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…
Beneath a thin (yet sturdy) veneer of respectability lies a nasty little secret at Ravenscroft manor. And when the handsome young footman of the house dies suddenly, falling to his death down the main stairway, it looks suspiciously like murder. The five women of the house claim his death is…
‘Tis the season, yet very few professional theater companies take up the religious significance of Christmas. A good thing, too, since the majority would muck it up with insincere pretensions. But the fact that most theater companies can’t do Christmas makes the fact that Eulipions can that much more exceptional…
They’re baa-ack–the original cast (save one) of Denver’s long-running Murder Most Fowl, that is. The play returns to the Avenue Theater this season as (A Very Merry) Murder Most Fowl. The plot’s the same, but the jokes are all new, and the interactive element remains the show’s primary draw–the audience…
No matter where you stand on feminist issues, David Mamet’s Oleanna at the Denver Center Theatre Company will tick you off. This is the kind of theater that sends you furious into the night–masterfully manipulative and absolutely scary. It’s scary because we know too much about propaganda–how ideologues throughout history…
Whenever a great novel is turned into a play, something inevitably will be lost in the translation. When the play is also a musical, a lot more of the original evaporates into thin air to make room for the song and dance routines. The most one can hope for is…
Moliere’s Tartuffe, now in a searingly funny production by CityStage Ensemble at Jack’s Theater, takes on religious hypocrisy with such fervent zeal that it laid its original audience to waste. But then Moliere’s patron, the “Sun King” Louis XIV, was overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of the irreverent playwright and…
It may not run as smooth as brook water, but the production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes at the Country Dinner Playhouse sparkles with the sophisticated nonsense that made all those great Thirties musicals so endearing. Andrew Lloyd Webber and his clones couldn’t pop a tune like Cole Porter (or…
Gilbert and Sullivan turned comic opera into an extraordinary form of satire in their time. Tarantara! Tarantara! at the Denver Civic Theatre is a gleeful yet oddly dark tribute to the great team. Plays like H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and Trial by Jury are still funny because the…
Farce can be insipid drivel or sublime madness, depending on the play and the wit of the director. Fortunately, Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the University of Colorado-Boulder is more sublime than insipid, more caustic madness than silly drivel. And though this production can lose its way…
Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, now at the Theatre at Muddy’s, exposes the murky side of scientific inquiry. Even professors of archaeology, we learn, can be despicable and put their egos before the well-being of others. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Somebody really does have…
OpenStage Theatre’s production of The Philadelphia Story, now running in Fort Collins, proves once and for all that unemployed rich people dashing about trying to find true love in romantic comedies are no longer interesting. Whenever their plight did engage us in the Hollywood films of the past, it was…
Reckless, now running in Boulder in a biting, smart production by the Actors Ensemble, might have been called Relentless Christmas–so much of the action takes place on consecutive Christmases and so many of the events are cataclysmic. But although Craig Lucas’s hilarious play skewers the season’s sentimentality, it isn’t about…
Education is more than it’s cracked up to be. And while Educating Rita, now at the Denver Civic Theatre, suggests the traditional ingestion and regurgitation approach can be improved upon, it never says how. Playwright Willy Russell’s effort may be fun to watch, especially with such engaging actors, but its…
The McCarthy era stunk. If you don’t believe that, be sure to catch Red Scare on Sunset at Industrial Arts Theatre. The satire by Charles Busch imitates the style of Red-scare films (I Married a Communist, et al.) that fed American paranoia during the Fifties. Ironically, these propaganda films were…
Mocking sacred cows is a venerable tradition in the arts, and as long as it’s done without any discernible taste (but with a good deal of wit), it satisfies our sense of the ridiculous without betraying original works. Remember Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales From Shakespeare? Like that perverse piece of…
Sometimes the dark is safer than the light. Sometimes a blind woman can “see” more clearly than those whose eyes have not dimmed. In Wait Until Dark, at the South Suburban Theatre Company, the heroine of the story is a young woman, recently blinded and still learning to maneuver around…
America loves its gangsters. Not the real ones, of course: We like our gangsters safely enshrined in the movies or on stage, and we like them to be Italian (one more outrageous prejudice). But while we admire the consummate movie godfather, Don Corleone, he’s still pretty scary; once in a…
