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…
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…
