It’s fun to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet in an auditorium full of middle- and high-school students, as I did when I attended Openstage Theatre’s final dress rehearsal in Fort Collins. The students’ giggles at the raunchy bits, half-comprehending response to the milieu and genuine grief at the…
Since it opened two years ago with Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, Littleton’s Everyman Theatre has been one of the metro area’s best and most interesting small venues. Now the company has closed its doors, a victim of budget problems and shaky economic times. Everyman was housed in a fairly…
There’s a power to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that defies analysis. On one level, it’s a sentimental fable, a codification of the tamed bourgeois, Victorian Christmas that replaced the dangerous excesses of earlier generations, when drunken laborers took to the streets to sing, challenge the rich and turn propriety…
A new company called Rorschach Productions has put together a sequence of short plays that constitutes one of the more interesting evenings of theater around. It’s a combination of late-ish Samuel Beckett and very early Sam Shepard titled An Evening of B.S. In the first piece, Beckett’s Catastrophe, a director…
The Nomad Theatre’s Cinderella, directed by Deborah Curtis, is perfect for children. It’s slight, charming, tuneful and funny. There’s no uncertainty about the story or how it will end, so you can just settle in and enjoy the talented performers and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs. The evening opens with the…
Children of Eden is a very literal rendition of two Bible stories — those of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood. These narratives provide a good excuse for colorful props and costumes, a large cast and lots of ecstatic singing. Other than that, it’s hard to figure out a…
Rattlebrain Theater should have everything it needs to become a destination for the young and hip, a thronged local hot spot, the kind of place no in-the-know visitor to Denver would think of missing. It’s in a great location: the old D&F clock tower, slap-bang in the middle of the…
Nancy Cranbourne and Patti Dobrowolski, creators of the hysterically funny theater piece Two Woman Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization, are a Boulder institution. Or perhaps I should say “treasure.” Their newest offering, Mrs. Schwartz and Dober: Show and Tell for Grownups, is the first act on a double bill at the Boulder…
Two actors, a brother and sister, linger in the backstage area of a theater in a strange, unnamed country. There’s junky furniture, a round table with a painted rose at its center, a trunk covered with labels and a tall statue that could represent anything, godly or human, malevolent or…
I tried to watch English director Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on video once, but I gave up after thirty minutes or so. Maybe there’s something about the combination of wretched and unlikable protagonists, aimless activity, a snickering approach to violence and lots of splattered blood that’s…
The Denver Center complex hummed with activity last Saturday night. On the streets outside, cars circled aimlessly around the full parking structure. In the Buell, Tony Curtis maundered onto the stage in Some Like It Hot, and a stage away, playwright Martin McDonagh’s mean-spirited brothers tormented each other in The…
I must admit, I don’t see the point of Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, a play about a pair of hateful and hate-filled brothers, set in a bleak Irish village called Leenane (this is the third of a trilogy of plays set in this place). One of the brothers, Coleman…
Most of us remember the 1952 movie version of Singin’ in the Rain for the inspired partnership of Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly and the infectiously upbeat songs of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. The plot revolves around Hollywood and the film industry just as America was discovering talking…
The Full Monty began as one of those small, unassuming British movies about unemployed men in a gritty, industrial town — in this case, Sheffield, Yorkshire. These workers see their neighbors, wives and girlfriends rushing to a Chippendales-style male strip performance, and they decide to raise some money by staging…
There are evenings when my job seems like the best in town, and the Shadow Theatre Company’s Lady Day at Emerson¹s Bar and Grill provided one of them. The lights come up on a muted gray-green background, a piano, a nosegay of gardenias on a round table. Piano notes sound,…
Time, that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week, To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives. — W.H. Auden “My husband wanted to leave,” an attractive blond woman told me during the intermission for The Skin of Our Teeth,…
There is simply no way of explaining musical genius on the order of Mozart’s, and I think that’s the puzzle at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s glittering and celebrated play, Amadeus, which received all kinds of awards and attention when it first opened in London, in 1980, and again four…
As far as I can tell, David Lindsay-Abaire, author of A Devil Inside, has a good education, an effervescent imagination, a lot of smarts, a highly developed comic sense — and nothing much to say as yet. The play is full of ugly, violent imagery, but none of its deaths…
There’s something about the idea of separating the mingled good and evil within each of us that won’t let go of the imagination. Part of the appeal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the early seasons lay in the character of Angel, the vampire with a human soul, the dark,…
When a writer wants to explore complex issues, it makes sense to pick a simple format. Lee Blessing has set his 1988 play, Two Rooms, in — appropriately — two rooms and limited the cast to four. There’s Michael Wells, held hostage in a dank cell in mid-1980s Beirut. And…
Alone on stage at the Aurora Fox, working on a set designed as a grimy basement, actor Greg Price is in almost constant motion, shuttling between the phone on his desk, a wall intercom and the red phone of an alarm box adorned with a huge blinking red light. From…
Dorian, the musical version of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray now playing at the Buell, boasts some of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time. Unfortunately, everything else about the show is mediocre: It features stock characters, a dumb script, a pedestrian plot, some major…
