Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
At the Denver Center Theatre Company’s New Play Summit last month, a couple of critics from larger cities were talking about our area’s theatrical offerings. On a Colorado visit some years back, they’d gone to Boulder’s Dinner Theatre — and the show was very good, one of them said with…
Eventide. This is a sequel of sorts to Plainsong, which the Denver Center Theatre Company produced two years ago, though the language is less evocative and the vision less far-reaching. In Plainsong, we learned of two elderly brothers, awkward bachelor cattlemen, who took in a pregnant teenager after her mother…
Every time I re-encounter him, I’m surprised and thrilled by Dylan Thomas’s writing – the inventiveness, effusiveness, humor, insight, sheer appetite and joy, as well as his intoxication with words. Under Milk Wood, described by the author as a play for voices, creates a day in the life of a…
Habeas Corpus. Director Richard Pegg, who’s English, completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. Pegg knows that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of Englishman vacillates perennially between shame and lust. He also understands that Bennett’s ironic melancholia is…
Eventide is a sequel of sorts to Plainsong, which the Denver Center Theatre Company produced two years ago. Plainsong was a triumph, a perfect marriage of production values and novelist Kent Haruf’s words. A luminous and over-arching sky dominated the action, and Plainsong became less a story about individual people…
Truth is, I don’t like Eugene O’Neill’s work much, and I really loathe Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I’m not proud of this. I remember once reading another critic who insisted that Shakespeare was overrated and thinking this said far more about the critic than about Shakespeare. O’Neill is one…
Habeas Corpus. Director Richard Pegg, who’s English, completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. Pegg knows that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of Englishman vacillates perennially between shame and lust. He also understands that Bennett’s ironic melancholia is…
In a culture not much concerned with history, the Cold War that shaped American politics and thinking for so many decades has almost faded from memory, replaced by the misnamed War on Terror. But playwright Rogelio Martinez was born in Cuba, where Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin was a national hero,…
Habeas Corpus. Director Richard Pegg, who’s English, completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. Pegg knows that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of Englishman vacillates perennially between shame and lust. He also understands that Bennett’s ironic melancholia is…
The members of the Buntport Theater troupe have always been interested in the creative process. They’ve imagined Alexandre Dumas creating his three musketeers after reading a novel borrowed from the library; suggested what would happen if Ovid, having burned the manuscript of Metamorphoses in a fit of pique, came face…
Home by Dark. The events in Home by Dark, currently receiving its world premiere at Curious, are very close to local playwright Terry Dodd’s heart. When he was a student at the University of Colorado in the 1970s, he received a nighttime visit from his state trooper father. Dale Dodd…
There’s a pleasant straightforwardness to Sheldon Friedman’s The Long Goodbye, which begins with a gunshot, then an elderly man holding the gun and describing the slow process of his wife’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s. Moving back a little in time, you see this man, Parker, with his dazed and disoriented wheelchair-bound…
Director Richard Pegg is English, and he completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. The rhythms of the dialogue are bone-deep familiar to him — a rare and deeply welcome thing in this area. Pegg knows about Brighton and Hove, and…
Autobiography can be dangerous territory for creative writers. Of course, many writers use their own life stories to some extent; reality provides all kinds of useful insights and evocative bits and bobs of memory. But to work as a script or novel, truth needs to be rejiggered, and it helps…
There’s an expectant, zizzy feeling in the air, along with the smell of wet paint, as Roller Skating With My Cousin begins. Everyone’s in a high good humor, and between the whirling designs on the floor, the crazy whine of music and the promo materials that bill the piece as…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Absurd Person Singular. The Denver Center Theatre Company should be applauded for selecting Absurd Person Singular, Alan Ayckbourn’s dark comedy, as one of its Christmas offerings. Ayckbourn’s trademark is intensely clever, laugh-out-loud farce capering over the surface of a sad and penetrating cynicism, and it’s the perfect antidote to the…
