What a disappointment! Kent Thompson began his tenure as artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company with a terrific production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and a hugely funny version of Feydeau’s classic farce, A Flea in Her Ear. But the third offering under his tenure, Jose Cruz…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
It’s amazing, really, the amount of sheer hard work and the level of perfectionism required to keep this bright bouncing balloon of a farce aloft. You get Scott Weldin’s sets — an elegant, intricate bourgeois living room in shades of beige, complete with patterned wallpaper, crystal chandelier and three oval…
No false advertising here: The show’s about naked boys singing. The real thing. The full monty. Seven of them, some younger, some a little older, a couple more buff than others, flaunters and flirters and would-be hiders, and every one of them gallantly baring his body and showing his all…
Ain’t Misbehavin. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
Although the critical world seems almost united in proclaiming Death of a Salesman not only Arthur Miller’s best play, but one of the greatest twentieth-century dramas, I have always rather disliked it: the heavy symbolism, the self-consciously poetic language, the endless moralizing and the protagonist’s awful self-pity. To me, the…
The seven founders — and also writer-designer-director-performers — of Buntport Theater are exploring new territory. Known for a prankish and highly literate experimentalism, the team is currently showing Realism: The Mythical Brontosaurus, which, as the title suggests, is pretty much a realistic play. There are no lopped-off limbs here or…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
I’m not the best audience for a scary show. At the movies, I cover my eyes during the gory parts. I also find that, for the most part, the real world provides all the grief and terror I know how to handle. Nonetheless — despite some moments spent cringing in…
For this ambitious production, Su Teatro artistic director Anthony J. Garcia has transposed the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to modern-day Mexico, intertwining it with contemporary politics and elements of Aztec myth and adding music by composer Daniel Valdez. It’s a fascinating concept, and parts of it work well, but…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys takes place in a teahouse in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, during the time of apartheid. The Master Harold of the title is a seventeen-year-old boy; during the play, his mother is manifest only as a voice on the phone, and we learn that…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
More than a decade ago, I attended a production at the Gaslight, a theater in the basement of a beautiful Victorian house in northwest Denver. The play, Bent, was new then and revelatory, a terrifying examination of the plight of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The play seemed almost incongruous in…
Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? I know that Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting…
The Fourth Wall, Playwright A.R. Gurney is a courteous, upper-crust kind of guy, so when he found himself enraged by national politics, he didn’t respond with agitprop or searing realism. Instead he imagined a comfortably middle-class housewife, Peggy, who — by way of protest — rearranges all the furniture in…
At the center of Lynn Nottage’s gentle, appealing play, Intimate Apparel, is the figure of Esther, a black woman in her thirties living in a boardinghouse in 1905 New York City, and — like so many poor and displaced women before and since — making her living as a seamstress…
As a reviewer, I see a lot of theater productions, and it’s rare for me to want to see one for a second time. But Germinal Stage Denver has more than once mounted a play I’d have liked to re-experience. This is because artistic director Ed Baierlein picks works that…
The Denver Center Theatre Company is beginning its first season under new artistic director Kent Thompson, former director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Thompson, 51, took the reins from Donovan Marley, who announced his retirement in January 2004, after 22 years. Theater buffs are wondering what to expect from the…
Assassins. Assassins seethes through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitude and raising a host of tormenting questions. This brilliant musical by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim is exactly the kind of project local companies should be undertaking. It tells the story of nine people who either assassinated…
Assassins seethes through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitude and raising a host of tormenting questions. This brilliant musical by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim is exactly the kind of project local companies should be taking on — and kudos to Next Stage for doing so. Sondheim…
In the ladies’ room during the intermission of The Dead Guy, I heard one woman say to another, “Every play they do here has some kind of message.” “What do you see as the message of this one?” asked her friend. A pause. “Oh, you know, how shallow television is.”…
