Playwright David Mamet’s remarkable Speed-the-Plow is as true to the contemporary American cityscape as an Edward Hopper painting. Mamet’s tough-mouthed dialogue–always a series of interruptions and eruptions–falls with an intoxicating rhythm on the ear. His is the prose-poetry of the street, with its low-life hustlers, as well as the equally…
A new theater company has just arrived in Denver with a hot agenda and a cool style: Shadow Theatre Company is intent on bringing more plays by African-American playwrights to the boards. And if its first production, Innocent Thoughts, by William Downs, is any indication, we’re in for some exhilarating…
When Carlisle Floyd wrote the exquisite opera Susannah in the mid-1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was out hunting up commies under every rock and movie studio. It was a bleak, hysterical period–but it was nothing new. Witch-hunts crop up over and over again throughout history, changing form to suit every era…
Poor John Adams. Obnoxious and disliked, the lawyer from Massachusetts who prodded Thomas Jefferson to compose the Declaration of Independence just couldn’t get along with the other founding fathers. But irritating as he may have been, he was an American hero just the same. So Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone…
Exuberant musicals are the Country Dinner Playhouse’s stock-in-trade, though sometimes that exuberance can seem forced. The most recent show at the Playhouse, 42nd Street, was a terrific, bouncy re-creation of a 1930s extravaganza and the best thing the CDP had done in a long while. But its newest production, Fiddler…
The frailties of human nature were meat and drink to Moliere. His comedies live on because they so cleverly skewered hypocrisy, pretentiousness and ego-driven stupidity, and his sense of the absurd is just as relevant now as it ever was. This year the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is offering The Would-Be…
Capital punishment is on everybody’s mind these days, what with Timothy McVeigh’s conviction and JonBenet’s murderer still on the loose. So the regional premiere of Colorado playwright David Hall’s The Quality of Mercy is timely enough. And CityStage Ensemble’s biting production has much to offer–several fine performances, inventive direction by…
Playwright Tony Kushner took on an astounding feat when he wrote Angels in America. The six-and-a-half-hour play consists of two parts–“The Millennium Approaches,” in which everything begins to come undone, and “Perestroika,” in which all of the play’s conflicts are more or less resolved. It is so Big that it…
Chip Walton is one of the brightest young talents to crash the Denver theater scene in years. He’s an accomplished actor who made an elegant, riveting Salieri two years ago in the Aurora Fox’s Amadeus. But Walton’s special gift is for directing. He has a filmmaker’s split-second timing, a poet’s…
The best comedies are serious business. The whole spectrum of human frailty is meat and drink for the great comic writers, and it takes a profound intelligence to make us laugh at human beastliness. Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, a nineteenth-century Russian with a gift for satirical realism, was one such brain…
Theatre on Broadway’s Whoop Dee Doo! is a lot like a good fat-free dessert: Flavorful while you’re tasting it, but so light it doesn’t stay with you. This cheeky musical revue from the late Broadway costume designer Howard Crabtree is well-done–the performers sing and dance their hearts out–but in the…
It’s been a long wait, but the Roundfish Theatre Company is back, bold and brassy, with Bobology. These three short one-acts by Denver playwright James R. Cannon present an absurdist attack on economic, political and religious fascism. And though the plays have their weaknesses, the production values are high, the…
Family entertainment doesn’t have to mean mush. The Denver Center Theatre Company began the year with a smart, edgy Peter Pan and followed it with a poignant Christmas Carol, an inventive Comedy of Errors and a delightful Life With Father. Now the DCTC is finishing up the family-fare portion of…
Anyone who’s ever been to Christmas mass at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver knows that the church is what the theater wishes it were. It has drama, mystery, joy, a sense of the tragic, a joke or two and, at its best, a feeling of transcendence. Moving the church…
All that bastardization of African-American music by white rock-and-rollers produced some terrific stuff. But white pop music is pasty indeed compared to original rhythm-and-blues masters like Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The rock musical A Brief History of White Music, in which a trio of black performers belts…
The musical version of Jan de Hartog’s Tony Award-winning play The Four Poster is called I Do! I Do!–and if it weren’t for two fine performers who pump their life’s breath into it at Littleton’s Town Hall Arts Center, it would be a resounding I Don’t. The songs are uniformly…
Only Stephen Sondheim or the devil could build an entire musical around a 35-year-old bachelor spending two and a half hours trying to decide whether he’s ready for marriage. Get over yourself, jackass. Come to think of it, apart from two or three sufferable songs in Sondheim’s Company, now playing…
Jules Feiffer’s Carnal Knowledge was written in the 1960s, made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in the 1970s, and revised in the late 1980s. It may seem a bit dated today–most educated men, after all, have learned a little something from the women’s movement. But Feiffer’s…
East German playwright Heiner Muller is not well-known in America, so the Lida Project’s production of HamletMachine presents a rare opportunity for Denver audiences to experience his wild woolliness. And what an experience: Such extravagant craziness is hardly ever this controlled and involving. The play is based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet–a…
A controversy over racial stereotypes has dogged the remounting of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat. But the art and soul of this 1927 musical remains the beautiful song “Ol’ Man River.” Sung by a character who is an ex-slave, it reflects both a protest against the subjugation…
It takes a little taste and a lot of guts to mount a 1920s or 1930s musical–and a keen artistic eye to keep it true to its period. The Country Dinner Playhouse’s vivacious 42nd Street is truer to that dazzling dance era than most. A pretender like One Foot on…
The dreams of youth can be so noble, so passionate and so hard to fulfill. Without a rigorous integrity and the warm watering of inspiration, noble ideals can dry and fade away, leaving very little behind but the stain of regret. English playwright Simon Gray’s astonishingly poignant drama The Common…
