All’s Well That Ends Well. This play isn’t Shakespeare’s best: It lacks the usual poetry and insight, and the plot is highly problematic. Helena, one of those smart, resourceful, charming heroines we’ve seen in other Shakespearean comedies, is in love with Bertram, son of the Countess who raised her, but…
Urinetown, the Musical, the show about a world in which a money-grubbing corporation controls a population’s right to relieve itself by charging exorbitant fees, is not as odd and daring as it once seemed, but it remains highly entertaining, cleverly written and filled with witty, hummable songs in several styles,…
There’s a reason why All¹s Well That Ends Well is rarely performed: The play is far from Shakespeare’s best. For the most part, it lacks the usual poetry and insight, and the plot is highly problematic. Helena, one of those smart, resourceful, charming heroines we’ve seen in other Shakespearean comedies,…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Julius Caesar has some strong performances and interesting ideas, but it doesn’t hang together conceptually. The play itself is problematic. It begins with a focus on the uses and abuses of state power, as Julius Caesar, home from the wars, seems set to become…
The Central City Opera production of Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon, or Cinderella, is a visual feast. The costumes of Sara Jean Tosetti — who looks a little witchy herself in her playful program photo — combine charming empire lines with the crooked, cunning shapes we associate with fairy tales. From the…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
On one level, Who¹s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a very literate and sophisticated Jerry Springer show. George and Martha are a longtime married couple. He’s a history professor at a small New England college whose career is far less glittering than he’d once hoped it would be; she’s the…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
There’s a reason that La Traviata, an opera about the doomed love between a consumptive courtesan and an aristocrat, is one of the most frequently performed in the world: It’s gorgeous, packed with luscious songs and expressive arias, full of pulsating emotion. But Central City Opera’s La Traviata is a…
Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser once noted that our relationships with the dead are always changing — a comment that pulled me up short at the time. The dead are long past contributing to conversations with the living, I thought. But, of course, these conversations take place constantly, as our…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
Too Old to Be Loud is the sixth in Heritage Square Music Hall’s Loud series, and the cast does much the same thing every time. The very thin plot line always involves an annual reunion in the Boylan High School gym. Actor-director T. J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer play sister…
The weather decided to become a participant in the opening night of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s The Servant of Two Masters. To begin with, the performance had to be delayed for a half-hour because of pelting rain. Then, after a remarkably good-humored audience had been seated again, gusts of wind…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has been so thuddingly mediocre for so many years that I approached the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream filled with skepticism. And nothing I heard at the gala preceding the performance — as new artistic director Philip C. Sneed pontificated on the history of…
The Victorians were increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure, as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne makes fun…
Corteo. Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo is a fine experience — visually gorgeous, musically exhilarating and filled with acts of athleticism that take your breath away. The costumes and sets are lovely and evocative, with the kind of fanciful curlicues you imagine adorning a fairy-tale palace or a miraculous child’s birthday…
Dinner theater is an odd phenomenon. Emerging pretty much from nowhere in the early 1960s, the genre flourished through the ’70s, when it often employed television stars, and began fading in the next decade. Dinner theaters tend to be associated with steam-table food and bland, smiley-faced productions; they draw a…
People used to talk about Cirque du Soleil as if the company’s productions were somehow transformative, as if taking in the brilliant spectacles, pondering the ambiguous plots and thrilling to the performers’ beautiful and impossible feats would somehow bring clarity and enlightenment to their own lives. As Cirque grew into…
Every Secret Thing. Judy GeBauer’s Every Secret Thing deals with the effect of McCarthyism on a group of high-school teachers, and it couldn’t have premiered at a more fitting time. The play is based on GeBauer’s memories of a civics teacher in her high school who was called before HUAC…
The Elitch Theatre opened in 1891 as the first summer-stock company in the country; over the years, it hosted such legendary stars as Sarah Bernhardt, Douglas Fairbanks, Jose Ferrer, Barbara Bel Geddes, Grace Kelly, Lynn Redgrave and Vincent Price. Many years ago, I saw Shelly Winters there in 84 Charing…
