Director Louis Malle’s 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street brought David Mamet’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya to the screen. It’s a magnificent movie, beautifully written and a veritable textbook on the art of acting. But it has left a big problem for theater companies: How in the…
Victor Hugo’s magnificent, sardonic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame is everywhere you look these days. Disney’s animated musical interpretation was a smash hit, and even The Simpsons television sitcom satirized Andrew Lloyd Webber’s penchant for musicalizing tragedies in its hilarious “Hunchback” episode. Still another rendering of the dark medieval…
Back in 1959, Hollywood called it The Fugitive Kind, and Marlon Brando’s brooding sexuality and Anna Magnani’s voluptuous realism made it a dark meditation on the nature of jealousy and violence in a small Southern town. It was as good a movie as Hollywood could produce. But Hollywood could not,…
Improv can be deadly; when it’s bad, it’s horrid. Good thing Comedy Sports is alive and well and living it up downstairs at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. After ten years and 1,900 performances (making it the longest-running show in Denver), the ensemble group has developed a distinctive persona. The performers…
Whatever else you can say about the performances at the Heritage Square Music Hall, there’s nothing else quite like them in Denver. The current hybrid production Sweeney Todd (no relation to the Stephen Sondheim musical) is part sketch comedy, part old-fashioned melodrama, part musical and part obnoxious silliness. It’s also…
Excruciatingly funny, dark as a dungeon and peculiarly exhilarating despite its bleakness, American Buffalo secured David Mamet’s leading place in American theater when it was produced on Broadway in 1977. The killer cast it attracted then, including Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage, indicates just what a jewel it…
Innovation has its price, and the liberties Denver director Jeremy Cole has taken with The Adding Machine, Elmer Rice’s famous 1923 experiment in expressionism, may not please purists entirely. But you have to hand it to Cole; he has found exciting ways to translate the dated designs of expressionism into…
Tuna, Texas, is one nightmare town–everybody in it is a jerk, a sociopath or a pathetic loser. The townspeople can be amusing, but not amusing enough to make you want to pay them a visit. And maybe that’s what’s wrong with Greater Tuna, now in a popular revival at the…
It’s not clear why ex-newsman Walter Cronkite felt it necessary to narrate a piece like this–yes, that’s his voice booming over the loudspeakers–but another celebrity, the Karate Kid, sure kicks up a fuss in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The musical satire of big business and the…
King Arthur, what a guy. Somehow the grand old Celt still appeals to the popular imagination. Many works of art have spun out from the legends of Arthur and the Roundtable, and there are good reasons for the current revival of interest in the King and his court–and in the…
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote some of the best comedies of their era, teaming up in the 1930s and 1940s to produce, among other hits, the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can’t Take It With You, which later became one of Frank Capra’s greatest movies. Hart was long on plot,…
Samuel Beckett thought it all through for us–what it means to live in a world where God is absent. In such a world, life is absurd because it has no ultimate meaning. If there is no God, we are all fools and clowns scrambling for bits of comfort and amusement…
In the arts, “experimental” can mean anything from innovative to amateurish, depending on the experience and creativity of the artists involved. But experimentation is invariably valuable, because it leads to the discovery of new forms. Unfortunately, things can get a little bumpy along the way. The Lida Project is one…
An opportunity to see the greatest of George Bernard Shaw’s early plays, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, doesn’t come along every day. And Boulder Repertory Company’s solid-gold production of the controversial drama offers just exactly the right occasion. The cast is excellent, the direction superb and the social issues still troubling. But…
Broadway Brunch. You’ve heard of dinner theater; now there’s breakfast theater. On Sunday mornings the Westin Hotel offers a musical review featuring four talented performers singing Broadway hits–sometimes in character, sometimes straight–in a good mix of salty and sweet. Reece Livingstone’s masterful presence demands attention and gets it; he’s particularly…
The good news about Nicky Silver’s Raised in Captivity is that actual social issues are raised. The bad news is that, apart from a few good lines and an impressive opening scene, Silver doesn’t seem to know what to do with those issues–or how to create characters who make us…
The Ballad of Baby Doe.The best acting of the Central City Opera’s season can be found in this, the company’s signature piece. The sordid love story about Baby Doe and Horace Tabor may make for a tragic bit of history, but it’s the stuff of grand melodrama–and all the more…
For the first few sets, it’s tempting to feel sorry for the four singers in Broadway Brunch, a musical review of Broadway hits playing at the Westin Hotel on Sunday mornings. But the sympathy pangs soon subside; these performers are having too much fun rising to the occasion in what…
Ah, the troubled young–how to deal with them in the theater? This past year we had the intense and frightening Saved, by British playwright Edward Bond, which indicted English society for its cruel, callous working-class teens. Then we had Eric Bogosian’s intelligent take on American youth in subUrbia. Both these…
The great thing about My Fair Lady is Pygmalion–the smash hit from 1914 that established George Bernard Shaw as England’s premier playwright of the era. Lerner and Loewe’s musical adaptation of that stageplay, while not quite hardcore Shaw, is saucy and intelligent, and the Boulder Dinner Theatre’s bright production treats…
Grand opera, like crime movies and modern tragedy, is largely peopled by sluts and scalawags. Big, blustery sins are committed and paid for, and the spectacle is thrilling. Often the innocent get mowed down in the process (usually as part of the naughty protagonist’s punishment), but in the end, the…
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League (PHAMALy) takes on Stephen Sondheim’s bawdy musical with energetic glee. Some of director Don Bill’s choices may offend–he goes a bit too far over the top for “family” entertainment. But sometimes Bill’s experiments…
