Farce can be insipid drivel or sublime madness, depending on the play and the wit of the director. Fortunately, Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the University of Colorado-Boulder is more sublime than insipid, more caustic madness than silly drivel. And though this production can lose its way…
Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, now at the Theatre at Muddy’s, exposes the murky side of scientific inquiry. Even professors of archaeology, we learn, can be despicable and put their egos before the well-being of others. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Somebody really does have…
OpenStage Theatre’s production of The Philadelphia Story, now running in Fort Collins, proves once and for all that unemployed rich people dashing about trying to find true love in romantic comedies are no longer interesting. Whenever their plight did engage us in the Hollywood films of the past, it was…
Reckless, now running in Boulder in a biting, smart production by the Actors Ensemble, might have been called Relentless Christmas–so much of the action takes place on consecutive Christmases and so many of the events are cataclysmic. But although Craig Lucas’s hilarious play skewers the season’s sentimentality, it isn’t about…
Education is more than it’s cracked up to be. And while Educating Rita, now at the Denver Civic Theatre, suggests the traditional ingestion and regurgitation approach can be improved upon, it never says how. Playwright Willy Russell’s effort may be fun to watch, especially with such engaging actors, but its…
The McCarthy era stunk. If you don’t believe that, be sure to catch Red Scare on Sunset at Industrial Arts Theatre. The satire by Charles Busch imitates the style of Red-scare films (I Married a Communist, et al.) that fed American paranoia during the Fifties. Ironically, these propaganda films were…
Mocking sacred cows is a venerable tradition in the arts, and as long as it’s done without any discernible taste (but with a good deal of wit), it satisfies our sense of the ridiculous without betraying original works. Remember Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales From Shakespeare? Like that perverse piece of…
Sometimes the dark is safer than the light. Sometimes a blind woman can “see” more clearly than those whose eyes have not dimmed. In Wait Until Dark, at the South Suburban Theatre Company, the heroine of the story is a young woman, recently blinded and still learning to maneuver around…
America loves its gangsters. Not the real ones, of course: We like our gangsters safely enshrined in the movies or on stage, and we like them to be Italian (one more outrageous prejudice). But while we admire the consummate movie godfather, Don Corleone, he’s still pretty scary; once in a…
Perhaps it takes an Eastern European to bring the Theater of the Absurd into the present; after all, people in that part of the world have seen so much more pointless cruelty up close. Pavel M. Dobrusky appears to be qualified, and the Czech director’s new Star Fever at the…
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of the great dream narratives of all time. There’s a lot of sense behind the nonsense verse and the bizarre behavior of all those whom Alice meets on her adventure. But then, the life of a dream has a logic of its own…
Ever the sentimentalist, playwright Neil Simon nevertheless has a knack for recognizing the ordinary citizen as interesting. Despite his penchant for safe answers and shallow ideals, Simon still manages to build hilarious dialogue and create characters in whom we invest emotionally. He takes us all in, and most of us…
When an ordinary bloke poses as a foreigner in a remote resort in Georgia, he becomes a magic mirror in which the good-hearted people around him see their better selves and watch their dreams of fulfillment unfold. The evil-hearted, on the other hand, are undone by what they see in…
It’s at the pinnacle of Western civilization, but King Lear is still, first and foremost, a ripping yarn. When a theater company pulls it off, the audience leaves thoroughly entertained and rich in wisdom. A new theater troupe has come to Denver, and the very first thing the Ad Hoc…
We are all related to each other, separated by only six people–six degrees of separation. You may not think you have anything in common with a monk in Tibet, but if you could trace a path through the right six people, you’d find a direct connection. This intriguing, if dubious,…
It could have been, so easily, Cheez Whiz. But The Who’s Tommy, now playing at the Buell Theatre, has evolved into a brawny rock hymn to reconciliation. “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” is not so much the solipsistic demand of invisible youth it originally was but rather…
David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, now playing at the Boulder Art Center, might be seen as an argument against a career in the theater–sort of a parent’s tool to persuade the aspiring actor in the family to go to law school or become a sanitation engineer. But since…
Beatle boys John and Paul each loved their mum–and they each lost her. That’s one of the key themes running through Lennon and McCartney: The Day They Met, a new work by Denver playwright Michael A. Miller now being performed at the Mercury Cafe. Miller implies that the common loss…
The production of Crazy for You at the Buell Theatre cranks up a full head of steam–and the rest of us have to run with it. Fortunately, most of the time the sprint is worth the effort. After all, the music is George Gershwin’s and the lyrics are Ira Gershwin’s…
What is real? What is illusion? Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre poses these questions in its presentation of Tony (Angels in America) Kushner’s adaptation of French playwright Pierre Corneille’s miraculous L’illusion Comique. Kushner’s brilliant update of the 1636 play, redubbed The Illusion, is funnier and more relevant to a contemporary audience…
One of the best jokes in playwright Jane Wagner’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe is found in its title. The question is, just how intelligent is life on earth? Now in an exuberant production at the Avenue Theatre, Wagner’s play asks more questions…
Everybody has a story–sometimes several stories. But a good story isn’t enough; you have to know how to tell it well. So a retired sailor named Ralph discovers during the course of Ralph’s Play, the first and best of two one-acts now playing at the RiverTree Theatre. Denver playwright Pat…
