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…
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. There’s enough good material here for a tight, funny, one-hour-long show, but this one stretches on and on. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through December 20,…
The mythology of the West as depicted in dimestore novels and Hollywood fantasy has been pretty thoroughly discredited by now; since the 1980s, a rash of revisionist works have described lives of deprivation, hunger and dirt — not to mention greed and exploitation — on what historians no longer want…
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. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through November 1, Garner Galleria Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed September 18, 2008. Microworld(s), Part 1…
A middle-aged man is alone on stage, reciting a paragraph of prose. The stage behind him has an unused, dusty appearance — chairs, a few other bits of furniture. We realize we’re in a deserted theater. The man mumbles and hesitates, and then there’s an interruption from the audience. A…
A Raisin in the Sun. This fifty-year-old play remains astonishingly relevant. The Younger family — grandmother Lena, son Walter Lee and twenty-year-old daughter Beneatha, as well as Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, and young son Travis — live in a roach-infested Chicago apartment with a down-the-hall bathroom. Travis sleeps on the…
Thaddeus Phillips is a magician of the stage. He likes putting disparate things together — objects, images, ideas — in service of a new and transformative vision. He is also an internationalist to the core. His characters are often bewildered travelers, and maps, boundaries and foreign languages play a large…
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. First produced in 1984, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the play that propelled August Wilson to fame, and it has everything that makes the playwright great: eruptions of humor, rage, pettiness and affection, all given resonance by a broadly humanistic sense of history and context. The…
A Raisin in the Sun was written over fifty years ago, but it remains vivid and relevant today. Though the final act is weakened by a sequence of preachy, 1950s-style dramatic speeches, in which each character in turn bares his or her soul, in every other respect these people are…
Die! Mommie Die! It’s been forever since we’ve had really good, outrageous, dirty-minded, over-the-top camp in Denver, so Die! Mommie Die! is a particular delight. Charles Busch’s play is a spoof of such 1960s Gothic horror movies as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. There’s no important…
