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…
Love is pain, pain produces suffering, and suffering is the state of being that leads one to God. But not before one has made the straight and narrow trip to hell, where, according to British playwright Ronald Duncan, no one really suffers anymore–including a handful of romantic writers whose collective…
Long before professional baseball became an event played between teams of ill-mannered millionaires, America’s pastime served as a metaphor for life’s ups and downs. Of course, that’s when the contests were regularly attended by white-shirted, fedora-wearing spectators with a boyish devotion to the game. And it’s that kind of unbridled…
In 1963, Robert Redford made his Broadway debut in, of all plays, Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. On the heels of that triumph, the sandy-haired heartthrob launched a successful movie career and used a portion of his Tinseltown megabucks to jump-start the Sundance Institute, a Utah artists’ colony dedicated…
Television’s mutant family of talk shows has effectively bastardized the theater’s long-sacred belief that one person’s emotional odyssey is appropriate subject matter for an audience’s shared catharsis. But not even Jerry Springer’s warped view of the human condition can compare with the shock-value tactics of Canadian playwright Brad Fraser. In…
Contemporary dramatists don’t typically direct their own plays, mostly because of the notion that at some point, all writers lose a sense of objectivity concerning their own ideas. Lately, though, more playwrights have chosen to direct their own transparent confessions. And in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s world premiere of…
There’s no one more qualified to examine the pretensions of theater professionals and their critics than England’s greatest living playwright, Tom Stoppard, who began his illustrious career as an itinerant drama reviewer. The surreal sense of humor Stoppard displays in The Real Inspector Hound is perfect for taking the air…
The conducting style of Richard Strauss stood in marked contrast to the flamboyant antics of other twentieth-century maestros. In fact, violinist Yehudi Menuhin once noted, when Strauss took to the podium, there was very little evidence that the great German musician was actually conducting. Nevertheless, a close look at vintage…
Near the end of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll House, Nora is compelled to choose between living with her patronizing husband or leaving him (and her adoring children) in order to pursue an independent life of self-realization. After a gut-wrenching, twenty-minute battle of wills with her befuddled mate, Nora…
Before you declare once and for all your utter disinterest in the private lives (not to mention the private parts) of public figures, take a gander at British playwright Alan Bennett’s intellectual farce, Kafka’s Dick. Far more than an underhanded jab at a deified writer’s supposed anatomical shortcomings, Bennett’s play…
In the days when radio was king, Americans seemed as united in spirit as at any point in their history. True, much of what was broadcast was merely sweet-sounding, thinly veiled propaganda (FDR’s Fireside Chats, for instance, weren’t much more than feel-good campaign messages). But the big-band music that came…
By virtually every account, the Broadway musical is booming. At last tally, a score of productions were playing to near-record crowds on the Great White Way. Of course, this spate of musical entertainment contains its share of theme-park shtick meant to attract starry-eyed out-of-towners and a fringe group of slumming…
A quick inventory of the Shakespearean actor’s stock-in-trade includes qualities such as an expressive voice and body, a fertile imagination, and a devotion to spiritual truth tempered by a carnival barker’s sense of showmanship. But when it comes to portraying any of the four major Shakespearean tragic roles (Hamlet, Lear,…
At first glance, the Shop’s tiny stage seems a poor choice to house a production of Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. In fact, the cramped confines of the storefront theater appear especially ill-suited to the emotional climax of Friel’s masterpiece, which calls for five unmarried Irish sisters to…
