Interesting, stimulating family entertainment is rare enough in Denver, so a sprightly show like Annie is welcome, indeed. Now playing at the Denver Civic Theatre, the musical revue offers local parents a breather from the inanities of television and a handy opportunity to introduce children to the excitement of live…
It’s all about power. The combination of skill, intelligence and soul-numbing, single-minded will that it takes to get rich in a capitalist society might propel one into the politburo in a communist society. So George Bernard Shaw speculated in his extravagant comedy of ideas The Millionairess, now in a hilarious…
Reinventing Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon has become something of an American pastime. The movie was a huge international hit, a brilliantly acted, visionary retelling of two Ryunsuke Autagawa stories. It was first remade in America in 1964 as The Outrage, a pretentious but still engaging version of…
There is so much to Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, it’s a pity there isn’t more. The Denver Center Theatre Company production is so rich in character, so well acted, so humane, so involving, it is difficult to say why it also just misses being completely satisfying. But then, the…
What a review of Love, Janis really needs is a rock critic, not a theater critic. The show at the Denver Center Theatre Company has plenty of hot moments, but works best as a re-creation of Joplin’s music, rather than her life. Nevertheless, Janis lives again. And all of us…
Singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, an enemy of sentimentality in all its forms, built an interesting career thrashing middle-class pretensions and undermining “good taste” wherever it reared its ugly head. His black, satirical songs scorched many a prejudice and failing in American society during the Fifties and Sixties, and while some of…
It’s easy to pity someone dying of a painful disease. In the theater, it’s too easy. When disease is the subject of a play, it almost always becomes a substitute for dramatic structure–a built-in twister of heart-strings and manipulator of our personal and public fears. There are, of course, important…
Daniel is lonely. He misses the barrio, and a distant ‘burb with a goofball name like “Enchanted Acres” is a bleak wasteland in comparison to the warm feel of the old ‘hood. But Daniel is more than lonely: He’s in the midst of a mid-life crisis with cultural overtones. Tired…
Love may be hard to find, but trust is even harder. The regional premiere of Trust, a new play by expatriated Denverite Steven Dietz (he now lives in Seattle), dives into the shallows of contemporary lust and longing to prove just how tough trust is to come by. Funny, twisted…
Flowers spring from the stage. A miraculous healing frees a gruff old priest from blindness. A little girl dies by inches, trapped in mud after a volcanic eruption. Other extraordinary–incredible, even, to a mind trained in Western rationalism–events appear as natural occurrences. The impossible is made plausible, and the result…
Turning Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brilliant novel The Scarlet Letter into a contemporary drama is a doomed proposition. Phyllis Nagy’s torturous attempt, now playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is so full of error, so misguided, so utterly banal a reading of a great work of art, one can only wonder…
We all suffer, some more than others, some horribly. But we all suffer. And though drama is almost always about suffering, it seldom reminds us to consider the man on the street, the woman next to us in the theater, much less what we may do to help each other…
The first time I saw The Lion in Winter, it was the film version and it starred two larger-than-life movie stars–Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. At the time, the story seemed irritatingly antihistorical–ascribing, as it did, contemporary attitudes to heroes of an entirely different culture and time. I dismissed it…
We still pay for the Vietnam War. Tracers, now playing at the Theatre on Broadway, gives us another window onto that experience. A collaborative effort written by John DiFusco and seven other vets, the play is part group therapy, part high drama and part history lesson. The story takes seven…
Sam Shepard can be pretty self-indulgent when he wants to be. States of Shock is one of those one-acts that seem to have risen out of a dense intellectual fog. The play is primarily an attack on war itself. There’s an indictment in it somewhere about the treatment (read: abandonment)…
John Merrick had a terrible disease (never correctly diagnosed, but now considered “Proteus syndrome”) that so disfigured him, he was known as the “Elephant Man” to the society that first abused and then protected him. Victorian England could be incredibly perverse in a way we scarcely can comprehend. Victorianism brought…
Of all Tennessee Williams’s sometimes brilliant but always anguished works, Suddenly Last Summer is the most difficult to produce. The structure of the play is so awkward and the horrors so thick that melodrama sneaks in unbidden at every turn. The first of two one-act plays included in a program…
It’s natural enough–a full-blown, new-age interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But while the Denver Center Theatre Company’s rendering explores the fantastic quality of dreams, building a fabulous world full of rich, bright magic, it sometimes palls–like having to listen to a fundamentalist sermon when you hold different ideas…
Caustic and brilliant, August Wilson nails down the realities of racism in his plays. They are as revealing, humane and in-your-face as they are graceful, funny and entertaining. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is a masterful piece of theater, competently mounted and performed with moments…
When the theater “holds a mirror up to nature,” it’s not always a pretty sight. The nature reflected there is frail, cruel, stupid and cold as often as it is brave, kind, bright and sympathetic. But the reflection can order and analyze human experience, making it easier for us to…
In the theater it is possible to weigh arguments–to present two sides of a debate and let the audience come to its own conclusions. In the movies, and almost always on TV, what you usually get is propaganda. Occasionally, a great film will come along that is open-ended enough to…
Viola loves Orsino who loves Olivia who loves Viola (thinking her Cesario). The eternal triangle. Love does not come easy in Shakespeare’s plays: There’s always some piper or other to be paid, some complicated journey laid on the innocent by fate. But in the comedies, of course, fate’s jests always…
