A hundred years before terms like “mommy track” and “telecommuting” crept into the common parlance, German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker wrestled with an agonizing dilemma: Would she settle for being a stay-at-home mom who filled her few idle hours by sketching portraits, or would she fulfill her prodigious talent by…
Laden with postmodern gloom and narcissism, The Fastest Clock in the Universe is an offbeat play about “human cannibals” struggling to define themselves in a world bereft of meaning, sense or care. Despite the characters’ attempts to dial back the forces of time, they’re eventually compelled to reckon with the…
As the three characters in Art discuss the worth of a painting one of them has purchased for an extravagant sum, they argue, rail and bluster until they finally establish the play’s basic premise: When it comes to questions of art or relationships, there’s no accounting for taste. But while…
The prospect of an evening of ghost stories is intriguing, especially this time of year, but there’s no point in dragging it out for two-and-three-quarter hours when only five to ten minutes’ worth of the material is even of passing interest. Director Scott Gibson and company’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, Once Upon…
His radical American cousins have reduced the grandeur of character to the smithereens of personality. His angry English countrymen have rejected arch debate in favor of circuitous harangue. And his disaffected Irish forebears have alternately romanticized, upbraided and forsaken their motherland. But rather than siphon such tried-and-true iconoclasm, twenty-something playwright…
In an age when a former professional wrestler (and current elected official) declares organized religion a crutch for the weak-minded (who need strength in numbers), a talking-head presidential candidate spews inflammatory remarks about religious groups and a so-called reverend pickets the funeral of a murdered gay man, it seems a…
A Depression-era board game invented to provide financially strapped folks with the chance to embark on vicarious — and harmless — voyages through the choppy waters of high finance serves as the central metaphor in Nagle Jackson’s A Hotel on Marvin Gardens. As a group of self-absorbed upwardly mobile types…
When it comes to dealing with the biblical question of who is his brother’s keeper, politicians blame the other party, theologians kowtow to the well-heeled while reminding them to help the less fortunate, and self-help enthusiasts consider the question confounding and untenable. Enter actor Laurence Fishburne, whose three-character Riff Raff…
If talent, poise and charisma were the only qualities needed to triumph in theaters of war or pleasure, then the sparkling quintet in Swingtime Canteen could claim absolute victory after crooning and hoofing their way though an Act One medley of brassy Andrews Sisters tunes. But even though the heroic…
Snugged away in a remote fishing shack in northern Minnesota, a burly loudmouth named Junior laments to his fellow ice-anglers that citified “income poops” have made a mess of the frozen lake that he and his Woolrich-clad pals consider their sacred refuge. In addition to spawning schools of cappuccino-sipping, tofu-nibbling…
In his best plays, Tennessee Williams uses vivid imagery and poetic dialogue to evoke feeling — instead of explaining it to death, which is the preferred method used by many of today’s psychodramatists. In fact, as illustrated by Germinal Stage Denver’s Noh theater-style production of Suddenly Last Summer, Williams’s powers…
Like the union of the two main characters in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, the Bug Theatre Company’s production is a hauntingly sad, absurdly comic look at domestic strife that lasts a little too long for its own good. Pacing and structural problems notwithstanding, director Donna Morrison’s version sometimes…
Throw a couple of polarized misfits on stage and let them rail about society’s refusal to accept them, and most theatergoers will likely say with a shrug, “That’s a shame. Welcome to the world.” If a playwright couches those same issues in the all-embracing language of family discord, though, audience…
Fifty-two years and a couple hundred pounds ago, Marlon Brando electrified Broadway audiences with his snarling, animalistic portrayal of the bellowing lout in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In fact, Brando’s riveting turn as Stanley Kowalski spawned generations of imitators who wrongly believed that mumbling, scratching and raw emoting…
Talk-show blather and gossip-column imbecility notwithstanding, professional performers aren’t all celebrified brats who uniformly indulge in angst-filled tantrums, global bed-hopping and public displays of megalomania. Like athletes whose passion for the game extends well beyond the final whistle, most stage actors are more devoted to studying and perfecting the nuances…
Braving theatrical waters that have proved treacherous to the hardiest of companies, the Upstart Crow Theatre has produced nineteen consecutive seasons of uncut classic plays. Even more remarkable, on a recent opening night, the Boulder group drew a full house of spectators who seemed perfectly willing to fork over fifteen…
If you’re tired of being bombarded by wall-to-wall news coverage of heinous crimes, tragic accidents and inane controversies, or of slogging through the nightly prime-time lineup of hospital dramas (in which half of the characters die), crime movies (in which the characters commit the acts that send their victims to…
Larry Kramer is perhaps best known as a pugnacious sort who regularly vilifies the editors of the New York Times and intimidates genteel talk-show hosts like Charlie Rose. In 1985, though, the gay activist and co-founder of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) became famous for writing The Normal…
The rising tide of William Shakespeare’s popularity reached its high-water mark recently with the hit movie Shakespeare in Love, a delightful tale that reshaped the Bard’s image from that of a paunchy though brilliant literary lion to one of a hot-blooded, if bumbling, dramatic poet. As refreshing as it was,…
Although it’s been more than forty years since West Side Story opened on Broadway, the landmark musical still has the power to transport theatergoers to unparalleled heights. Its combination of soaring melodies and frenetic dance sequences makes Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s 1957 show spellbinding in a way that often…
The ever-malleable topics of love, artistic creation and the end of the world are tempered by various forms of poetic justice in Summerplay, The Changing Scene’s annual festival of new works written and performed by artists with a Colorado connection. Although the trio of one-act plays varies considerably in quality…
These days, musical blockbusters are marked by their star-studded casts, syrupy storylines and truckloads of extravagant scenery. That’s why a fifty-year-old ensemble piece like Kurt Weill’s Street Scene seems destined to remain mothballed under layers of critical and scholarly acclaim. But in Central City Opera’s version, director Michael Ehrman’s character-driven…
