Arts & Entertainment

What you’ll see at Heritage is unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else. It’s pure silliness, pure Colorado, pure pleasure, an odd mix of dramatics, song, utter craziness and actors just sort of palling around with the audience. Veteran T.J. Mullin writes a lot of the material and delivers his roles with laid-back but assured humor. With the exception of Kira Cauthorn, who’s rapidly adjusted to the nutty style required, most of the actors have been around forever. Annie Dwyer, a fearless and inspired clown, supplies much of the energy and lots of surprised laughter. Rory Pierce knows how to be manly and also how to show off his legs in a dress; Alex Crawford is a mean percussionist and a dry-lipped funnyman; and nothing would work as well as it does without the vigorous and nimble musicianship of Randy Johnson.

Kurt Lewis opened this small, comfortable performing space with Bold Girls, a fine play about Ireland’s Troubles directed by Anthony Powell. Now Paragon Theatre has made the place its permanent home. A welcome addition to Five Points, a historic part of Denver, the theater will also be used for music, poetry readings and classes. Everyone knows that crossroads are magical places, and Lewis intends to create a vibrant center here, featuring a fertile fusion of cultures and art forms.

Rachel Corrie has been a lighting rod for controversy since her death in Gaza at the age of 23, when she was run over by an Israeli soldier driving a bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. And My Name Is Rachel Corrie has proved controversial, too. The play was too hot for the New York Theatre Workshop, which originally planned a presentation in 2006, then postponed it indefinitely. But Denver audiences were able to see it last fall, thanks to Countdown to Zero, Brian Freeland’s new company that intends to stage nine more significant works before disbanding. The house was packed almost every night, and Rachel Corrie’s parents even came to Denver for two performances, including one that was followed by a panel on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Terry Ann Watts gave a beautiful and open-souled performance as Sister Helen Prejean, the real-life nun who has worked for years with death-row inmates, making her exactly the sort of wise, calm woman you would want beside you in a crisis. Watts was quietly dignified throughout Dead Man Walking, but you could see the mingled rage and pity in her eyes when she was confronted with men who claimed to be only doing their jobs: the rigid, callous prison chaplain, the officer in charge of strapping down the condemned man, the governor who used the convict’s last chance for clemency as a political photo op. And she made the moment when Prejean finally broke down and wept almost unendurably poignant.

Shane is just a small role in Contrived Ending, an original play by Josh Hartwell. He’s one of those dopey, marginal little guys whom no one in his high school respected, and who gets put down constantly even after high school is over. He also invents all kinds of lies to make himself seem more important. In Conundrum’s production, playing Shane as a muffled little dormouse who nonetheless possesses a spark of spunk and integrity, Steven J. Burge almost stole the entire show.

The conceit of this sendup of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most incoherent of plays, is that a wandering troupe of five actors is presenting it as a musical. Buntport actually got us through the entire plot, using a board with caricatures and lightbulbs to tell us which of the five actors was playing which of the several dozen characters at any given moment, a van that moved from place to place on the stage, all kinds of goofy props, and the company’s usual combination of literacy and lunacy, playfulness and skill.

No other company in town matches Buntport’s humor and inventiveness, and the group’s take on Moby Dick was no exception. But perhaps the funniest bit occurred at the very beginning, when Erik Edborg re-enacted the entire leviathan of a novel using nothing but a red plastic fish and a round fishbowl.

Kent Haruf’s Plainsong won critical acclaim for its quiet beauty, and Eric Schmiedl’s stage adaptation — miraculously — comes close to doing the novel justice. This isn’t one of those theater pieces that wows you on the spot; instead, Plainsong stays with you, settling slowly into your consciousness until it becomes part of the way you see the world. This is largely because of Schmiedl’s fidelity to the novel; he keeps much of Haruf’s writing, the rhythm of the prose providing a steady pulse beneath the action. As a result, the plot has less to do with forward movement than with a kind of inexorable unfolding that makes you feel as if you are watching a moving, living frieze.

How We May Know Him is a brain-tease of a play that acts on your cerebral cortex, not your guts. It’s a story about four women: Val, a Christian zealot; Simone, a new-agey television host; Nicola, a soldier of fortune; and Nicola’s partner, the sometimes waspish but usually lost and bemused Wren. The action is surreal and much of the meaning metaphoric — but that doesn’t mean that Ellen K. Graham’s script is murky or hard to follow. A series of short, sharp, freaky scenes make up the action, and in Paragon Theatre’s production, there were all kinds of things to engage your intellect and attention.

To some extent, actors are at the mercy of the productions in which they appear. An exciting show can make an okay actor look terrific; an excellent actor can seem weak if trapped by circumstances. So far this season, Trina Magness has emerged with honor from two productions that simply didn’t work. She played the first witch in the noisy, ill-conceived Macbeth staged by Listen Productions, giving the harridan a sinuous and insinuating grace that chilled the blood. And in Red Herring at the John Hand Theatre, while the play lacked finesse, Magness came close to redeeming the evening with her Maggie, the stereotypical detective’s doll, a role she played with dry and understated wit.

