The Galleria at the Denver Center is a cabaret space; audience members sip or snack while, on a small stage, charming and energetic young people sing and dance for them. It’s rather like being at an Irish party, where, amid general merriment, one guest after another stands up and performs…
In the beginning, there’s a sawdust ring, surrounded by what seems to be a low concrete wall. A group of people in peasant dress enter, walking beside a horse-drawn cart. To measured music, they release a bundle from the cart. It rises slowly toward the ceiling; you see that it’s…
Carousel is so familiar to most of us that we tend to forget the musical’s true genius. First produced on Broadway in 1945, it represents the melding of two very different sensibilities — that of Ferenc Molnár, the Hungarian novelist and playwright who wrote Liliom, which Carousel is based on,…
The plot of Shakespeare’s As You Like It resembles that of a summer romance movie. Unfortunately, the Disneyfied version being presented by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival cheapens the play’s gentle beauty and robs the dialogue of its richness. As directed by Lynn Nichols, the show is riddled with drawn-out special…
When the Central City Opera revived Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe a few seasons back, thunderous applause and full-voiced cheers filled the tiny theater for a full five minutes as a steady barrage of flower bouquets, many hurled from the far reaches of the balcony, showered the stage…
Shakespearean companies have tried various approaches to producing the three parts of Henry VI, plays that are believed to have been written with the help of at least one collaborator. In 1963, Tantalus co-creators John Barton and Peter Hall combined the unwieldy trilogy with Richard III to make The Wars…
What a difference no-nonsense direction makes. Elizabeth Huddle heeds the clues in Shakespeare’s text instead of making her own mystery of them — as have many Colorado Shakespeare Festival directors before her — and the performers in her version of King Lear, led by guest artist Raye Birk’s virtuoso turn…
Looking for a Broadway musical that lets the brainwaves relax and the funnybone roam? Have a thing for exuberant dance numbers, exquisite costumes and an old-fashioned love story? Don’t mind overamplified voices, stand-and-sing ballads and a steady barrage of groaners? Then hie thee hither to the Arvada Center’s outdoor amphitheater,…
Operatic versions of famous novels and plays are much like their cinematic cousins: Some lend new insight and dimension to the original, others stress one aspect of the story at the expense of others, and a few reaffirm predictions that nothing could beat the book. Mark Adamo’s Little Women, playing…
Forsooth, here we go again. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival opened last weekend with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the Bard’s earliest, and more problematic, comedies. Like most of the CSF’s efforts over the last five seasons, the play quickly falls victim to directorial caprice and, at times, sheer…
As the after-dinner crowd files back in to Heritage Square Music Hall, a three-piece band plays several bouncy tunes. Strains of “All of Me” segue into an instrumental hoedown that sounds like it’s from Smokey and the Bandit. The down-home, carnival-like atmosphere, which is part South Dakota Corn Palace, part…
There’s not much reason for the two characters in The Zoo Story to talk to each other for nearly an hour when one of them behaves like a raving lunatic from the very start. Not even the saintliest among us would listen, calmly, to a complete stranger — who looks…
Opera lovers who trek up Clear Creek Canyon every summer share something other than a yen for great music and a tolerance for winding mountain roads. They make the yearly pilgrimage because the Central City Opera has earned a reputation for producing high-quality shows free of highbrow pretension. Even with…
Elementary school children might appreciate Aladdin and the Glass Slipper for the lessons that each character learns and the dialogue’s in-jokes about familiar fairy tales. But preschoolers will probably get a kick out of the bouncy songs, festive costumes and action scenes that stand in sharp — and welcome –…
This Is Our Youth is filled with so much graphic language, mindless violence, casual sex and even more casual drug use that producing it in a public high school would have been impossible. The story, however, has much to say about a society in which parents and children are rarely…
Apart from a series of comic reversals that crown Act Two and the vintage lounge decor they’re played against, there isn’t much to recommend British playwright Ben Elton’s Silly Cow, a creaky, one-note farce about inept critics and the objects of their misplaced ire. While the actors in Germinal Stage…
Weakened by self-doubt and the elements — as well as being driven to near despair by a fellow traveler’s demise — British explorer Robert Falcon Scott temporarily interrupts his Antarctic expedition to ask, “When is the point when the whole thing becomes worthless? After one man dies? After two?” Moments…
The lavish production numbers in Annie Get Your Gun are hard for any theater company to pull off. So is the script’s archaic depiction of Native Americans, with character treatments and one-liners that range from mildly embarrassing to patently offensive. And if either of the show’s two leading performers has…
Now and then, fantasy and reality humorously collide in Pork Pie, a self-styled “mythic jazz fable” set in a period described only as The South: “When men wore hats, women had the power, and legends were alive.” Beginning with a kindly narrator’s tongue-in-cheek remarks, Michael Genet’s world-premiere play, currently running…
Each of Anton Chekhov’s four dramatic masterpieces walks a tragicomic tightrope. Actors and director are sometimes thrown off balance by emphasizing a play’s comedy at the expense of its tragedy (and vice versa), while others perch somewhere in the humdrum middle. In either case, theatergoers can be left wondering whether…
With three plum roles, a tension-packed story line and streaks of black humor, Orphans has been a perennial favorite since it premiered at Los Angeles’s Matrix Theatre in 1983. Given that it was originally produced by a group called Actors for Themselves, it’s no surprise that Lyle Kessler’s comic thriller…
Fancy abounds, issues take flight and genders do more than bend in Cinderella: The Real True Story, a modern retelling being presented in Boulder by the all-female Goddess Theatre Company. Written by Cheryl Moch, the two-act play recounts the famous fairy tale with a “same-sex twist.” Instead of falling in…
