It doesn’t matter how sappy the music is, the kids are what sells Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic The Sound of Music. The Country Dinner Playhouse’s revival features seven terrific kids, and every time they’re on stage, the whole production lifts a notch. Blatantly sentimental, the show has a few minor…
Louis Jordan was an ingenious saxophonist, vocalist and songwriter whose energetic music lit up radio airwaves in the 1940s and continued to delight audiences into the 1960s. Roll Jordan Roll, at the Denver Civic Theatre, celebrates the moment in Jordan’s life when he began to make it big with his…
Humorist and movie star Will Rogers made political satire a gentle art. The Oklahoma country boy once said he never met a man he didn’t like, and that kindly sentiment even governed the way he skewered politicians. The Will Rogers Follies celebrates Rogers’s show-business career in the brazen style of…
When a scumbag becomes a TV talk-show celebrity, the world is in trouble. And so English playwright Alan Ayckbourn skewers the cult of the celebrity, the mendacity of television and the public’s infinite appetite for manipulative trash in Man of the Moment. With a subject such as this, sparks ought…
Intense, ingenious and shocking, Steven Dietz’s God’s Country is also appallingly timely. After the Oklahoma bombing and all the recent press about so-called patriot militias, a powerful play about the murder of liberal Jewish radio talk-show host Alan Berg, along with a painful expose of the ideology behind that murder,…
What books would you bring to a desert island if, heaven forbid, you were condemned to one? What single luxury would you bring to ease the loneliness and discomfort of such an imprisonment? These are the questions asked by three captives in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, as they languish…
A lot of cultural pretensions are examined in David Ives’s hilarious collection of six playlets, All in the Timing–mostly in bursts of brilliant and sometimes surreal parody. Though none too deep, this offbeat offering is still right on, and the Germinal Stage Denver’s finely tuned production is as delightful as…
Just when you think it’s safe to go to the theater, Christopher Durang shows up somewhere and disturbs all your complacencies. Brilliant, amusing, incisive and ultimately humane, Durang’s caustic assessments of American life and Catholic upbringing manage to undermine even the most insistent optimism. Cattlecall Productions’ appallingly funny The Marriage…
According to the first version of the war in heaven, Michael and his angels fought, and Satan fell like lightning from the sky. God won. Not so in Jose Rivera’s apocalyptic Marisol, in which God loses, in part because he’s already allowed all hell to break loose. Now being presented…
At the end of Hamlet, the stage is littered with bodies. Lee Blessing’s Fortinbras picks up where Shakespeare left off, putting a hilarious new spin on where those bodies are buried. The wit is wry and the characters involving in this lively production at the South Suburban Theatre Company. But…
Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, a breakthrough drama first performed in 1968, is dated in some ways but still packs a punchy–and universal–message. The play has very definite problems, but a strong production now at the Theatre on Broadway underscores its best features. The show takes place in…
What you want from a farce is to laugh at yourself and everyone else whose self-absorption gets them into trouble. And you want the protagonist, however ridiculous he is, to triumph in the end. The lively Lend Me a Tenor at the Aurora Fox is diverting, absurd fun with a…
One of the most marvelous of medieval tales is the story of Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil for either knowledge, wealth, youth or sex, depending on who’s doing the telling. Among the most appealing versions of the cautionary tale is a contemporary African-American treatment–The Trials and Tribulations…
The Compass Theatre Company’s Much Ado About Nothing needs more room. The cramped space of the Dorie studio in the Denver Civic Theatre is more suited to smaller casts. But restricted as the actors are, they still manage to bustle, run, stand in elaborate ceremonious arrangements and even dance. So…
Christopher Selbie is a lot older than any Hamlet I’ve ever seen, and he’s more manic-depressive than melancholic. But if his performance is quirky, it’s also remarkable–and it turns the Compass Theatre Company’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though uneven and clunky in places, into an oddball victory. Hamlet has been…
The growing influence the movies have over theater has its downside. Some theatrical productions try to vie with movie spectacle, for instance, cheapening the theatrical experience, a la Miss Saigon. But Hollywood’s influence can also lead to ingenious or charming solutions to theatrical problems. Madeline Walker O’Brien’s The Why and…
The full title of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. A mouthful–and really a much more proper title than the abbreviated one. This is a long, complicated…
It might seem odd to find it in a theater instead of a smoky bar, but the Denver Center Theatre Company’s It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues is a scintillating piece of work. The songs have been carefully chosen to illustrate the history of the blues with all its hot…
The hit movie The Madness of King George has stimulated popular interest in eighteenth-century England, which had a rich theatrical tradition of its own–witness Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The Industrial Arts production of this Georgian comedy, though a bit thick at first, soon opens a bright window on…
Anton Chekhov’s first play, Wild Honey, is raucous, intermittently charming, sometimes scathing and terribly clunky–the original is said to take six hours to perform. This production by Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre is the short version, translated and adapted by gigglemeister Michael Frayn (Noises Off). But while Hunger Artists does a…
The great French playwright Moliere hated doctors, and more than 300 years after he wrote The Imaginary Invalid, his scathing ridicule of the profession still stings. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production aims its darts at medicine’s present as well as its past, and it hits the mark with…
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a difficult play, full of subtle tests of skill for those hardy souls who undertake it. But Germinal Stage Denver’s new production grapples with all the challenges and wins. And though the seats turn a tad hard toward the middle of the…
