The Denver Center Theatre Company is presenting a version of The Madwoman of Chaillot, updated as simply The Madwoman and set in contemporary New York rather than Paris. The play was written by an ailing Jean Giraudoux during World War II and was first released in 1945, after his death…
Cats. This company does as good a job with Cats as one can imagine. The dancing, choreographed by Stephen Bertles, who also directed, is seamless. The cast is lithe and graceful. They slither like snakes. They leap high and land without a sound. They’re wonderfully into character, batting at each…
Paris on the Platte is a comic romp through early-nineteenth-century Denver history, focusing on Mayor Robert Speer and his dreams of “The City Beautiful.” The opening — a spoof on old-time melodrama — doesn’t quite work: It’s hard to tell exactly what’s being said by the yelling, gesticulating actors. But…
Polonio Castro, the protagonist of Thaddeus Phillips’s El Conquistador!, is a Colombian peasant living out a fantasy. Although there are similar Everyman characters in many cultures, Polonio reminds me of the humorous little men who populate Czech film and literature — not too great a stretch, given that Phillips’s theater…
Cats. This company does as good a job with Cats as one can imagine. The dancing, choreographed by Stephen Bertles, who also directed, is seamless. The cast is lithe and graceful. They slither like snakes. They leap high and land without a sound. They’re wonderfully into character, batting at each…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
When I first saw publicity for The Testosterone Monologues at the PS Grille (now PS 1515), I imagined some guy playing with his penis — literally or metaphorically — in a nasty, smoky joint. Surprise number one: PS 1515 is a nice place, well-appointed, shiny wood fittings, roses on the…
It takes time for major historic events to find expression in art (a serious body of literature about the Vietnam War didn’t emerge until almost a decade after the peace treaty was signed), and it seems to me that playwrights are just beginning to feel their way into the topic…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
It’s hard to assign a genre to John Guare’s Landscape of the Body, currently being produced by Paper Cat Theatre. It’s absurdist and unrealistic; it mingles horror and slapstick. “I’d like a laugh track around my life,” says Betty Yearn, being interrogated as a suspect in the murder of her…
I’m a huge fan of the Heritage Square Music Hall. Going there to review feels like a break from school and from all those plays — whether deep and thoughtful or annoyingly pretentious — to which I have to give serious critical consideration. Heritage provides solace for mind and spirit,…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The best thing about Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree is the central character who tells most of the story, a six-year-old child named Elizabeth. She’s sometimes cute, but she’s also smart, bratty and eccentric enough to keep the highly emotional play from becoming overwhelmingly sentimental. It’s through Elizabeth’s often uncomprehending…
Nancy Cranbourne has a devoted following in Boulder, and if you check out Vulva Riot, her new solo show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, you’ll see why. Although naming theater pieces after genitalia seems to be a trend these days, I must admit, I wish Cranbourne hadn’t called…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Ed Baierlein has mounted a clean, skilled, well-acted production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Germinal Stage and, paradoxically, the production’s strengths highlight the play’s weaknesses. The action takes place in a cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert, where May and Eddie are performing yet…
Julian Sheppard’s Buicks falls squarely in the middle-aged-male life-crisis genre. Bill, who owns a car dealership and has a wife, Kathy, and two children, is a glad-handing, posturing creep, mildly racist and, most of all, utterly oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of those around him. He doesn’t see his…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun originally opened on Broadway in 1959 — before the civil-rights movement found its full momentum and at a time when, as Hansberry said, “The intimacy of knowledge which the Negro may culturally have of white Americans does not exist in the reverse.” The…
I first heard Paul Robeson’s voice during the folk revival of the early 1960s, the days when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were ascendant. Someone had put together a disc of folk songs from earlier in the century that included Robeson singing “Get on Board, Little Children.” It was an…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
If you want to put on a first-rate production, you need to start with a strong script. And given how many of these there are to choose from, I’ve no idea why so many half-baked plays — ancient, creaking comedies, pretentious contemporary effusions, dated musicals — get staged around here…
