A good journey makes a heroic tale–especially when the protagonist ultimately arrives at new insight. Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh, though flawed as drama by its own heady ambitions, is one such quest story. And the sterling production at Theatre on Broadway illuminates an already bright play with layers of…
Angels and devils hover in the local theater this season–and it’s about time. First the Broadway road show Angels in America graced the Auditorium Theatre last fall with its tale of God in retreat. Now we have Lucifer Tonite, by Denver’s most intense writer/performer, Don Becker. But while Angels could…
August Wilson is one of America’s great playwrights. His rage, his humor and his humanity find their deepest expression in the construction of character; plot is not the point. Yet each of his plays tells a compelling story, and each story moves us because it strikes home as true and…
If you’re going to revive a period thriller as clunky and passionate as Dial “M” for Murder, for heaven’s sake don’t ignore the very elements that make it interesting–go for the noir! The road-show production of the classic 1950s murder mystery now at the Auditorium Theatre features TV and movie…
Sometimes a play can leap through the centuries and land gracefully in our midst. But it takes a crack cast to handle antiquated language forms and old-fashioned sentiments. To work really well, a revival must speak some fundamental truths about the human condition. The Triumph of Love, an eighteenth-century farce…
The French loved him when America all but deserted him. But who cares what the French think? Now Jerry Lewis is enjoying a revival of public favor guaranteed to increase an already endless ego–fully displayed in the slick and (mostly) charming Damn Yankees. Even the death of his erstwhile sidekick…
The most important community theater arises out of a community’s need–and El Centro Su Teatro is a prime example of what the best community theater should be. Producing original plays in Spanish and English, Su Teatro draws on amateur and trained performers to give voice to the Hispanic community’s struggles,…
Most of the holiday shows now playing in Denver are secular pieces that capitalize on the season’s frenetic nostalgia but have no commitment to its meaning. But there is one authentic Christmas piece in town: Black Nativity at Eulipions. The play by poet Langston Hughes has a doubly emotional edge–a…
They’re baaaack. With the just-opened Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Czech director Pavel Dobrusky and Norwegian counterpart Per-Olav Sorensen have once again brought “process theater” to the Denver Center Theatre Company. The first of their offbeat pieces–Stories, based on Isabel Allende’s novel The Stories of Eva Luna–was a delightful, technically brilliant bit…
Cross-gender performances are not all equal. When women play male characters, we tend to take them seriously. But when men play female roles, we can’t help but laugh–it always looks like parody. CityStage Ensemble director David Quinn’s version of Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy The Critic includes a riotous array of…
Something about the Roaring Twenties still seems naughty–and in the best sense of the word. Maybe it’s just nostalgia for a simpler time, but even the wild flappers, the speakeasies and the social experimentation had a much more innocent feel than our own jaded, cynical era. That’s why Mame, the…
The first of many holiday shows, She Loves Me may well turn out to be this season’s best. This delightfully quirky musical has been given a delicious, intimate staging by the South Suburban Theatre Company, with a charming cast, fine direction and a very cool set. The action takes place…
Psycho Beach Party is yet another outrageous parody of B movies and pop psychology–and it’s somewhat brighter and cleverer than most. The cast at Theatre on Broadway is right on down the line, but the show depends upon the ingenious antics of its star, Andrew Shoffner, to really make it…
George Gershwin’s pop tunes hold up after all these years. Tunes like “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “But Not for Me” have beautiful melodies and jazzy energies that are still capable of knocking your socks off. Crazy for You brings many of…
Purists may blanch at director Jeremy Cole’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but the adventurous revision has much to say to us. It’s not perfect, but this production by the Cattlecall theater troupe is intense, knowing, and never dull. As the play opens, Macbeth has just quelled a rebellion against King…
In his many short stories, John Cheever skimmed the surface of bourgeois American family life, laying bare the pretensions of suburban culture and dissecting the hopelessness of its materialism in nicely served, if thin, slices of life. In A Cheever Evening, playwright A.R. Gurney stirs together a number of scenes…
John Patrick Shanley’s poignant Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a three-scene argument for love–the kind of love between a man and a woman that penetrates individual isolation via mutual kindness. And it’s delivered in an unusual package as persuasive as it is hard-edged–partly because the play is well-written,…
It’s almost impossible to put on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice today; if one excises the loathsome anti-Semitism from the play, one can’t help but do violence to its original meaning. Laurence Olivier managed to virtually reconstruct the play’s intentions by cutting lines and casting all the characters except Shylock…
The local husband-and-wife acting team of Moira Keefe and Charlie Oates couldn’t be much different from each other. Yet they have managed to stay married for nine years, and they share their often dark and mostly hilarious secrets in the show they wrote and perform together, Staying Married. This is…
Arthur Miller appears to have gained some wisdom in his old age. A man has to mature a long way in his understanding of the world and of women to write a play as insightful and kind as The Last Yankee. And the Denver Center Theatre Company has imported the…
The plays that George Bernard Shaw wrote in the late nineteenth century were popular because they were funny–and because, despite Shaw’s socialist politics and Darwinian outlook, the societal conventions he appeared to flout were actually refined under the scalpel of his wit. With a few notable exceptions, Shaw’s plays remain…
Over the past year, many of Denver’s most powerful and insightful theater productions have been political in nature, displaying a passion for justice without resorting to propaganda: My Sister in This House, Six Degrees of Separation, Star Fever, Parallel Lives, God’s Country, The Interrogation, Oleanna, Death and the Maiden and…
