The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League (PHAMALy) has launched another hit–a lively production of Stephen Sondheim’s bawdy musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This time, director Don Bill’s experiments get outrageous. Some of his choices are tasteless–a bit too far over the top for…
Roundfish Theatre Company is off to a fast start. The new group’s taut, smart production of David Mamet’s scathing indictment of American salesmanship gone awry, Glengarry Glen Ross, proves the new producers have guts–and taste. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Mamet’s use of profanity is almost poetic. He stealthily reveals…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo earlier this year was terrific, but it wasn’t really Brecht. Much truer to the spirit of the radical German playwright is CityStage Ensemble’s testy, uneven production of The Good Person of Szechwan. Too long, sometimes annoying and certainly abrasive, this…
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote their first show together in 1943, and Oklahoma! has proven to be one of the most influential musicals in the history of American theater. With Hammerstein’s sentimental yet memorable lyrics and Rodgers’s lavishly melodic tunes (nearly impossible to refrain from humming), they built…
We don’t really understand our world. Flailing about in unsuitable relationships, many people really want a perfect blend of community and independence and just can’t find it anywhere–except maybe at a place like Stanton’s Garage, where life unexpectedly solves its own riddles and strangers help each other through emotional distress…
Extended families can be such a blessing–sometimes a mixed blessing, as two local theater productions remind us. American playwright Paul Osborn’s charming, poignant comedy Morning’s at Seven and Irish playwright Brian Friel’s dismal drama Wonderful Tennessee both step gingerly on the minefield of sibling tensions. But while the first is…
One of the great things about a show like Ain’t Misbehavin’ is its interactive dimension: The performers play directly to the audience members, who get to clap their hands and tap their feet in time with the boisterous, life-affirming music of Thomas “Fats” Waller. And the fabulous Pointer Sisters production…
A troubled mind struggling for decency, the neighborly hand held out to a wretched man–these are the elements of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, for my money the most meaningful of all the great American playwright’s works. Other Williams plays may be more poetic or tragic or psychologically…
Gospel, the musical form that arose at the turn of the century with Pentecostal revivalism in African-American churches, has had a lasting and profound effect on American music during its century-long evolution. While rhythm and blues and soul took off from gospel roots, gospel itself has retained its identity and…
Musicals seem to be the one theatrical form in which outright silliness is not only acceptable but desirable. A farce has to have some underlying intelligence, some razor-sharp insight into manners and mores, in order to satisfy. But a musical needs only vivid tunes, lively dancing, sympathetic characters and perhaps…
Much of what makes us laugh in comedy arises out of pain. And Dale Stewart’s subversive, poignant comedy Harvey’s Boy is sore all over. However, there’s nothing morbid or crass about this one-man show. Stewart’s reminiscences about his childhood and young adulthood add up in the end to a warm…
The archetypal story of Beauty and the Beast has taken many, many forms in practically every culture of the world. The most common of these involves a beautiful woman falling in love with a prince who has been hexed into ugliness. In other forms of the story, the Beast figure…
Part myth-making, part absurdist exercise, part political allegory and part youthful hell-raising, The Eclipse of Lawry, by Gwylym Cano, is fun, stimulating theater. It’s hard to follow some of the dialogue, since the repartee rips rather fast and is complicated by a Texas drawl meant to underscore the cowboy theme…
Anthony Zerbe is one terrific character actor. He has appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, as villains or good guys, disappearing into his roles and yet always remaining distinctly himself. I remember seeing his remarkable Richard III at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, and it has…
A whole section of seats has been removed at the Theatre at Jack’s to make way for the Civil War as only American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce could envision it–and as only CityStage Ensemble would stage it. Bitten by a Snake is creator/director Laura Cuetara’s compilation of five Bierce…
It’s the music that matters most in Appalachian Strings. But the vibrant production now at the Denver Center Theatre Company is also a history, both of “hillbilly” music and of the people of Appalachia. The writing in this engaging piece is sometimes a trifle overwrought, the people idealized beyond the…
There may be more people on stage than in the audience, but the crowded space in the small Dorie Theatre is alive with ferocious goofiness in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Dated and simplistic as Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 tale may be, it still carries the moral force of a great old…
And now for some socially redeeming theater: Ojibwa Indian poet and playwright Tomson Highway’s poignant contemporary exploration of Native American life, The Rez Sisters, at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center. Once in a while a play comes along that opens a window into another world–then moves through the window and…
Film critics used to grouse about how stage plays never really transfer well to the screen–at least until Kenneth Branagh started transforming Shakespeare into cinema. And yet a well-written play provides smart dialogue, even when the setting is too confined for the big screen. Far, far worse than turning a…
“Two planks and a passion” is how Christopher Selbie describes the kind of theater he believes in–theater that emphasizes the art of acting, the imagination of the actor, and the imagination of the viewer. Four years ago Selbie formed the Compass Theatre Company with a few friends and a measly…
We’ve had a lot of little devils hoofing it on the Denver boards recently–Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Lucifer Tonite and the Jerry Lewis rendition of Damn Yankees have come and gone from local theaters since December. Beethoven’s devil was a sophisticated shape-shifter who never succeeded in seducing Beethoven into mediocrity. The…
Movies about parenthood tend to exaggerate the icky-diaper issues. Over the last few years, a new emphasis on Dad’s role in a baby’s life have produced a slew of sentimental foolishness like Look Who’s Talking, Three Men and a Baby, Junior and the insufferable Nine Months. But it’s not as…
