Hello, Dolly!Say hello to Hello, Dolly!, an old warhorse finding new life at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. The musical tells the story of a meddlesome widow, Dolly Levi, who makes a living connecting people. Ostensibly trying to find a wife for half-millionaire feed-store owner Horace Vandergelder, she’s actually plotting to snare…
What a lark! What a plunge!” thinks Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as she steps exuberantly into her day, and that’s pretty much what I felt walking out of Curious Theatre after Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. The play is just so sweet, smart, honest and touching, such an absolutely delightful…
Playwright Michele Lowe writes well about art, and the central character in her Map of Heaven is an artist, Lena, whose paintings are maps of imaginary places, and who’s about to have her first big show. As the play opens, she consults in her studio with longtime dealer and gallery…
I was surprised to discover that Jim Leonard’s The Diviners was written as recently as 1980. The play feels like a period piece, and not just because it’s set in the Depression. Buddy Layman, the central character, was brain-damaged by an almost-drowning at the age of four, during which his…
Bedroom Farce. Bedroom Farce is the story of four couples and three bedrooms. The oldest pair, Delia and Ernest, are looking forward to a pleasant dinner and a quiet night. But their plans are upended by Susannah, the intensely neurotic wife of their socially obtuse son, Trevor. The depredations of…
Come April, Boulder’s renowned Frequent Flyers Productions aerial dance troupe will stage The Fabulous Freaky Flyers and their Flying Machines, an up-in-the-air homage to the ’60s, at the Lakewood Cultural Center. But while you’re waiting, rabid baby boomers and retro-fanatics, the company is offering die-hards an opportunity to bid for…
Operation Babylift, which flew hundreds of babies out of Vietnam after the 1975 fall of Saigon for adoption in the United States, has faded from national memory. But for actor Joe Wandell, born Hai Tran Thai and the son of a Vietnamese woman and a GI, it remains the central…
There are so many seemingly random elements at play in the Yes! Lab’s concept for The Remake Rumble, a seven-week series that starts tonight, they could almost be variables in a long-form improv game. The basic idea: take the plot elements and characters from famous movies and remake them, improv…
The first act of Next to Normal is brilliant. As almost everyone surely knows by now, the subject is an unusual one for a musical: a woman’s long struggle with bipolar disorder. Mental illness is hard to dramatize. Most attempts degenerate into sob-sodden sagas about someone’s obsessive pill- and therapist-aided…
Bedroom Farce is the story of four couples and three bedrooms. The oldest pair, Delia and Ernest, are looking forward to a pleasant dinner and a quiet night. They chat peacefully about repairs to the roof, share a late-evening plate of pilchards on toast and cradle cups of bedtime cocoa…
Mare Trevathan exists in the local theater scene on many levels: She’s an actress, publicist and booster all rolled up into one dynamic ball of energy, who’s played roles for numerous companies, including Curious Theatre, where she also manages community affairs. Mare has been all over the world and has…
Bono recently took time out of his busy touring schedule to save his investment opportunity, Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark — a Broadway musical boasting tunes written by the investor himself, daredevil scenes of amazing acrobatics and, according to a November New York Times interview, “wows from the soul and…
After getting her start in the inner workings of the entertainment biz as a music promoter (for a while in Denver), Tig Notaro got an itch to be on stage — not as a musician, but as a comedian. In that respect, she’s been more successful than many; she’s done…
It’s been a rough couple of years for the Shadow Theatre Company. Not long after moving into what it calls a “state-of-the-art” space three years ago, founder Jeffrey Nickelson took ill; he died in early 2009. After that, it seems — from an operational standpoint, anyway — things got rough…
Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s musical Next to Normal won the Pulitzer for its authors — the book and lyrics are by Yorkey, the music by Kitt. Yet it began simply as an exercise for a musical theater workshop, one of those “show us everything you’ve learned in 10 minutes”…
There aren’t enough opportunities for local playwrights to please Frank Oteri. It’s a shortage that drove Oteri to create A Very Dark Holiday Playwright Festivus at the Vintage Theatre, a showcase that spotlights work from six local writers. The show includes an original comedy from Oteri titled “Intimate Information,” a…
Hello, Dolly! You’re looking for a warm, lively, music-filled, sweetly sentimental holiday season show — but you’ve had it up to here with Santas and Tiny Tims, as well as not-so-funny take-offs on Santas and Tiny Tims. Say hello to Hello, Dolly!, an old warhorse finding new life at Boulder’s…
December holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Solstice are forced to make their case to a bureaucrat intent on streamlining the calendar. Santa’s compulsive list-making may have far more sinister implications than most people realize. A festive dinner gets couples quarreling, while a young man fights his clock on…
When you share a bill with Gwenyth Paltrow on Conan O’Brien’s step-down-but-still-in-the-game TBS vehicle, you know you’ve sort of made it. Such was the case last night for T.J. Miller, the latest in an increasingly long line of semi-stars to come out of Denver’s East High School that also includes…
Like many art forms, the craft of standup comedy is, for the most part, a boys’ club. “We wanted to take back the night,” jokes participating comedian Alicia Jacobs of Ladies Laugh-in, a monthly comedy showcase happening tomorrow night at 8 p.m. at Beauty Bar. Started back in July by…
Dixie’s Tupperware Party. Dixie is a booze- and sex-addicted, trash-talking, child-neglecting ex-con from Alabama who holds Tupperware parties in her trailer, and she’s invited you to this one. Dixie’s Tupperware Party at the Galleria really is a Tupperware party — you get a name tag and raffle number when you…
Though I’ve managed to skip all Sugarplums, Scrooges and Child’s Christmases this year, I couldn’t avoid the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s A Christmas Carol. Director Philip C. Sneed’s readers’ theater approach — few actors, a cappella Christmas songs, minimal glitz, functional rather than exquisite sets and costumes — puts the focus…
