The growing influence the movies have over theater has its downside. Some theatrical productions try to vie with movie spectacle, for instance, cheapening the theatrical experience, a la Miss Saigon. But Hollywood’s influence can also lead to ingenious or charming solutions to theatrical problems. Madeline Walker O’Brien’s The Why and…
The full title of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. A mouthful–and really a much more proper title than the abbreviated one. This is a long, complicated…
It might seem odd to find it in a theater instead of a smoky bar, but the Denver Center Theatre Company’s It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues is a scintillating piece of work. The songs have been carefully chosen to illustrate the history of the blues with all its hot…
The hit movie The Madness of King George has stimulated popular interest in eighteenth-century England, which had a rich theatrical tradition of its own–witness Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The Industrial Arts production of this Georgian comedy, though a bit thick at first, soon opens a bright window on…
Anton Chekhov’s first play, Wild Honey, is raucous, intermittently charming, sometimes scathing and terribly clunky–the original is said to take six hours to perform. This production by Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre is the short version, translated and adapted by gigglemeister Michael Frayn (Noises Off). But while Hunger Artists does a…
The great French playwright Moliere hated doctors, and more than 300 years after he wrote The Imaginary Invalid, his scathing ridicule of the profession still stings. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production aims its darts at medicine’s present as well as its past, and it hits the mark with…
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a difficult play, full of subtle tests of skill for those hardy souls who undertake it. But Germinal Stage Denver’s new production grapples with all the challenges and wins. And though the seats turn a tad hard toward the middle of the…
What if the Big Bad Wolf wasn’t really bad at all? As the song says, there are “Two Sides to Every Story,” and playwright/director Pamela Clifton’s interactive children’s musical What Really Happened Once Upon a Time, at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, finally defends the real victims…
Playwright Kevin Kling creates a special brand of one-man show out of the raw material of his own life, then tempers it with the insights of famous literary and scientific geniuses. The result is new myth–stories that hit you like fables, tingle your spine, challenge your assumptions and tickle your…
At the Cafe Noir, everyone wears black and white–or they get picked on by the actors. The cast of this interactive theater piece, now being staged by Mystery Cabaret West at Catalano’s Catered Affair, helps serve and clear a four-course dinner during the intermissions while carrying on a constant, teasing…
The production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Country Dinner Playhouse is clean, lively, ingeniously choreographed and fetchingly performed family entertainment. But this rollicking story, based on the 1954 MGM film of the same name, does require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, particularly for adult women…
Kevin Barry tries to zero in on a painter’s life in The Secret of Durable Pigments, now in its premiere production at the Changing Scene. The playwright creates a number of interesting little portraits–the artist’s mother, his best friend, his kindly old aunt–but his portrait of the artist as an…
Mountain McClintock never took a dive–it’s the one thing the aging boxer is proud of, the one shred of dignity he still owns. But the hero of Rod Serling’s sagacious Requiem for a Heavyweight has a dignity he doesn’t recognize, a small flame of intelligence that blazes up for one…
Truth hides in the details. The regional premiere of Parallel Lives, at Jack’s Theatre, zeroes in on the particulars of women’s lives, especially as they interact with men–and gets the Big Picture right. Based on The Kathy and Mo Show, by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy, this feminist sketch comedy…
Half Native American and half African-American, the title character of Carlyle Brown’s Buffalo Hair struggles to make sense of his racial identity. That internal battle, refracted in the lives of several other mixed-race characters, forms the central conflict of this fascinating historical drama. The regional premiere at Eulipions offers an…
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a whinefest under the best of circumstances. The four characters reveal their secret sufferings in convoluted party games and end by eviscerating each other’s fragile emotional guts in a stupefying alcoholic haze. Despite the entertainment value inherent in such fireworks, when the…
At the end of the opening-night performance of Grease, former Monkees heartthrob Mickey Dolenz hushes the applauding audience at the Temple Buell Theater and says, “If you like us, tell your friends. If you didn’t like us, tell them you saw Cats.” I saw Cats. The very best thing about…
Playwright Robert Shaver sets his new play, Slavia and Hugo, in a horrific, blood-smeared, body-littered clinic. An atmosphere of degradation and torture lurks, monsterlike, and with it the anti-war message of this harsh absurdist parable. War waged against civilians is the most atrocious war of all, and this ardent production…
In playwright Keith Reddin’s Nebraska, even peacetime military life can be hell. And this Industrial Arts production leaves the viewer drained as Reddin delves into the loneliness, insecurities and futile adulteries plaguing the lives of his characters. The world these people inhabit is fraught with tension, fear and the terrible…
When a man lives under a cloud of fear, forever expecting a deluge, he may not notice that he’s already soaked to the skin and trembling. In the caustic comedy-drama Later Life, now in a superb production at the Avenue Theater, playwright A.R. Gurney masterfully reveals how fear has affected…
A new play from a young playwright is almost always rocky terrain. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Keith Glover’s Coming of the Hurricane is no exception, though Israel Hicks’s distinguished direction does much to smooth the way for the viewer. There is some wonderful dialogue here, along with…
Capitalism doesn’t always equal freedom, especially in the arts. That’s the bitter pill served up by Nagle Jackson’s The Quick-Change Room at the Denver Center Theatre Company. The message goes down easily–sweetened by Jackson’s piquant humor–but it burns in the belly. It’s a slow burn, too. The play demonstrates some…