Who would have thought that the coolest Friday-night party around would be at a stodgy art museum? But sure enough, on the last Friday of every month, the Denver Art Museum turns itself into a lively all-ages club, complete with local DJs or bands, a cash bar and a host of kooky activities — guided meditation in the Asian galleries, séances surrounded by selections from the Louvre, pedicure operations painting miniature artwork on your toes — that are sure to get those cranky old curators bristling behind their bifocals. The events are free with the normal price of admission, and they end by 10 p.m. — leaving you plenty of time to hit the town and act like the drunken buffoon you really are, knowing that you’ve already gotten your fill of high-falutin’ culture.

Although there were some disappointments at Curious Theatre early in the season, How I Learned to Drive — a reprise of the first-ever Curious production ten years ago — was a hit, and the company continued to roar forward with two of the most exciting productions on a Denver stage this year. 9 Parts of Desire, a play by Heather Raffo, revealed the depth and complexity of Iraqi culture through the voices of several women, and in a gutsy, beautiful performance, Karen Slack played them all. Equally riveting was The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a rollicking, blood-soaked farce by Martin McDonagh, brilliantly acted and directed, that had you simultaneously wincing down in your seat and laughing aloud.

Neither The Gin Game nor Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are particularly timely, though the latter is an American classic and welcome viewing any time. But at Paragon, Warren Sherrill’s productions of these two plays made them contemporary. The Gin Game featured Jim Hunt as a man fighting the ravages of time and his own loneliness in the most ungracious way possible, with Patty Mintz Figel as his cunning opponent; despite the unspectacular text, you felt deeply for these lost people. And Virginia Woolf was a jolt of rage-fueled adrenaline, with Sherrill’s sure directorial hand evident in everything from the strength of his casting to such tiny details as the real snapdragons used in one scene.

The play was an old chestnut, but thanks to impeccable casting and insightful direction, Paragon Theatre Company breathed new life into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You couldn’t help admiring Martha Harmon Pardee’s vitality and sheer, pull-out-the-stops courage as Martha; she came across as funny, smart, wrenchingly vulnerable and, in her own way, honest. Sam Gregory’s George at first seemed the weaker of the two antagonists — but it didn’t take long for the audience to figure out that George was a deadly opponent. These two had been fighting forever; it’s what they did instead of sex. Add Ed Cord as Nick, blankly pleasant at first but slowly revealing his soulless ambition, and Barbra Andrews’s secretly spiteful Honey, and you had a mind-bending combination of slow simmer and all-out combustion.

Luscious and lyrical, a feast for the eyes, ears and mind, The Light in the Piazza reminded you of just how romantic a musical can be. Every performance was a gem. Katie Rose Clarke was a luminous Clara; David Burnham, too, sang like an angel. And at any point, if you happened to get bored watching superb actors carry an absorbing plot or listening to varied and heart-stirring music, you could study the exquisite architectural contours of Michael Yeargan’s set, admire the vibrant colors of Catherine Zuber’s costumes or take in the shifting play of light created by Christopher Akerlind. This play left you dizzy with pleasure.

With Ragtime, it felt as if Boulder’s Dinner Theatre had opened the doors and let in a great whoosh of invigorating air. This is one hell of a musical to stage, one based on an important book that marries a meaningful plot with a smart, perceptive script and terrific songs. To create a cast, artistic director Michael J. Duran teamed up with Jeffrey Nickelson of Denver’s Shadow Theatre Company, and Nickelson himself played the enigmatic angel-devil Coalhouse Walker. The energy and discovery created by this fusion of talents from the two companies was palpable, and the production was a joy, buoyed by strong performances, filled with memorable moments and crammed with musical numbers that ranged from meltingly lovely to funny to wildly exhilarating.

Here’s the setup: a man and woman are seated at a bus stop after a pleasant first date, and she suddenly reveals that she’d really like to have a baby before her biological clock runs out. As the woman, Alicia Dunfee began sweetly but became more and more aggressive as she attempted to coax, bully and physically force her unsuspecting date into giving up his sperm. She pleaded. She danced. She stomped. She placed her purse at her breast and attempted to nurse it. Finally, she toppled the hapless male onto the floor and straddled him. The scene brought down the house — but since Dunfee is now visibly pregnant, perhaps it was an early hormone flush that made her performance so boldly unforgettable.

Is there anything Kathleen M. Brady can’t do? We’ve seen her in classical and modern plays, in comedy and tragedy. This year we found out that she can sing, and sing she did in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, rich-toned and full-throated. Brady played the role of the shrew Domina (the name speaks for itself) with such humor and vitality that you couldn’t imagine why the male characters weren’t falling all over her instead of the mushy little ingenue.

Jacob is the intensely effeminate butler — or, as he prefers, maid — of the gay couple at the center of the frothy, splashy La Cage Aux Folles. The role is a guaranteed laugh-getter, and Milton Craig Nealy played it to the hilt, with infectious style, humor and enjoyment.

As Jen, the sister in the two-person musical John and Jen, Gina Schuh-Turner turned in a wonderfully committed performance. She not only acted well and sang beautifully, but she brought a particular subtlety to the stage — at times heart-meltingly tender, at others hilariously funny. And in one memorable song, she morphed into a loud, shrewish sports mom, screaming out instructions as her young son struggled through a Little League game.

Seymour is a nerdy soul who’s faced with a Faustian bargain when he finds and tends a man-eating plant that offers him money, prestige and the love of Seymour’s beautiful co-worker, Audrey — but only if Seymour keeps feeding it flesh. It’s a ridiculous premise that fuels a goofy show, but Brandon Dill, an expressive actor with a strong voice, actually made you feel for the guy.