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…
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…
