In August, many people escape the city for one last summer vacation — but here in Denver, you can escape your everyday life by simply spending a night at the theater. Here are three new options: The Greater Good Three Leaches Theater at Spark Theater 985 Santa Fe Drive 7:30…
Every year, Senior Housing Options, which provides safe, caring housing for indigent older and disabled people in several Colorado locations, mounts a theater production at Denver’s Barth Hotel as a fundraiser. This year, the play is Joe DiPietro’s The Last Romance, and the money will go toward safety equipment and…
With the dog days of summer fully under way, sweaty Coloradans may wish to heed the stars and avoid the sweltering outdoors. A second skyward glance, however, reveals that the August firmament sparkles with comedic luminaries all month long — many of them products of the Denver comedy braintrust. In…
Love will be in the air, along with the loins of several able-bodied improvisors, when the Air Sex Championships gyrate onto the Oriental Theater stage on Tuesday, August 2. Air Sex is conceptually similar to air guitar — if the axe were replaced with the body of an imaginary lover…
For years, Quincy Jones was known in the independent comedy scene in Los Angeles for his welcome presence and laidback observational humor. Like most fledgling comics, he hustled hard at local shows and open mics, longing for the opportunity to get a crack at the infinitely larger audience that a…
In Little Shop of Horrors, currently showing at Miners Alley, Seymour, a nerdy young guy who works in a failing florist shop that’s situated, inexplicably, on skid row, is hopelessly in love with fellow worker Audrey. Unfortunately, she is in a relationship with Orin Scrivello, a sadistic dentist, and is…
The fourth annual High Plains Comedy Festival begins just thirty days from now, and the 2016 lineup has all the makings of an old-fashioned giggle gauntlet. From August 25 through August 27, over 100 of the country’s funniest people will descend upon Denver’s Baker neighborhood to crack wise, tickle fancies and…
Whatever happens at Voodoo Comedy Playhouse this weekend, it will definitely come as a surprise. “They like to keep it a secret,” says Voodoo head honcho Steve Wilder of the mockable movies on the menu for Friday and Saturday, when Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff, stars of TV’s iconic 1988-1999 Mystery Science…
I’ll Eat You Last is subtitled “A Chat With Sue Mengers,” who was the top-tier agent to some of Hollywood’s starriest stars — or, as she calls them here, “my twinklies”; those twinklies included Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen, Gore Vidal, Nick Nolte, Michael Caine and, most important, Barbra Streisand. And…
The set for Thaddeus Phillips’s the ARCHIVIST is perhaps the most important character in this experimental, brain-dizzying work-in-progress at Buntport. Towering white columns of file boxes divide the playing area, boxing in — almost literally — the Archivist in all his magnificent and delusional loneliness. Beyond the columns, the darkened…
Finishing School got its start in 2001 in Los Angeles; the art collective builds site-specific work, does studio art and creates other forms of media, all with the intention of sparking conversation around social issues, politics and shared everyday human experiences. The artists recently produced Finishing School: BLISS, a social-engagement project…
Drained by the heat of summer? Take a seat in a cool theater and get refreshed at one of the rousing musicals opening this week at Denver theaters. What else is up? Try the Colorado Theatre Guild’s annual Henry Awards at 7 p.m. Monday, July 18, at the PACE Center…
There actually was a time when rock and roll and the happy gyrations of teens dancing to the music were considered sinful and a sure precursor to every kind of sleazy and drug-hazed sex, a time when respectable parents were so nervous about Elvis Presley’s hip thrusts and controversy ran…
I didn’t want to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Troilus and Cressida. I had seen the play once before — and read it as a student — and vaguely remembered the plot, though almost no details. Still, I knew it was a problem play that sits somewhere between…
As Denverites roast their way through international hot dog month during the high plains heat, opportunities abound to chortle away the evenings in air-conditioned comfort. Fittingly for a month named after an Emperor, July has a legion of comedic delights ready to lay siege to our city’s sweaty audiences — everything…
After twelve debauched years, last call for the legendary open mic at Squire Lounge was June 28. A rogue’s gallery of Squire favorites took the stage that night for a boozy, profane farewell to the “meanest mic in America,” topped off by a performance by Denver comedy supergroup Big City…
The first time I saw a work by Thaddeus Phillips, a Denver native who now runs Philadelphia-based Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, was at Buntport Theater on a cold night in 2001. The piece was called Shakespeare’s Storms and there were around fifteen people in the audience — two of them being me…
At the intermission of Equivocation, this summer’s traditional non-Shakespeare-but-related-to-Shakespeare offering from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, I found myself exultant, almost floating along the aisle to the lobby. I’m so grateful to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival for bringing us this play, I said to a friend. It’s brilliant. And so it…
As many Coloradans know all too well, law-enforcement agents of this country’s less-enlightened states deliberately and systemically profile Colorado drivers in an attempt to bust them with legal weed. On June 13, beloved Denver comedian Jay Gillespie found himself targeted in Childress, Texas, where a routine traffic stop led to…
This holiday weekend, why not go to camp? Greetings from Camp Katabasis, the brilliantly funny new show from Buntport Theater Company, has a special Memorial Day performance. But there are other shows to remember around town, keep reading for mini-reviews of three favorites. Greetings from Camp Katabasis. In Greetings from Camp…
Podcasts are in tune with the democratized spirit of the internet; anyone with a microphone and a computer can offer listeners unlimited hours of recordings, usually for free. Limited only by their imaginations, podcasters have a freedom of expression unrestricted by commerce, censorship or geography. Several great podcasts have blossomed…
Catherine, a widow living in a wealthy suburb of Austin, Texas, during the presidency of George W. Bush, hires Arturo from a group of unemployed men gathered at a street corner to clean up her overgrown garden. She is lonely, neurotic, angry, shunned by neighbors who gossip about the reasons…
