There’s a pleasant straightforwardness to Sheldon Friedman’s The Long Goodbye, which begins with a gunshot, then an elderly man holding the gun and describing the slow process of his wife’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s. Moving back a little in time, you see this man, Parker, with his dazed and disoriented wheelchair-bound…
Director Richard Pegg is English, and he completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. The rhythms of the dialogue are bone-deep familiar to him — a rare and deeply welcome thing in this area. Pegg knows about Brighton and Hove, and…
Autobiography can be dangerous territory for creative writers. Of course, many writers use their own life stories to some extent; reality provides all kinds of useful insights and evocative bits and bobs of memory. But to work as a script or novel, truth needs to be rejiggered, and it helps…
There’s an expectant, zizzy feeling in the air, along with the smell of wet paint, as Roller Skating With My Cousin begins. Everyone’s in a high good humor, and between the whirling designs on the floor, the crazy whine of music and the promo materials that bill the piece as…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Absurd Person Singular. The Denver Center Theatre Company should be applauded for selecting Absurd Person Singular, Alan Ayckbourn’s dark comedy, as one of its Christmas offerings. Ayckbourn’s trademark is intensely clever, laugh-out-loud farce capering over the surface of a sad and penetrating cynicism, and it’s the perfect antidote to the…
For ten years, Gary Culig starred in The Santaland Diaries — a one-man, one-act play based on an essay by David Sedaris — at the Bug Theatre, but last December he delivered his final performance here and toddled back to New York. Now the Boulder Ensemble has taken up the…
Absurd Person Singular. The Denver Center Theatre Company should be applauded for selecting Absurd Person Singular, Alan Ayckbourn’s dark comedy, as one of its Christmas offerings. Ayckbourn’s trademark is intensely clever, laugh-out-loud farce capering over the surface of a sad and penetrating cynicism, and it’s the perfect antidote to the…
I came to Spring Awakening a complete innocent, without so much as a quick Google to ascertain theme, genre, plot. I’d heard of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play on which the musical is based, of course, since it pops up in all surveys of European theater, and I knew the production…
Absurd Person Singular. The Denver Center Theatre Company should be applauded for selecting Absurd Person Singular, Alan Ayckbourn’s dark comedy, as one of its Christmas offerings. Ayckbourn’s trademark is intensely clever, laugh-out-loud farce capering over the surface of a sad and penetrating cynicism, and it’s the perfect antidote to the…
Singin’ in the Rain follows a glamorous Hollywood couple, Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, through the transition from silent movies to the talkies. Don comes through pretty well, but Lina’s voice is a harsh, squeaking disaster that threatens to sink the studio. Enter Kathy Selden, who wants to be a…
Long before the Denver theater world woke up to his talents, actor-director Frank Georgianna was a significant force in Boulder, where he began his work in the 1970s. His Boulder Repertory company never had a home of its own; he and his wife, Ernestine, rehearsed the actors in the basement…
Big Love. In a plot lifted from Aeschylus, fifty sisters have been promised by their father to fifty cousins; on their wedding day, they flee from Greece to Italy in search of sanctuary. They land at the home of hyper-civilized Piero, who wants to help but doesn’t want trouble —…
I have to applaud the Denver Center Theatre Company for selecting Absurd Person Singular, Alan Ayckbourn’s dark comedy, as one of its Christmas offerings. Ayckbourn’s trademark is intensely clever, laugh-out-loud farce capering over the surface of a sad and penetrating cynicism, and his work is the perfect antidote to the…
Big Love. In a plot lifted from Aeschylus, fifty sisters have been promised by their father to fifty cousins; on their wedding day, they flee from Greece to Italy in search of sanctuary. They land at the home of hyper-civilized Piero, who wants to help but doesn’t want trouble —…
In the bowels of the hautest of New York’s haute cuisine restaurants, would-be actor Sam mans the phones. All may be elegance, soft-spoken service, expensive food and flattering lighting above, but here in the basement there’s grubbiness and clutter, drab green walls and constantly ringing phones. Also a jarring, flashing,…
In Well, playwright Lisa Kron has created a character, Lisa Kron, who’s writing a play —an exploration, insists the on-stage doppelgänger — dealing with Lisa Kron’s relationship with her mother. It has to do with illness and healing, she informs the audience (no pesky fourth wall here), and the fact…
Calamity. Written by Stephen Wangh and Suzanne Baxtresser, Calamity brings Calamity Jane back to life, re-creating one of the Wild West shows in which she starred at the turn of the last century. But here Calamity also confronts the present — along with current ideas about just who she was…
Apparently playwright Charles Mee has been garnering a fair amount of attention over the past few years, but it somehow escaped me. So I have no particular expectations when Big Love begins with a group of young women clustered in the wings at both sides of the playing area, all…
