As I watched The Light in the Piazza, I momentarily stopped being a critic. I didn’t try to assess what I was seeing; I just sat back agog — and yes, that funny old word fits exactly — and entranced, letting this marvelous musical happen to me. There’s so much…
Although it’s filled with George Bernard Shaw’s usual spot-on analysis, as well as a fair share of his parody and wit, Mrs. Warren¹s Profession is an early and far-from-perfect piece of theater. It’s talky — that goes without saying — and peopled by characters who seem intended more to illustrate…
A House With No Walls. There’s a special category of pundit: the black conservative, those darlings of the Republican Party who profit hugely by attacking other African-Americans. The protagonist of Thomas Gibbons’s play is a more thoughtful and credible version of this kind of talker, a brilliant historian named Cadance…
It feels as if Boulder’s Dinner Theatre has opened the doors and let in a great whoosh of invigorating air. Sure, the blocky old interior is the same, and the food hasn’t changed in decades. And yes, many of the cast members are familiar, because BDT is perhaps the last…
The premise of Frame 312 should be fascinating. Playwright Keith Reddin postulates that the 22-second Abraham Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that was minutely examined by the Warren Commission had been edited, and that an excised frame — frame 312 — shows the president’s head slamming backward, indicating…
Issues of race in America are so intensely fraught, convoluted, personalized and wrapped in ego, self-righteousness, guilt, rage, self-pity, anger, class and confusion that it’s a wonder black and white can even talk to each other anymore — and in many important ways, they can’t. A white professor uses the…
The Perfect Party. Tony, the protagonist, is a middle-aged professor, steeped in American history and literature. He has quit his job in pursuit of a single overwhelming passion — to host the perfect party — and has invited Lois, a critic from a “major New York newspaper,” to witness and…
Realism doesn’t work with Tennessee Williams, nor do most kinds of stylization. His work requires a passionate, heightened, over-the-top romanticism from both cast and director. Unless you’re swept away by the magic of the language, by the hyper-inflated and hugely sexualized emotion, these plays can seem hyperbolic and dated –…
I’ve been worrying about Frankie and Johnny all day, trying to figure out whether or not they’ll stay together. Which is odd, because they’re a fictitious couple dreamed up by playwright Terrence McNally in his Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune and brought to life by Emily Paton…
I know that August Wilson is a great playwright in the same way I know that Notre Dame is a majestic cathedral, but whenever I re-encounter his work, I find myself trying to figure out exactly why it’s so great. In past reviews, I’ve used words like “rich” and “multi-layered”…
Clue: the Musical. The pleasure of this Country Dinner Playhouse production of Clue: the Musical is that it boasts a truly outstanding cast. Which is good, since the music is serviceable rather than clever or melodious, and this is less a show than a big, cheerful game. Cutouts of the…
In Diversions and Delights, Germinal Stage actor-director Ed Baierlein gives us a broken Oscar Wilde. The man who delighted in shocking London, the poseur who walked along the Strand holding a flower, the writer who told an American customs official that he had nothing to declare but his genius, the…
A.R. Gurney is both a gentle man and a gentleman. He’s the product of an upper-crust WASP family, an echelon of society he’s delineated with irony, wistfulness and affection in many early plays, including The Dining Room. But he’s also interested in politics, as is clear in 1992’s The Fourth…
Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…
For King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy, Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson has the characters argue, fight, rage, torment each other and grieve on an almost bare stage within the confines of high, forbidding gray arches and pillars. The beginning of the story has the symmetry and…
Bad Dates has the familiar feel of a long night spent with a girlfriend after she’s suffered a breakup, one of those nights when you can offer nothing but a shared bottle of wine, anything sweet you have lurking in the fridge and a loving ear. Playwright Theresa Rebeck provides…
Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…
Edith Piaf, the French chanteuse her countrymen lovingly dubbed “The Little Sparrow,” died long before I had a chance to see her on stage. But I know her voice in my bones, as I imagine many of you do, too: that low-pitched, cigarette-and-whiskey-flavored sound with its profound vibrato, a voice…
Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…
I spend the first thirty minutes of 1001 in a state of irritated disaffection. This is the world premiere of an original play, and disaffection may be a legitimate response: Playwright Jason Grote has tried to do something original, something that I can’t slot tidily into any of the pre-existing…
I first visited the Country Dinner Playhouse with my parents-in-law — good, small-town, middle-American folk, who took my husband and me to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a special treat. I remember that the food was the usual steam-table fare and that I was a little surprised by…
Aphrodisiac. Playwright Rob Handel’s inspiration is the affair between Congressman Gary Condit and intern Chandra Levy, which erupted into the media when Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a year later; although suspicion clouded his career, Condit was never officially accused of murder. Aphrodisiac approaches this story obliquely…
