Performing Arts

Reviving the quintessential Fifties drama is no easy matter; so many of the values and beliefs of the period seem dated. The best approach is to be as true to the period as possible. Director Jeremy Cole takes Terence Rattigan’s charming Separate Tables–two linked one-acts from the England of the…

One can respect a play and hate it at the same time. Drawn in to the premise completely, you can ultimately feel manipulated, and finally angry. Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is just such a play–capable of awakening the darkest revenge fantasies and then convincing its audience that there…

Parents are difficult in every culture. If they’re kind, loving people who only want the best for their adult children, they can be pretty darn willful about just what that “best” might be. So grown-up offspring have to find ingenious ways of asserting their own independence while still preserving their…

It’s impossible to beat Alfred Hitchcock at his own game. Nobody could remake Dial “M” for Murder as a movie and make it work. But Frederick Knott’s 1950s crime play still crackles oddly on the stage. And Hunger Artists’ stylish production, though intermittently absurd, translates film-noir technique gracefully to the…

Once in a while a glimpse of something special comes through in a theatrical event. And Voices of the Children: The World of Brundibar is special. This is community theater as it should be: beautifully mounted, intelligent, moving and a little raw around the edges. Because the play is about…

When you think of Edward Albee, the word “hopeful” does not readily leap to mind. The author of The Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All Over, among many other dark dramas, lashes out at human cruelty, egotism and the inability to communicate across gender and class lines…

The great movie and Broadway musicals of the 1930s seem both naive and extravagant in hindsight. Depression-era folk wanted to lose sight of their dreary poverty in visions of glittery gowns and lighthearted romances. The humor in these shows was usually slightly naughty but never really earthy; the brash showgirl…

Sometimes you have to be beastly to be kind. And as beastly as Geniuses, Madmen, and Saints can be, all British playwright Peter Barnes’s rage and wit is directed at what is most vicious and self-deceptive in human beings–particularly those who use religion as a cloak for peculiar vices. The…

You have to love country music–particularly country music from the early 1960s–to really get the most out of Always…Patsy Cline. It also helps if you like being part of the show, since the actors talk and sing directly to you and even draw individuals into the action. But even if…

Playwright David Mamet understands how people really converse. He articulates the rhythms of the inarticulate, because he grasps how hard it is sometimes to talk and think at once, even to finish sentences. The mind and the emotions race so far ahead of the mouth. Mamet also appreciates the fact…

“Poetry theater” as defined by the Denver troupe called the Open Rangers is part theater, part poetry, part dance, part music and part chutzpah. Sometimes exhilarating and sometimes embarrassing, the Open Rangers try for authentic and immediate artistic expression in their current production, The Reign of the Scar Clan, with…

Short plays, like short stories, must be skillfully wrought to involve the audience instantly, delivering their substance with comparatively little development. So their goals tend to be more modest than those of longer works, and their action more obvious. Still, they can make powerful, lasting impressions. Theatre at Muddy’s 10…

A man lies dying, and his wife, his best friend, his grown children and his mistress gather in the next room to wait for his death. It soon becomes clear that the man was a public figure who made a lot of money and wielded a great deal of power…

The second series in The Changing Scene’s annual festival of new plays called “Summerplay” opened last weekend with four short pieces as different from one another as fruit, vegetables, rocks and rice. Some of it is digestible, some of it isn’t. But each play gets a full-bodied production, intelligent directing…

When Bertolt Brecht first staged his scathing The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928, it not only delighted his middle- and upper-class audiences, it made him money for the first time in his theater life. Maybe it was the sheer naughtiness of its womanizing, murderous, thieving antihero, Macheath (aka Mack…

Different people, different points of view: That’s the modest message behind 10 Percent in Maple Grove–a collection of disconnected scenes about gay and straight interaction in a small Midwestern town. Playwright Mark Dunn’s world-premiere show at Jack’s Theater is not about sex, AIDS, hate or self-pity, but rather about understanding,…

Humphrey Bogart never actually said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca. But somehow the line has lived on and permeated the culture. It stands for the reckless, sophisticated tough guy Bogart usually played–the stuff of male role models for the last fifty-odd years. Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam brings…

Musicals tend to be shallow, sentimental fun–a day in the park. But once in a while, one rolls along that actually has a little something to say. Three musicals now on the boards in Denver offer something beyond a quick escape, rousing tunes and slick performances: a trace of social…

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has been around a long time, but though a lot of people support the noble cause, many more do not. There are just too many agonies associated with attendance at CSF. Every year, those of us who do show up try to forget the grotesque discomfort…

Cult classic The Rocky Horror Show is just so Seventies. It must have seemed fiendishly outrageous when it came out in London in 1973 (the movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was released in 1975)–so new, so outlaw, so wild. Well, it’s still wild, but it now seems kind…

The movies did it better. “Women’s pictures” such as All About Eve, The Women and even The Bad Seed, for all their melodramatic silliness, at least presented complex and interesting female characters. But Ruthless! The Musical, which is supposed to be a sendup of those Hollywood classics, is about as…

Two million Jews and tens of thousands of other prisoners were tortured and killed at Auschwitz. Because the numbers are so staggering, it is excruciatingly difficult to absorb the fact that each of those millions died an individual death, that each was murdered and that for each murder, there was…