The best thing about British playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, which is receiving its local premiere at Paragon Theatre, is the central conceit. The action plays out in alternating scenes that take the same three people — well, essentially and symbolically the same, since they don’t ever age —…
Gold teeth are not cheap. That’s just one of the many things we learned during our chat with T.J. Miller, a Denver-raised comedian who has since gone on to mind-boggling heights of fame with supporting roles in such movies as She’s out of my League and Yogi Bear. But his…
Want to see a giant cat face with light-up eyes and a glowing field of poppies? So does Rianna Lee Brown. But to make it happen, she needs your help. The local artist, costume designer and performer has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund her ambitious new production, The…
When T.J. Miller’s one-hour Comedy Central special airs, it will be a big deal. “It’s a big deal,” the comedian agrees. “I didn’t even have to do a half hour on Comedy Central — I went straight to an hour.” Maybe that’s because Miller, who was born and raised in…
Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…
Caryl Churchill is not a playwright who repeats herself. She doesn’t have an immediately identifiable writing style or revert to certain kinds of characters or situations. Although her work tends to be politically aware, highly original and inventive in terms of stagecraft, each play is distinctly different. A Number, first…
The story of Billy Elliot is deeply appealing: During the 1980s, as Maggie Thatcher wars with the powerful coal-mining union as part of her campaign to destroy British labor, an eleven-year-old miner’s son stumbles into a ballet class and discovers an unlikely love of dance. Naturally, this appalls his tough…
At this point, it’s safe to say that Denver locals Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s The Book of Mormon is like the Titanic of musicals this year, and by Titanic we mean not the opulent ship sunk of hubris, but rather the James Cameron romantic epic from 1997 that swept…
By every conceivable definition, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s The Book of Mormon has been am unqualified success; in fact, considering the sold-out houses, the glowing reviews and the preposterous amount of Tony Award nominations the musical has garnered, it might even be the most successful thing the duo has…
Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…
Jean Cocteau, famed writer, director, designer, filmmaker and creator of the classic film Beauty and the Beast, supposedly wrote Indiscretions — originally called Les Parents Terrible — in 1938, during eight opium-hazed days. The central figure is Yvonne, an irrational, suicidal, diabetic woman who terrorizes her husband, George, and completely…
Rose Fleishman, a Jewish refugee from Austria, runs a delicatessen in Chicago, and right across the alley is a pub owned by Lady O’Riley, a dour Irish widow. Rose sells gefilte fish, Lady salmon loaf. Separated by centuries of history, culture and religion, the two women are coldly formal toward…
Back when she was working as a music promoter in Denver, few probably would have believed that Tig Notaro — who had at that point never even performed on a stage, let alone comedy — would go on to the phenomenal amount of success she’s since achieved: Besides numerous high-profile…
It’s been not much more than a month since The Book of Mormon, the sweet and dirty musical send-up of Mormonism from South Park creators and Denver locals Trey Parker and Matt Stone, opened on Broadway to the adulation of everybody — and now its dominance is official: Yesterday, Book…
Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…
Victor, a wealthy American newspaperman – that’s a contradiction in terms, of course; Victor inherited money from his newspaper-owning dad – is living the expatriate’s dream in 1961. A devotee of Papa Hemingway, he gallivants around Europe with his mistress, Louise, and owns a cafe in Paris where he employs…
You may have heard Plato’s theory about the origin of love — the round creatures, male-male, female-female, androgynous, who originally populated the world and were riven in half by an angry Zeus, doomed to spend the rest of eternity searching helplessly for their mates and their own lost souls. But…
Inherit the Wind, the fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, might just be the greatest courtroom drama ever written, and its main theme — whether or not Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution should be taught in a public school — is as…
For over a decade, BINDERY | space has been home to some of Denver’s best and weirdest experimental theater under the direction of the LIDA Project, which has been its driving force for most of that time, in addition to providing a place for a number of other like-minded companies…
Kumail Nanjiani isn’t exactly your typical comedian. Where most spend their time complaining about things they hate, Nanjiani attacks the things he loves, which happens to be activities of a decidedly nerdy persuasion: Videogames, horror and science fiction all have a place in his routine. You’ll be able to find…
When the Colorado Ballet left me a care package yesterday inviting me to a press conference announcing its 2011-2012 season, along with a very pretty box containing one milk-chocolate swan and one white-chocolate swan, it didn’t exactly leave a whole lot of intrigue as to what would be on the…
Ruined. One of the most troubled and lawless places in the world right now is the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and if everyone’s life there is hell, Congolese women, raped and mutilated by the thousands, are condemned to the lowest circle. In attempting a play about the plight…
