Few Denver natives have made as lasting an imprint on this city as Cleo Parker Robinson. For over forty years she’s been dancing her way through Colorado’s cultural scene, establishing a dance troupe and a school, winning countless awards and bringing social awareness to controversial subjects along the way. Her…
The opening moments are pulse-poundingly exciting — music, live wrestling, flashing lights, tons of adrenaline from an already hyped-up audience. But the actual scripted beginning of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety is quiet, as a Puerto Rican kid called Macedonio Guerra — Mace — describes his lifelong fascination with…
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, based on John Gay’s satiric eighteenth-century piece, The Beggar’s Opera, burst onto the Berlin scene in 1928. Revolutionary for its time both in content and form, it rocked the art world, and it has since been staged and re-staged, as well as…
UPDATE: Just hours before Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was set to open last night, Ben Dicke, who directed the show and was to play Andrew Jackson, fell through an open trap door in a stage floor, sustaining a head injury and four broken ribs. According to updates from fellow production…
At Aiden Sinclair’s magic show, you won’t see any bunnies pulled out of hats or ladies cut in half. Sinclair describes From a Padded Room: An Evening in Colney Hatch Asylum, which plays at 7 p.m. Saturday, September 8, at the Tattered Cover LoDo event hall, as an empathic journey…
Curious Theatre Company opened its new season on September 1 with the regional premiere of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which is both a pure adrenalin rush and a significant aesthetic experience. Chad Deity breaks through the fourth wall like a hurricane and has the audience yelling…
“I’m really interested in finding the ways that past and present can naturally collide,” says Ballet Nouveau Colorado choreographer Garrett Ammon of his new production, Carry On. “And this relationship with Paper Bird has worked so well because their music is incredibly respectful and reverent of the past without being…
The Book of Mormon was the brainchild of two Coloradans, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who first burst on the national scene with South Park. But other locals also got lucky with the musical. Longtime Denver lobbyist Leo Boyle actually invested in it. “It’s one of the few things I’ve…
I was teaching a class on news reporting in 2002 when the Bush administration opened the prison at Guantánamo Bay and ruled that prisoners there would be designated enemy combatants. I asked my students if they knew what that implied. They weren’t a particularly well-informed group, but they understood the…
The Book of Mormon finally arrived in Denver, freighted with a massive weight of hype, slick marketing, praise and excitement for this musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, both Colorado natives. The show had sold out within hours last January, with friends posting photographs of themselves holding tickets…
The Book of Mormon finally arrived in Denver, freighted with a massive weight of hype, slick marketing, praise and excitement for this musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, both Colorado natives. The show had sold out within hours last January, with friends posting photographs of themselves holding tickets…
During her career as a performer, Gemma Wilcox has played dozens of intelligently crafted characters. The U.K.-born, University of Leeds trained actress is a one-woman cabaret of personas, and today she spends most of the year taking her shows on the road across the country and through Canada. She tries…
Children of war suffer in myriad ways. They witness and sometimes experience violence, suffer hunger and disruption, see their parents helpless and unable to protect them from vast, frightening and incomprehensible forces. Displaced children are a predictable product of conflict. Even for those left physically unhurt, the losses are incalculable…
This GIF pretty much summarizes how we feel about The Book of Mormon hitting home tonight. Although the fourteen-times-over Tony winner has already made a splash on Broadway — and sold out in Denver — it finally reaches the Ellie Caulkins Opera House at 7:30 p.m. for the first performance…
“Many dance company directors, especially the most venerable, keep to the wings, letting their dancers and the works speak for themselves. Cleo Parker Robinson is not one of those.” That’s the start of yesterday’s New York Times piece that’s basically a rave review for Cleo Parker Robinson. Oh, and the…
Boulder’s experimental, “collaboratory” Band of Toughs isn’t out of the woods. In fact, the theater troupe’s production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, part of the Boulder Fringe Festival, will place the play smack in the woods, in the mischievous fairy-forest the playwright envisioned. Performances will run Friday, August…
It’s almost here, guys. This Tuesday will mark the official opening date of the national tour of one of the laugh-crackingest, award-winningest musicals in recent history — but more important, it came out of local minds. We’ve been writing about Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s The Book of Mormon since…
There’s a lot of weird shit captured for posterity on videotape. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have been collecting it for 21 years, and touring the world sharing it under the name Found Footage Festival for the past eight. During that time, they’ve become de facto VHS historians, amassing an…
John Leo and Sophie Nimmannit met at the Boulder Fringe Festival some years ago, the story goes, and it was kismet — on both personal and professional planes. The bicoastal couple threw their fates together and created their own baby: the fringey comedy Peg-ass-us, which has been their bread-and-butter ever…
Edward Albee’s brilliant The Play About the Baby is really a play about age, life and experience. It’s mesmerizing to watch, raising all kinds of associations — comfortable and familiar, uncomfortable but still familiar — along with echoes of things you know and other things your thoughts have only touched…
Founded last year by Keith Rabin as a part of Lucent Performing Arts, Ignite Theatre is signaling great seriousness of intention, lining up an ambitious production schedule for the coming year that includes Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and the Pulitzer winner about mental illness,…
Joe Wandell spent a large part of his life wondering who he was, and in his one-man show, Mekong Joe, he invites you in on the search. This isn’t one of those all too common protagonist-finding-himself stories, because Wandell’s story is anything but common. In 1976, during the U.S. withdrawal…
