I expected a lot more of Central City Opera’s fiftieth-anniversary production of West Side Story. I’ve been in love with Leonard Bernstein’s music since I first heard it decades ago, and over the past few years, I’ve listened to many gorgeous voices in the intimate and historic Central City Opera…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
Macbeth is one of the most familiar of Shakespeare’s plays, and with each new production, I look to see what the director has accomplished in the way of re-interpretation, depth of understanding or clarification. For this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, Lynne Collins has added a number of interpretive touches. Early…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
No one really knows whether there was a barber in Victorian London who slit his customers’ throats and passed their bodies down a chute so that his harridan lover could make meat pies of them. There are evocative snippets in an old newspaper, a couple of popular nineteenth-century serials, an…
I’m generally a fan of playwright Steven Dietz’s cunningly constructed, verbally agile and often thought-provoking theater pieces, but I was surprised by Honus and Me. Although it wasn’t listed as part of the Aurora Fox’s children’s series, it turns out that Dietz adapted the play from a book by Dan…
The Last Five Years. This intimate two-person musical involves the breakup of a marriage. When Jamie and Cathy met in New York, he was an aspiring writer and she an actress. Success came for him fast, while she continued to inhabit the dreary, ego-pummeling world of auditions and summer stock —…
This is how the New York Times’s 2003 review of Matt and Ben begins: “Is there anyone who isn’t sick of Ben Affleck, with his J.Lo and his Gigli and the salaams he elicits when he deigns to show up in Project Greenlight?” But therein lies my problem with this…
Thaddeus Phillips, who visits Buntport every year or so, is one of the most interesting theatrical forces around. His Lucidity Suitcase offers proof that all you need for great theater is creativity, imagination and performers with guts, talent and integrity — performers like Tatiana Mallarino and Phillips himself. Phillips approaches…
The Denver Project. Created by Steven Sapp and Mildred Ruiz of New York’s UNIVERSES, this is an attempt to bring the realities of life on the streets to us, the well-fed patrons of Curious, to show that the homeless constitute a society and culture of their own, one that abuts…
No matter how well you thought you knew it beforehand, every show that Phamaly does takes on new meaning and dimension. This is the only company in the country to use disabled actors exclusively — and unlike, say, the National Theatre of the Deaf, it uses actors with every kind…
From this distance, it’s hard to figure out just what made Will Rogers so famous. He began his career with rope tricks and homespun philosophizing in Wild West shows, found fame in the Ziegfeld Follies, and eventually wrote newspaper columns, appeared in films and took a brief run at the…
The Denver Project. Created by Steven Sapp and Mildred Ruiz of New York’s UNIVERSES, this is an attempt to bring the realities of life on the streets to us, the well-fed patrons of Curious, to show that the homeless constitute a society and culture of their own, one that abuts…
I know Gershwin’s “Summertime” very well, but when Nova Y. Payton sang it in 3 Mo’ Divas, I felt as if I’d never heard the song before. I had always thought of it as a lullaby, sensuous in its evocation of hot summer days but essentially gentle. Stopping to scat…
Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941, when he was in exile in Finland and the world had not yet fully absorbed the depth of Hitler’s depravity. Set in gangland Chicago in the 1930s, the play parodies the stratagems by which Hitler came to power, casting…
McGuinn and Murry are a pair of gumshoes waiting in their dusty office for a case in McGuinn & Murry, a takeoff on 1940s film noir. No one has enlisted their services for years, though, and so they make up hypothetical mysteries to pass the time. Murry comes up with…
The Denver Project. Created by Steven Sapp and Mildred Ruiz of New York’s UNIVERSES, this is an attempt to bring the realities of life on the streets to us, the well-fed patrons of Curious, to show that the homeless constitute a society and culture of their own, one that abuts…
Every semester, my freshman class at the University of Colorado stages a debate on whether or not you should give money to beggars, and every semester, my students reveal an almost identical set of prejudices and convictions. Those opposed to giving money seldom offer the one rationale that strikes me…
Dinah Was. The story opens with Dinah Washington, at the height of her fame, arriving at the Sahara in Las Vegas for a show. Though the manager expects her to fill the house, he refuses to give her a room at the hotel, insisting that she stay in the trailer…
Many years ago — before his current incarnation as a Scientology guru-cum-acting coach in Hollywood — I took acting classes with Milton Katselas in New York. Among my classmates was a tall, dark-haired gypsy named Bea. One evening, she gave an oddly flat monologue from Romeo and Juliet, sat down…
When Donald Margulies’s Sight Unseen opens, we’re in a house in the English countryside — but this is no cozy cottage surrounded by green, sheep-dotted fields. This is a gray, damp world. It’s inhabited by Patricia, an American expatriate, and her British husband, Nick, whom she married on the rebound…
Arcadia. There’s so much richness to this play that once you’ve seen it, you want to acquire the text, ask your mathematician friends to explain the science, re-read Byron, study the history of the English garden, and generally try to plumb the ideas that Tom Stoppard has set whirling about the stage, including…
