When Freyda Thomas’s adaptation of Molire’s Tartuffe was shown at Circle in the Square a decade ago, it received a dismissive review from the New York Times. The seventeenth-century classic is about a religious con man whose false piety ensnares a prominent householder, almost destroying his home and family; translating…
Charity Hope Valentine is a loving and trusting soul, perpetually betrayed by the men she loves but always willing to give her heart again. She works at a dance hall, flirting and dancing for money. Sweet Charity, with a book by Neil Simon and songs by Cy Coleman and Dorothy…
I Am My Own Wife. The subject of I Am My Own Wife is German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde in 1928 Berlin, a collector of antiques who survived both World War II and the Communist years in East Germany. But the play is as much about author…
The action of Hamlet all hinges on an injunction by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who appears on a bitter cold night to tell the prince he must kill his murderous and usurping uncle. Everything that happens in Something Is Rotten is also set in motion by a ghost –…
There’s quite a bit wrong with Next Stage’s production of The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, but what’s wildly — and exactly — right is the group’s choice of a play to open its season, as well as the casting of the protagonist. Author Rolin Jones is now a writer…
The subject of I Am My Own Wife is German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde in 1928 Berlin, a collector of antiques who survived both World War II and the Communist years in East Germany. But the play is as much about author Doug Wright’s relationship with von…
Aldo and Huey are friends. Huey is divorced, and Aldo — who never gained his father’s affection and is unable to sever the link with his overpowering mother — is unmarried. Huey has been behaving oddly since the divorce, wearing poetic, frill-sleeved shirts and unflatteringly tight black pants, mooning around…
Making theater where there has been little or no theater before — the small towns east of Boulder, for example — is an exemplary activity, and finding new plays to produce is doubly so. But the process is also highly risky. It takes thousands of scripts that are so-so, spotty,…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
There are certain actors whose name on a cast list gladdens my heart. The presence of any one of them on stage pretty much assures that I’ll have a good evening at the theater, almost regardless of script, direction or supporting cast. These actors are hugely different in terms of…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
As I stood in line for the ladies’ room during the intermission of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s The Tempest, the woman in line behind me asked me what I thought of the production. I murmured something noncommital. She herself liked all the actors, she told me, except for Prospero. She…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Something is happening at the University of Delaware’s theater program, from which the Colorado Shakespeare Festival has drawn a fair amount of its acting talent in the past few years. I imagine an elderly English actress running the place, dispensing advice on diction and elocution over china teacups. From the…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
I remember a friend once talking to me about a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The melancholy nobleman Jaques has just joined his exiled fellows and is excitedly describing a recent encounter: “A fool, a fool, I met a fool in the forest.” In some of the most…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
Actress Lucy Roucis, who’s playing the witch Addaperle in The Wiz, her thirteenth production with the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors’ League (PHAMALy), has a standup routine about the pros and cons of her Parkinson’s disease, which she recites softly during a break in rehearsal: Pro: Killer parking spaces. Con:…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
Because I grew up in London, where the ghosts of Roman soldiers, Saxon traders, Renaissance poets, Victorian merchants, Cockney fishmongers, bishops and queens and kings and murdered princes whispered beneath the pavement, it took me a long time to acknowledge that there was any such thing as Colorado history –…
Love is hard to find. If you find anything — anything at all — remotely resembling it, you should hang on for dear life. Or at least take a long, thoughtful second look, no matter how absurd the thing seems initially or how tempted you are to cut and run…
