Hardened by years of debilitating despair, a young woman shuffles into a Midwestern living room, saunters over to the dining-room table and matter-of-factly declares, “I’m going to kill myself, Mama–in a couple of hours.” Ninety intermissionless minutes later, the character of Jessie Cates regrettably fulfills that awful promise. Apart from…
For better or worse, the wobbly wheel of sexual politics as entertainment appears to be shimmying out of control. Prurient as it may be, theatergoers’ interest in sexual power plays is hardly a twentieth-century phenomenon. Even 2,400 years ago, the subject occupied center stage in such bedroom farces as Aristophanes’s…
Based on a familiar legend packed with graphic sexual references and written almost entirely in verse, David Ives’s play Don Juan in Chicago is a wholly fictionalized, occasionally amusing look at contemporary sexual mores. And if your idea of a rip-roaring good time includes listening to such thigh-slappers as “Do…
Ever-admiring of her husband’s pioneering spirit but increasingly contemptuous of his overriding ambition, a young wife reacts to one of her mate’s first scientific discoveries by murmuring, “In these moments with you, I understand the allure. They say that man was meant for the earth, but I think you are…
By the time the two main characters in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta sit down to confront their nameless fears during the drama’s riveting final scene, most theatergoers are likely to have either forsaken the playwright’s meandering spiritual odyssey or determined that the less-than-fruitful trip wasn’t worth taking…
When Murray Schisgal’s play Luv premiered on the Great White Way 34 years ago, the two-act comedy was an overnight hit with New Yorkers who had little trouble identifying with the Brooklyn-born playwright’s incisive observations about metropolitan living. Oddly enough, the play’s underlying theme that one man’s perceived paradise can…
Ever since one of the king’s men stepped forward amid a sea of Elizabethan spectators and intoned Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, playwrights have continually asked audience members to join them as silent partners in the commission of existential crime. To be sure, such probing into…
In the opening moments of Emma’s Child, a self-described “local nothing” of a teenage mother permits her unborn baby to be adopted at birth by a well-meaning, well-to-do childless couple. This might lead audiences to believe that playwright Kristine Thatcher is gearing up for a probing discussion about, say, class…
Ten years ago, when the only marquee Ragtime graced was the imaginary one glimmering in the eyes of its creators, the musical’s current director, Frank Galati, was earning a well-deserved reputation as one of this country’s most innovative, if enigmatic, showmen. An actor, director and college professor, Galati mesmerized Chicago…
Celebrated warbler Sophie Tucker was the most famous of the Prohibition-era “naughty girls” who belted out honky-tonk melodies, jazz tunes and torch songs in vaudeville acts that also sometimes included trained animals, female impersonators and famous criminals holding forth about their checkered pasts. The collective drawing power of speakeasies, talkies…
Is it possible to save another human being from himself? Are the exhortations of politicians, sociologists and religious types the best answers to the problems plaguing the three downtrodden New Yorkers in William Hanley’s play Slow Dance on the Killing Ground? Or is it more likely that, as one character…
Despite recent events in Jasper, Texas, it’s difficult to imagine a group of modern white men brazen enough to pose for a snapshot as they gather around a black man’s mangled and lynched body swaying from a tree amid the tranquility of a Southern forest. More difficult still is to…
A couple of years ago, playwright Arthur Miller sounded something of a death knell for commercial theater when he remarked, “The theater culture on Broadway is dead. You can’t expect people to pay forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred dollars to sit down for a straight play.” Ironically, the acerbic dramatist…
Back in the late Eighties, when a team of New York producers announced that a stage version of the classic 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain was in the works, two questions crossed the minds of every prospective audience member: “How do you pull off the rain scene in a…
As strains of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” waft through the smoke-tinged air of the Mercury Cafe, a young woman haltingly enters the local establishment’s Jungle Room and takes up residence in one of its remote corners. Her oddly vacant eyes darting to and fro, Rootie (Elizabeth Rose) stuffs a…
Scholars and theatergoers will always argue about the legitimacy of setting William Shakespeare’s plays in periods other than Elizabethan England. Employing the well-worn device sometimes yields rich rewards, as evidenced two summers back by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s rock-and-roll version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and last season’s Civil War-era…
It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than Christopher Plummer playing the title character in William Luce’s Barrymore. In addition to maintaining his performer’s lock on the role since the play premiered at Canada’s prestigious Stratford Festival in 1996 (a few months later, the production moved to Broadway, where Plummer won…
What happens when a man is forced to choose between the well-being of his children and the sanctity of his good name? Should John Proctor, the main character in Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, preserve his sons’ inheritance by bending to the stiff-necked morality of Salem’s witch-hunters? Or should the…
By virtually every account, the 18-to-34 age group is the fastest-growing segment of the opera-going public. Although no one can explain exactly why Baywatching channel-surfers from the MTV generation are hooked on an art form once renowned for its corpulent prima donnas and sleep-inducing histrionics, two local opera companies are…
In keeping with the melodrama that permeates Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, Central City Opera’s opening-night performance featured as artist Cavaradossi understudy Chad Shelton, who in the last week of rehearsals replaced a star tenor sidelined by a ruptured blood vessel in one of his vocal cords. (Tenor Adam Klein, who was…
Even though Love’s Labour’s Lost isn’t one of William Shakespeare’s best-known or best-loved plays, the lyrical, ornate story is yet another example of the sentient dramatist’s incomparable ability to capture in verse the timeless truths about life’s great sea changes. And while the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s visually stunning production of…
Time was when an academic wit such as University of Colorado professor Sean Ryan Kelley wouldn’t have thought twice about how to direct the opening production of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Like any other sensible college teacher, Kelley would have begun his creative odyssey by making a dutiful pilgrimage to…
