You may want to run home and brush your teeth after attending Steel Magnolias–all the sugar in playwright Robert Harling’s script is likely to encrust them. The play does have a few redeeming moments, some of which the production at the Aurora Fox manages to locate. But in the end,…
French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote The Lady of the Camellias as a tribute to a young lover he admired and lost when she died at the age of 22, burned out by high living and the scourge of the age, consumption. Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi kept the memory of the…
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and most self-help books about the battle of the sexes are written by space cadets. Since many of these tomes are also about what losers men are when it comes to their treatment of women, comedian Rob Becker took it upon himself…
Playwright Joan Ackermann makes sense out of the commonplace. In last summer’s biggest local hit, Stanton’s Garage, she wove the eccentricities of unremarkable men and women into a thoroughly involving slice of life. Zara Spook and Other Lures, also a journey of personal discovery, is a delightful fanfare for the…
In order to make the world safe for theater, children have to be initiated in its mysteries now. Everybody in the business knows this, and strides have been made on the local scene to create theater suitable for children and families–like the splendid Peter Pan presented by the Denver Center…
Sure, it’s based on a loopy premise, but Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon still attracts audiences in droves. It’s most likely to appeal to family audiences: Kids under twelve go for the magic, while their grandparents appreciate the show’s optimistic image of an earthly paradise. Country Dinner Playhouse would seem to…
Legendary skirt-chaser Don Juan gets his in the end–at least in most of the versions of the famous story. And after seducing all those women, he would seem to deserve to burn in hell. But what if hell is a very pleasant sort of place–a kind of continuing cocktail party…
Humor doesn’t get any darker than Chazz Palminteri’s Faithful–at least not without getting sickening. But unlike many purveyors of black comedies, the tough-guy actor-turned-playwright manages to raise the audience’s spirits by play’s end, much as Woody Allen does in his best comedies. Palminteri skewers vanity, self-deception and especially hypocrisy, and…
Industrial Arts Theatre continues to expand Denver’s theatrical horizons with the first of what it hopes will be a long series of Colorado Women Playwrights Festivals. Running in repertory are two “programs”; the first features a full-length play, along with an amusing short, and it gets the festival off to…
Surf’s up, Shakespeare. Tweaking the Bard is the latest rage on the stage–witness Theatre on Broadway’s current compressed version of his “compleat works”–and the Denver Center Theatre Company is hanging ten with its new production of The Comedy of Errors. It’s set on the beaches of sunny Southern California, where…
Dealing with the death of a mother is a wrenching experience for children–to say nothing of Mum herself. And that’s where playwright Edward Albee hooks you in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women: It’s hard not to reflect on your own family as you spiral through the dark corridors of…
Fast and funny, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) skewers the Bard and honors him, too. In fact, the more you love Shake-speare, the more amused you’re likely to be by this jolly nonsense, now in its regional premiere. The comedy, which replaces Shake-speare’s immortal verse with game-show pandering,…
True story: A young seminary instructor was discussing the nature of evil in his class when a woman raised her hand and told him she did not believe in evil. “Really?” he said. “What do you call Auschwitz?” The student replied, “Well, it’s evil for me.” The insulated arrogance of…
The only way to describe playwright August Wilson’s Seven Guitars is with superlatives: Wilson’s writing is inspired, and Israel Hicks’s casting and direction is nothing short of brilliant. The night I saw the show, it received a standing ovation from an audience that seemed floored and fascinated–and distinctly grateful for…
It may seem intriguing at first, but self-indulgent craziness gets old fast. That’s the problem with Don Nigro’s Seascape With Sharks and Dancer–it starts out well, but because the main creature is so sunk in self-pity, she doesn’t evolve. Such a failure to change may be true to life, but…
Eleanor of Aquitaine was arguably the greatest woman of the late medieval period. She was beautiful and brilliant, a patron of the arts and a cultivator of the chivalric code. She defied the church hierarchy, married a French king and dumped him for an English king, bore six daughters and…
When that broken-down, opera-sized chandelier lying on the stage flies out over the audience and up to the ceiling in The Phantom of the Opera, it’s enough to justify the price of admission. The special effects in the Broadway road show of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extravaganza, now at the Buell…
Don Becker is a manic-depressive guy “with psychotic features” who writes humorous stuff for a living–first as a stand-up comic, now as one of Denver’s most irreverent playwrights. His first play, Back on a Limb, was a one-man show, an expose of his own mad life. Becker hid nothing of…
It’s always Armageddon for somebody. Don Becker’s dark new comedy, Kurt Cobain Was Right, puts a new spin on modern end-of-the-world themes harking all the way back to the Theater of the Absurd and cinematic spinoffs like Dr. Strangelove. The Lida Project’s outrageous production will offend, stimulate and maybe shake…
So much of the best musical comedy to favor the region recently has come from Boulder Dinner Theatre that it’s no surprise that BDT’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot is just what it should be–magical. This isn’t Lerner and Loewe’s best work (that distinction belongs to My Fair Lady),…
The central symbol of a long-lasting marriage in Jan de Hartog’s bittersweet The Four Poster is the marriage bed itself. Sexual tension is important in this poignant comedy from the Nomad Players, but the real point is a couple’s attempts to reach each other over 35 years. Well-written and charming,…
Heritage Square’s Music Hall’s comic melodramas may not appeal to everyone, but their pleasant buffoonery is a hit with audiences willing to put up with a little foolishness. The goony style of these frolics can’t really be confused with acting, but the company has achieved an undeniable polish. And its…
