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.”…
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…
I loved this production of The Fourth Wall when I saw it at the late lamented Nomad Theatre — directed, as now, by Billie McBride and featuring the same cast — and I fully expected to love it again at the Avenue. But I didn’t. The script remains witty and…
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…
In 1955, when Inherit the Wind was written, religious attacks on evolution seemed safely in America’s past, and authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee weren’t so much re-arguing the topic as using it as a metaphor for the stifling of thought in the McCarthy era. It’s astonishing to realize…
The plot of An Ideal Husband isn’t as absurd as that of Oscar Wilde’s best-known play, The Importance of Being Earnest — there’s no mention, for instance, of a baby in a carpet bag — but it’s still a featherweight thing. Husband concerns a politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, whose spotless…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
When you walk into the East Theater at the Dairy Center for the Arts, you see a man puttering quietly about the stage. The setting is simple: a white chair dead center; a set of coveralls suspended from a hanger to your left; a table holding sound equipment to your…
Oil begins with an unidentified, cowboy-hatted oilman leaning back in a chair and justifying drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The speech is droll — the work is so environmentally sound, the oilman tells us, that the caribou sidle up to the pipelines to keep warm — and the…
Death of a Salesman. This is one of those low-budget shows held together with chewing gum, string and ferocious determination. Which means that it’s uneven, the set and lighting are minimal, and a couple of the performances are downright amateurish. Arthur Miller’s critique of American materialism remains relevant, but his…
Denver Repertory’s Death of a Salesman is one of those low-budget shows that’s held together with chewing gum, string and ferocious determination. Which means it’s uneven. The set and lighting are minimal, because neither the company nor the John Hand Theatre has the resources to create the mix of dream,…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
The Winter’s Tale, part of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is a peculiar hybrid of a play. It begins as tragedy, then lurches into full comic mode. There’s a sixteen-year gap in time, more comedy, and it’s back to gravitas for the final scenes. The play contains many familiar tropes –…
