The central symbol of a long-lasting marriage in Jan de Hartog’s bittersweet The Four Poster is the marriage bed itself. Sexual tension is important in this poignant comedy from the Nomad Players, but the real point is a couple’s attempts to reach each other over 35 years. Well-written and charming,…
Heritage Square’s Music Hall’s comic melodramas may not appeal to everyone, but their pleasant buffoonery is a hit with audiences willing to put up with a little foolishness. The goony style of these frolics can’t really be confused with acting, but the company has achieved an undeniable polish. And its…
“Marley was dead to begin with.” Charles Dickens opened A Christmas Carol, his greatest ghost story and arguably the best secular Christmas tale ever written, with these strange, portentous words. In 150 years, the incredible success of the novella about old Scrooge and his ghostly redeemers continues to haunt the…
The arts and the sciences came together in the Renaissance in a way they never had before. Aristotle’s limited universe, in which the sun and planets revolved around the Earth, was discarded in favor of Copernicus’s more accurate assessment. And it was clearly seen by educated men and women that…
‘Tis the season for gooey sentiments, so you’d better watch out if you’re headed for the New Denver Civic’s gangly rendition of Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. But there’s no need to pout: The real thing is out there in theaterland this holiday season, if you know where to…
Mama Rose is the stage mother from hell. The central character of Gypsy–now in a hardy production at the Arvada Center–might have been written up by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in his classic case studies of evil. Apparently nobody in the late 1950s (when the show premiered) understood child abuse,…
So many words, so few ideas. In his tedious satire Was He Anyone?, playwright N.F. Simpson tries so hard to bite into the red tape surrounding governmental “charity” that he chokes on it. Not even the Hunger Artists Ensemble’s talented cast can do more than give this sociopolitical spoof a…
Life in Southern California is, yes, phony and flaky. Once in a while a movie or a play celebrates all that peculiar sunny fakery with affectionate parody (Steve Martin’s L.A. Story comes to mind) or abject pessimism (Sam Shepard’s anti-Hollywood plays). And now there’s one more take on the L.A…
Sex is easy; love is hard. That’s the point, no matter how fractured, of Theatre on Broadway’s 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, a story that sets out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to make emotional connections these days. It’s peopled with gay characters,…
Vulgar, irreverent and awash in cheap shots, Nunsense may be the silliest show in town. But despite its bad habits, this bit of fluff has one redeeming feature: The music is actually pretty darn good. Of course, it takes enormous energy to sell the songs here, which comment on everything…
Feminists are frequently accused of being humorless: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One–and that isn’t funny.” But at least one troupe in town is proving there are laughs to be had among the little womyn. Unidentified Female Objects II: The Search Continues, at the…
Think of Edvard Munch’s eerie painting “The Scream” and you get a pretty good idea of how Stephen Mallatratt’s play The Woman in Black affects an audience. Ad Hoc Theatre’s intense, ingenious production of Mallatratt’s ghost story is truly creepy. No monsters leap out at you, but the central figure…
From the beginning of Stephen Sondheim’s tragic musical romance Passion, we realize there’s something screwy about the notion of “love” promoted in this kinky tale. It’s a sort of Fatal Attraction meets Beauty and the Beast–but without the tidy ending of either of those popular works. Throughout the disappointing first…
The most important thing Bruce Friel does in his latest play, Molly Sweeney, is expose the double-edged nature of so-called medical miracles. If he’d have thought more deeply about the subject, he might have made a genuine work of art. As it is, he has written an absorbing piece of…
Election season is fraught with rhetoric, innuendo, accusation and hyperbole. Facts are twisted, motives interpreted and failings magnified–each candidate spins his own image and spins the other guy’s, too. And this is the way it has always been in politics. CityStage Ensemble’s Dan Hiester recognizes spin-doctoring when he sees it,…
“Children’s theater” too often equals boring pap–badly written, stupidly produced and amateurishly performed. But it can be magical, inventive and beautifully realized. Children’s theaters in Minneapolis, Louisville, Chicago and Seattle have done fabulous work ministering to the imagination of kids while entertaining and even enlightening them–and all without boring their…
What you want to achieve with Peter Pan is magic. And the Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production, adapted from J.M. Barrie’s original, makes it. It’s a little too long for the squirmy set–there are a few slow places that don’t keep the little ones involved, and a half-hour trim…
Maybe it’s just the revue format that’s hard to get a handle on, but the intermittently amusing A Thurber Carnival at RiverTree Theatre doesn’t quite make it as an integrated evening of theater. Though the performers appear to have plenty of affection for the mild witticisms of longtime New Yorker…
Newtonian physics, time versus eternity, the glories of landscape architecture, and sex. English playwright Tom Stoppard doesn’t mess with the small stuff in Arcadia; he’s looking for the Big Picture and what it all means. Whether he’s looking in the right place–the world of science–is open to debate. But at…
The play may be the thing, but movies have always voraciously consumed the literature of the stage–and with wildly mixed results. A lot of plays simply don’t belong on screen (most anything with fewer than ten characters, for example). A lot of modern plays need the intimacy of the stage…
The trouble with message plays is the annoying tendency of the moral to get stuck in your throat as the playwright tries to ram it down. Very unpleasant. That’s why a play like Mark Dunn’s The Deer and the Antelope Play is rare and welcome: Its message is so clear,…
It may be hard to believe now, but truly great talents once graced the world of television–and viewers across America knew how to appreciate a good gag or a searing drama. Before the era of sitcoms and car chases, before cynical admen took control and cut up the airwaves into…
