Tonight and tomorrow at the Mercury Cafe, V-Day Denver will stage readings from A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer, an anthology about violence against women co-edited by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues. This is only one of the events organized by V-Day Denver, this city’s…
We’re not in Kansas anymore. Wicked took a classic villain of American folklore — the Wicked Witch of the West — and transformed her into Elphaba, a misunderstood victim, the prejudice against her and her green skin a clear parallel to racism. Even drenched in the saccharine coating of musical…
Denver is no stranger to Wicked. The Broadway show has toured through here three times before, and April 11 marked the start of a fourth run in this city. Arguably, no one can celebrate the show’s return more than lead actor Andy Kelso, who plays the role of Fiyero, the…
With their red-brick walls and stone turrets, many of America’s mental hospitals look eerily like sanctuaries. Some of these facilities genuinely endeavored to do good. Others have darker histories, belied by the elegance of the architecture. In The Empty Places, a photo collection and soon-to-be-produced documentary, Ralena Gordon tries not…
America has long had a tumultuous relationship with its mentally ill, and Ralena Gordon has spent the last five years documenting it in a photo collection she’s named The Empty Places. Tonight at the Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street, she’ll discuss her work at a fundraiser that she hopes will…
Bravo! The theater department at Metropolitan State College of Denver has become the first college theater department in the state to gain accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Theatre. And not for just one of its programs, but all three: the BA in theater, the BFA in musical…
Storytelling is the oldest kind of theatre, and, perhaps, the most brazen. It denies audiences the comfort of distance. It embroils them in yarns about love, anger, fear and death; it invites them to abscond from worries, troubles, and boredoms. To storytellers like Irish-born Clare Muireann Murphy, who willfully, unapologetically…
The death of Trayvon Martin has thrust race relations back to the top of America’s list of conversation topics. But Carlos Heredia hopes for discourse that doesn’t just happen as a result of violence. He wrote and directed a musical that he hoped would help create it: Then Sean Met…
Some of us are only just getting over the hangovers associated with our abuse of Irish stereotypes on St. Patrick’s Day, so it’s as good a time as any to get an education in some real Irish culture and folklore from performance storyteller Clare Muireann Murphy. Originally from Dublin, Murphy…
“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” — Sonnet XCVIII References to April — arguably the most literary month, if not the cruelest — abound in the works of Shakespeare. No one’s completely sure about the exact date of his birth, but records indicate he was baptized on…
Starting next Friday, Christopher Willard of Backstage Theatre Company will stage four readings of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. The acclaimed one-man show earned notoriety recently after it was revealed that the author, off-Broadway performer Mike Daisey, had fabricated some details about working conditions in the Chinese…
Artists and arts lovers alike turned out for Friday night’s Start the Art benefit concert — to talk, listen to performances by local musicians Terry Sandoval of the Hunger Artist, ScaTTer GaTHer and headliner Joshua Novak, and promote the cause of arts education for kids, with the goal of raising…
To celebrate the opening of its fourth run on the Denver stage, award-winning Broadway musical Wicked will partner with the Cherry Creek Shopping Center to open special preview “the World of Wicked” today, and running through April 15. Wicked fans and other mall-goers will get to bask in an emerald…
A ticket to tonight’s Start the Art benefit concert buys more than just a night of good food, a cold beer and music by Westword Music Showcase nominee Josh Novak — it buys a chance to support a brand-new initiative to ensure kids’ access to arts education. Event organizers Chris…
Tomorrow night, Buntport Theater will open a new show, inspired by a true event, called Tommy Lee Jones Goes to Opera Alone. But the title belies the community effort it took for Buntport to produce and animate a nearly life-size puppet of the solitary actor…
Paragon Theatre Ensemble will close permanently on March 18, following the end of its run of Miss Julie — only weeks after celebrating the opening of the same show in its brand-new space. A series of expensive code violations led to the ultimate decision to not just shutter that space…
