What if the Big Bad Wolf wasn’t really bad at all? As the song says, there are “Two Sides to Every Story,” and playwright/director Pamela Clifton’s interactive children’s musical What Really Happened Once Upon a Time, at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, finally defends the real victims…
Playwright Kevin Kling creates a special brand of one-man show out of the raw material of his own life, then tempers it with the insights of famous literary and scientific geniuses. The result is new myth–stories that hit you like fables, tingle your spine, challenge your assumptions and tickle your…
At the Cafe Noir, everyone wears black and white–or they get picked on by the actors. The cast of this interactive theater piece, now being staged by Mystery Cabaret West at Catalano’s Catered Affair, helps serve and clear a four-course dinner during the intermissions while carrying on a constant, teasing…
The production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Country Dinner Playhouse is clean, lively, ingeniously choreographed and fetchingly performed family entertainment. But this rollicking story, based on the 1954 MGM film of the same name, does require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, particularly for adult women…
Kevin Barry tries to zero in on a painter’s life in The Secret of Durable Pigments, now in its premiere production at the Changing Scene. The playwright creates a number of interesting little portraits–the artist’s mother, his best friend, his kindly old aunt–but his portrait of the artist as an…
Mountain McClintock never took a dive–it’s the one thing the aging boxer is proud of, the one shred of dignity he still owns. But the hero of Rod Serling’s sagacious Requiem for a Heavyweight has a dignity he doesn’t recognize, a small flame of intelligence that blazes up for one…
Truth hides in the details. The regional premiere of Parallel Lives, at Jack’s Theatre, zeroes in on the particulars of women’s lives, especially as they interact with men–and gets the Big Picture right. Based on The Kathy and Mo Show, by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy, this feminist sketch comedy…
Half Native American and half African-American, the title character of Carlyle Brown’s Buffalo Hair struggles to make sense of his racial identity. That internal battle, refracted in the lives of several other mixed-race characters, forms the central conflict of this fascinating historical drama. The regional premiere at Eulipions offers an…
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a whinefest under the best of circumstances. The four characters reveal their secret sufferings in convoluted party games and end by eviscerating each other’s fragile emotional guts in a stupefying alcoholic haze. Despite the entertainment value inherent in such fireworks, when the…
At the end of the opening-night performance of Grease, former Monkees heartthrob Mickey Dolenz hushes the applauding audience at the Temple Buell Theater and says, “If you like us, tell your friends. If you didn’t like us, tell them you saw Cats.” I saw Cats. The very best thing about…
Playwright Robert Shaver sets his new play, Slavia and Hugo, in a horrific, blood-smeared, body-littered clinic. An atmosphere of degradation and torture lurks, monsterlike, and with it the anti-war message of this harsh absurdist parable. War waged against civilians is the most atrocious war of all, and this ardent production…
In playwright Keith Reddin’s Nebraska, even peacetime military life can be hell. And this Industrial Arts production leaves the viewer drained as Reddin delves into the loneliness, insecurities and futile adulteries plaguing the lives of his characters. The world these people inhabit is fraught with tension, fear and the terrible…
When a man lives under a cloud of fear, forever expecting a deluge, he may not notice that he’s already soaked to the skin and trembling. In the caustic comedy-drama Later Life, now in a superb production at the Avenue Theater, playwright A.R. Gurney masterfully reveals how fear has affected…
A new play from a young playwright is almost always rocky terrain. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Keith Glover’s Coming of the Hurricane is no exception, though Israel Hicks’s distinguished direction does much to smooth the way for the viewer. There is some wonderful dialogue here, along with…
Capitalism doesn’t always equal freedom, especially in the arts. That’s the bitter pill served up by Nagle Jackson’s The Quick-Change Room at the Denver Center Theatre Company. The message goes down easily–sweetened by Jackson’s piquant humor–but it burns in the belly. It’s a slow burn, too. The play demonstrates some…
Mark Twain spins fitfully in his grave every time Bernard Sabath’s execrable The Boys in Autumn plays again. Now this effort by a third-rate artiste to project his meager talents onto the work of one of his betters is playing at the Theatre at Muddy’s. If it weren’t so dull,…
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, now at the Theatre on Broadway, makes a plea for compassion in these days of AIDS. But his ideas about how a lover can best express that compassion are sometimes questionable. Rife with in-jokes and written primarily for the gay community, Jeffrey is a kind of riotous…
The texture and nature of intimacy is the texture and substance of Shay Youngblood’s potent Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery at Eulipions Theatre. The story about a twelve-year-old girl and the eight “Big Mamas” who raised her reveals the hidden threads women sometimes weave into a community. Many of the…
Beware the ghost with a bargain: The price for the ethereal gifts he offers may be too high. The hero of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, now in a splendid new production by CityStage Ensemble, discovers just how high a price when he’s offered release from the sorrows of his…
Sometimes a guy is better off when his wildest dreams don’t come true. After all, when real life intrudes on fantasy, it can be most disappointing. So the hero finds out in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, playing at the RiverTree Theatre through Saturday. Oddly enough, Neil Simon’s meditation…
Charles Dickens understood the fine art of tearjerking. Nobody before or since could sentimentalize human virtue, family life or the death of a child with such unabashed exploitation and get away with it. But Dickens loved the rarer pleasures of supernatural horror as well, and his A Christmas Carol, now…
Thieves and murderers can turn into comic heroes–even guardian angels. The result in My Three Angels at the Westminster Dinner Theatre is an intermittently divine comedy. The play proposes three miscreants as benevolent figures who watch over a poor but honest family when a rich and treacherous relative tries to…
