It’s hard to assign a genre to John Guare’s Landscape of the Body, currently being produced by Paper Cat Theatre. It’s absurdist and unrealistic; it mingles horror and slapstick. “I’d like a laugh track around my life,” says Betty Yearn, being interrogated as a suspect in the murder of her…
I’m a huge fan of the Heritage Square Music Hall. Going there to review feels like a break from school and from all those plays — whether deep and thoughtful or annoyingly pretentious — to which I have to give serious critical consideration. Heritage provides solace for mind and spirit,…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The best thing about Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree is the central character who tells most of the story, a six-year-old child named Elizabeth. She’s sometimes cute, but she’s also smart, bratty and eccentric enough to keep the highly emotional play from becoming overwhelmingly sentimental. It’s through Elizabeth’s often uncomprehending…
Nancy Cranbourne has a devoted following in Boulder, and if you check out Vulva Riot, her new solo show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, you’ll see why. Although naming theater pieces after genitalia seems to be a trend these days, I must admit, I wish Cranbourne hadn’t called…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Ed Baierlein has mounted a clean, skilled, well-acted production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Germinal Stage and, paradoxically, the production’s strengths highlight the play’s weaknesses. The action takes place in a cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert, where May and Eddie are performing yet…
Julian Sheppard’s Buicks falls squarely in the middle-aged-male life-crisis genre. Bill, who owns a car dealership and has a wife, Kathy, and two children, is a glad-handing, posturing creep, mildly racist and, most of all, utterly oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of those around him. He doesn’t see his…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun originally opened on Broadway in 1959 — before the civil-rights movement found its full momentum and at a time when, as Hansberry said, “The intimacy of knowledge which the Negro may culturally have of white Americans does not exist in the reverse.” The…
I first heard Paul Robeson’s voice during the folk revival of the early 1960s, the days when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were ascendant. Someone had put together a disc of folk songs from earlier in the century that included Robeson singing “Get on Board, Little Children.” It was an…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
If you want to put on a first-rate production, you need to start with a strong script. And given how many of these there are to choose from, I’ve no idea why so many half-baked plays — ancient, creaking comedies, pretentious contemporary effusions, dated musicals — get staged around here…
I was thrilled when I first heard that the Denver Center Theatre Company intended to present Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex with the powerful Bill Christ in the title role. It seemed a perfect marriage of text and actor. In fact, the company has deployed many of its strongest performers for this…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
During the intermission of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, I overheard some people talking in the lobby. They were trying to fit the play’s characters into the familiar Tennessee Williams oeuvre. Dorothea was like the self-deluded, fragile, alcoholic Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, they agreed. But who in…
Last year, director Israel Hicks commissioned Charles F. (OyamO) Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan, to write a play based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Hicks wanted it set in a contemporary milieu, with Torvald transformed into the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations. OmayO obliged. The…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Going to the theater alone is depressing, so part of my job as a reviewer involves coaxing, bribing and seducing friends and family members into accompanying me. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these companions — wise and perspicacious people all — even when their opinions clash with…
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is a play of ideas; I see them as white balls zigzagging through a bright white sky in a constant and dizzying display. The protagonists are Niels Bohr and his onetime student Werner Heisenberg — leaders among the group of scientists who transformed the world’s concept of…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The Hunger Artists have made something of a tradition of staging a reading of James Joyce’s The Dead in the historic Byers-Evans House at the beginning of each new year, and it’s a good tradition. The story, subtle and beautifully multi-layered, filled with references to snow, memory and, as the…
