contrast to the genial, glossy executives…
Carousel is so familiar to most of us that we tend to forget the musical’s true genius. First produced on Broadway in 1945, it represents the melding of two very different sensibilities — that of Ferenc Molnár, the Hungarian novelist and playwright who wrote Liliom, which Carousel is based on,…
In the beginning, there’s a sawdust ring, surrounded by what seems to be a low concrete wall. A group of people in peasant dress enter, walking beside a horse-drawn cart. To measured music, they release a bundle from the cart. It rises slowly toward the ceiling; you see that it’s…
When I was a child, my mother made plum dumplings every year around this time. It was always an occasion. My sister and brother-in-law came over to the house, along with other friends — most of them refugees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria who’d fled to London during the war…
It’s lunchtime at Fourmile, one of the state prisons in the Cañon City complex. We’re in a small room, at a table set with plastic cutlery and paper napkins. On one wall hangs a row of white chefs’ hats and jackets; against another there’s a table holding a watermelon carved…
If America were as ballet mad now as it was in the 1970s, or if last year’s Center Stage were as good a movie as The Turning Point, the name Ethan Stiefel would be as iconic as the name Mikhail Baryshnikov. It’s certainly familiar to anyone with even a passing…
In 1895, playwright Oscar Wilde took the Marquess of Queensbury to court in London, claiming the marquess had libeled him by calling him a sodomite. A trial was held; the judge decided the marquess had been correct. Since homosexuality was a crime in nineteenth-century England, Wilde himself was soon in…
I first encountered truffles last summer — after reading about them, wondering about them, gazing at the listings in food catalogues and wincing at their cost, occasionally sprinkling some drops of truffle oil onto a dish of rice — when I spent a couple of weeks at a writers’ conference…
