They’re baaaack. With the just-opened Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Czech director Pavel Dobrusky and Norwegian counterpart Per-Olav Sorensen have once again brought “process theater” to the Denver Center Theatre Company. The first of their offbeat pieces–Stories, based on Isabel Allende’s novel The Stories of Eva Luna–was a delightful, technically brilliant bit…
Cross-gender performances are not all equal. When women play male characters, we tend to take them seriously. But when men play female roles, we can’t help but laugh–it always looks like parody. CityStage Ensemble director David Quinn’s version of Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy The Critic includes a riotous array of…
Something about the Roaring Twenties still seems naughty–and in the best sense of the word. Maybe it’s just nostalgia for a simpler time, but even the wild flappers, the speakeasies and the social experimentation had a much more innocent feel than our own jaded, cynical era. That’s why Mame, the…
The first of many holiday shows, She Loves Me may well turn out to be this season’s best. This delightfully quirky musical has been given a delicious, intimate staging by the South Suburban Theatre Company, with a charming cast, fine direction and a very cool set. The action takes place…
Psycho Beach Party is yet another outrageous parody of B movies and pop psychology–and it’s somewhat brighter and cleverer than most. The cast at Theatre on Broadway is right on down the line, but the show depends upon the ingenious antics of its star, Andrew Shoffner, to really make it…
George Gershwin’s pop tunes hold up after all these years. Tunes like “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “But Not for Me” have beautiful melodies and jazzy energies that are still capable of knocking your socks off. Crazy for You brings many of…
Purists may blanch at director Jeremy Cole’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but the adventurous revision has much to say to us. It’s not perfect, but this production by the Cattlecall theater troupe is intense, knowing, and never dull. As the play opens, Macbeth has just quelled a rebellion against King…
In his many short stories, John Cheever skimmed the surface of bourgeois American family life, laying bare the pretensions of suburban culture and dissecting the hopelessness of its materialism in nicely served, if thin, slices of life. In A Cheever Evening, playwright A.R. Gurney stirs together a number of scenes…
John Patrick Shanley’s poignant Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a three-scene argument for love–the kind of love between a man and a woman that penetrates individual isolation via mutual kindness. And it’s delivered in an unusual package as persuasive as it is hard-edged–partly because the play is well-written,…
It’s almost impossible to put on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice today; if one excises the loathsome anti-Semitism from the play, one can’t help but do violence to its original meaning. Laurence Olivier managed to virtually reconstruct the play’s intentions by cutting lines and casting all the characters except Shylock…
The local husband-and-wife acting team of Moira Keefe and Charlie Oates couldn’t be much different from each other. Yet they have managed to stay married for nine years, and they share their often dark and mostly hilarious secrets in the show they wrote and perform together, Staying Married. This is…
Arthur Miller appears to have gained some wisdom in his old age. A man has to mature a long way in his understanding of the world and of women to write a play as insightful and kind as The Last Yankee. And the Denver Center Theatre Company has imported the…
The plays that George Bernard Shaw wrote in the late nineteenth century were popular because they were funny–and because, despite Shaw’s socialist politics and Darwinian outlook, the societal conventions he appeared to flout were actually refined under the scalpel of his wit. With a few notable exceptions, Shaw’s plays remain…
Over the past year, many of Denver’s most powerful and insightful theater productions have been political in nature, displaying a passion for justice without resorting to propaganda: My Sister in This House, Six Degrees of Separation, Star Fever, Parallel Lives, God’s Country, The Interrogation, Oleanna, Death and the Maiden and…
Resignation to suffering is the best playwright Hugh Leonard can offer as resolution to the accumulated pain of a lifetime. But the strength of his humanist viewpoint in A Life lies in its cultivated compassion. The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of this gentle reflection on one man’s life and the…
Director Israel Hicks zeroes in on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with fervor and style in his new telling of the classic tale at the Denver Center Theatre Company. He has the temerity to set the greatest of Shakespeare’s cautionary tales in old California (instead of old Verona), with Spanish dons…
Toward the end of John Guare’s tragicomic Landscape of the Body, one of the characters tells us that the mystery is always greater than the solution. This sentiment (seen most recently in the movie thriller Seven) may be oh so au courant, but it may also be a dodge–a way…
Thomas Merton, it’s fair to say, was an individual worth writing a play about. An American monk who lived a hermetic life out in the woods, he nevertheless kept up a mighty correspondence with many of the greatest writers of his age during a literary career that ran from 1941…
It may be juvenile, brash and silly here and there, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ultimately transcends its own naivete with delightful exuberance and dazzling production values. From lyricist Tim Rice’s humor to Webber’s sweet pop tunes to the sophisticated lighting and set designs, the…
The third play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Broadway Bound, is only ankle deep. But the wading is both more pleasant and more interesting than in the first two plays in the series, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. This last play is about writing–the desire, the tedium and the…
In a Pentecostal church near 11th Avenue and Acoma Street in downtown Denver, a corps of volunteer carpenters is busy building the only Elizabethan-style stage in Denver–and a one-of-a-kind theater arts facility. The church, where a small congregation still holds services on Wednesdays and Sundays, was recently purchased for $200,000…
The Aurora Fox Theatre’s striking production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus proves once again that one can abhor the sentiments of a playwright and still find depth, meaning and mastery in his work. But it takes an ingenious performance or two, luminous directorial insight and a willingness from the audience to…
