2009 Broadway revival cast photos below by Joan Marcus. I don’t know exactly what I expected when I walked into the Buell Tuesday for the opening night of Hair, and after the curtain went up and the once-controversial musical got started, even my theater-going companion, an old hippie in every…
Denver comic extraordinaire and former Westword writer Adam Cayton-Holland is scheduled to make his TV debut tonight on the ABC sitcom “Happy Endings.” “I ably played the role of ‘Customer’ and it was my duty in the scene to order a sandwich. And I ordered the shit out of that…
Clybourne Park. Racism persists, but the ways in which we feel and express racism change with the times. Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, at the end of which the Youngers, a struggling black family, are about to move into a…
When Mary Shelley — poet, essayist, novelist and, most famously, the creator of Frankenstein — lost one of the four babies she conceived with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (only one child ultimately survived), he placed her in a tub of ice water to stop the hemorrhaging that threatened her life…
At the beginning of Parlour Song, demolitions expert Ned is showing videos of his work to his neighbor, Dale, owner of a car wash. Dale is polite but uninterested — he’s seen these many times before, though Ned seems to have forgotten showing them to him — but for the…
Beginning Saturday, Paragon member and executive director Michael Stricker joins co-founder Warren Sherrill and Emily Paton-Davies in the troupe’s production of Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song, the last show of its present season, as well as the last to be performed in a sublet venue (in this case, the Kim Robards…
Clybourne Park. Racism persists, but the ways in which we feel and express racism change with the times. Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, at the end of which the Youngers, a struggling black family, are about to move into a…
As a musical, Ragtime inevitably lacks the complexity — as well as the violence and darkness — of E.L. Doctorow’s wonderful novel, but it still has a thousand times more intelligence, charm and integrity than the average musical. As written by Terrence McNally, with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
Many people think of farce as a lesser genre than tragedy or even thoughtful comedy, because with farce there’s no focus on theme, subtext or characterization. But putting together a workable farce takes a lot of wit and ingenuity. Every piece of action has to be perfectly timed so that…
If you’re looking for the perfect date-night destination, keep on looking. Love, Sex & the Second City isn’t a show for a first date — because it’s about first dates and why we never make it to that second one… or the third…or the fourth. Love, Sex & the Second…
The gig is up! Last night saw Denver dance troupe Silhouettes take second place after Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr. on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. Tensions were high as both dance troupe Team iLuminate and teen band POPLYFE were initially given the boot. It came down to the final two and…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
Denver’s fall theater season is already off to a hot and heavy start with offerings of every stripe, from classically funny (The Liar and Unnecessary Farce) to explosive (Justin Bieber Meets Al Qaeda) to thought-provoking (Clybourne Park) to just plain silly (Completely Hollywood (abridged)). And due to the wealth of…
Racism persists, but the ways in which we feel and express it change with the times — as exemplified in Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park. The play was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, at the end of which the Youngers, a struggling black family, are about…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
Despite their nearly two decades of golden success, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always put on for Colorado — magnum opus South Park, for example, is basically a fifteen-year-long-and-counting tribute to the home state — and given that track record, we weren’t surprised at all when they announced that…
Les Miserables has been running for 25 years — making it the longest-running musical, well, ever. I caught the show in 1999, about halfway through its decade-spanning run; at the time, I was living Perth, Western Australia, and the performance was staged in the basketball arena where Perth’s professional team…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
Anne Nelson, a journalism professor, wrote The Guys very soon after 9/11, and the play closely follows her own experiences. Like her protagonist, Joan, Nelson could think of no real way to contribute — plumbers were needed, Joan tells us, but not intellectuals — until she learned of a fire…
When people think of The Wiz, if they think of The Wiz at all, chances are they think of the camp-tastic Motown Productions joint that starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor (oh my) in one of the most hilarious miscalculations ever to hit the ’70s screen. But…
No joke, Annette Roman’s father was a Holocaust survivor and her mother once belonged to the Hitler Youth. It’s a tricky tightwire to balance, but Roman puts it all into perspective in her solo performance, Hitler’s Li’l Abomination, currently showing at the Boulder Fringe Festival. And though she worries that…
