Playwright Amy Herzog enters a very specific world in After the Revolution, now receiving its regional premiere at Curious Theatre: the passionate, close-knit, hyper-idealistic world of Jewish Communism in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick showed this…
Throughout all three hours of Camelot, I was entertaining a single question: Why would anyone decide to stage this thing? I’d been pleased when I first read the show’s title on the Arvada Center’s season announcement: I had never seen Camelot before, and was anxious to make up for it…
For Racheli Mendelson, a former EMT who’d been creating performance-art pieces since she was thirteen, it just made sense to explore her time serving in the Israeli military through a red-nosed clown performance. See the result at Mendelson’s Boulder International Fringe Festival debut, Shoot, Cry & Forget About It!: A…
On Sepember 19 Denver crowds will unload a serious amount of cash on an event titled “The Clean Guys Comedy,” which features such stand-up legends as Jamie Kennedy (Scream), Uncle Joey from Full House, and some other folks you vaguely remember from somewhere. The comics themselves aren’t what’s selling this…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
If you missed the big announcement of Off-Center@The Jones’s upcoming programming at the theater’s season opening event last night, you also missed a big party with lots of free beer. Under wraps until the live trailer show commenced, the venue’s third season of nonconformist theater can now be discussed, and…
Zoos tend to fare badly during wartime, with the plight of captive animals mirroring that of besieged populations. Diane Ackerman’s beautiful book The Zoo Keeper’s Wife tells the story of the Zabinskis, who ran a zoo in Warsaw that was devastated by German bombers: “The moaning of lions and yowling…
Multimedia artist Adam Stone has collaborated on four of Buntport’s most interesting shows, making music for three and contributing a soundscape and his own haunting presence to Wake, the company’s take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. So a fair amount of excitement greeted the recent announcement that he had created a…
Homophobia in popular culture began to fade in the ’70s, and for the most part was dead and gone by the ’90s. With music, it began with disco and was stomped to death by riot grrrl. In film it was exposed with Boys in the Band, and deemed passé with…
The story of three multi-generational drag queens traveling through the Outback in a glittery pink bus — to a disco beat — takes a back seat to the costumes in Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical. The touring Broadway show is in the middle of its run at the…
Since the beginning of his career, Dave Coulier has worked in the realm of family-friendly comedy. His first major television role was in 1984, hosting Nickelodeon’s children’s sketch-comedy show Out of Control, where he became known for his goofy voices and the catch phrase “Cut it out.” He took that…
Happily wedded Hollywood sweethearts Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman make beautiful music together — and comedy, too! Although both found fame and fortune on sitcoms — Offerman as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation, Mullally as Karen on Will & Grace — their talents are too big to be confined…
50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…
Inviting the audience to work with musicians, dancers and performance artists in intimate, one-on-one shows, Tara Rynders, creator of You & Me, has seen great success across Colorado since she started her site-specific interactive perforcmances in 2011. The dancer has also taken her show on the road with events in…
While last week’s High Plains Comedy Festival was a tightly run ship that set sail to introduce the world to the Denver comedy scene, this weekend’s Too Much Funstival was a sloppy drunken kiss on the lips to this city’s funny fans, an incredibly loose bacchanal of free food, booze,…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
A week into his comeback tour, Dave Chappelle either had a “meltdown,” was “booed off the stage,” or was treated like a black-face minstrel by a crowd of “fucking animals” last Thursday in Hartford, Connecticut. The incident has made for a bloggery buffet of commentary on race, comedy and corporate…
50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…
About half an hour into Peter and the Starcatcher, I started wondering: What is it with the New York critics? They were so excited by this show — exhilarated, ecstatic. They loved that the tech wasn’t grindingly, massively hyper-expensive, but rather low-key, using ordinary objects in the way that experimental…
Get ready for The Kid, starring Joey McIntyre of the cult-favorite supergroup New Kids on the Block, which will have its world premiere in Denver this week. Earlier this month, on the heels of the act’s massive, fifty-city tour, McIntyre and Denver Center Attractions announced that they were teaming up…
Mike Birbiglia is not interested in your laughter. Or at least, that’s not all he’s interested in. While most comedians shy away from long-form jokes — for fear of not getting any laughs and being stuck with a sinking ship for ten minutes — Birbiglia is all about the long-term…
While Jon Stewart was away directing his first film in the Middle East, CNN took the opportunity to revamp Crossfire. One of the first politically polarizing talk shows on the first cable news network, Crossfire had a 22-year run before it was shut down in 2004, after Stewart called the…
