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…
The great English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell was nearly fifty years old when she created the role of Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, Pygmalion. And even though Campbell’s acclaimed swan song marked the beginning of her somewhat ignoble decline (upon visiting the grand dame in New…
Hollywood’s neatly packaged lies have been both bane and beacon to playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. Even though Hatcher’s farce about Thirties Tinseltown types, One Foot on the Floor, was given a rousing world-premiere production last year by the Denver Center Theatre Company, the play’s satiric commentary nonetheless failed to resonate with…
Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek’s joyous musical about pioneer life on the prairie, Quilters, couldn’t have been mistaken for a Broadway success when it closed in September 1984 after a run of just 24 performances. But like another musical that failed on the Great White Way, a short-lived endeavor based…
Feminism is the main character in Parallel Lives: The Best of the Kathy & Mo Show, now on stage at the Avenue Theatre under the hit-and-miss direction of Michael McGoff. A pared-down version of the off-Broadway hit originally written and performed by actresses Kathy Najimy (best-known as the neurotic, rubber-faced…
Upon exiting the Space Theatre after a recent performance of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s current production of Don Quixote, a boy no older than twelve turned to his mother and said, “That was even weirder than The Master of Two Servants.” To which his mother haltingly replied, “Servant of…
Alarming as the re-emergence of Seventies clothing and musical styles might be, one of that period’s most influential musicals, Chicago, resonates well with modern audiences. That’s because society has finally fulfilled late director/choreographer/auteur Bob Fosse’s prescient observation that Americans, egged on by an unscrupulous media, deify certain classes of criminals–especially…
The beginning moments of local dramatist M. Scott Merrifield’s play Desert Air are full of promise. As the Changing Scene’s world-premiere production of this Gulf War-era drama begins, the strains of a popular rock song (“Video Killed the Radio Star”) fade out while the stage lights illuminate a drab olive-green…
Though contemporary theatergoers have long favored the narrowly focused view of dramatists such as Arthur Miller (who’s still writing plays that reflect mostly American concerns), a growing number of contemporary directors are gravitating toward old hands such as Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, who crafted dramas that capture…
Like the mid-life crisis that its central character frequently describes but rarely experiences, local dramatist Coleen Hubbard’s play A Ritual for Returning has all the makings of a cathartic event but never actually becomes one. But though it has yet to realize its dramatic potential, this freewheeling romp through the…
