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50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…

Peter and the Starcatcher just doesn’t fly

About half an hour into Peter and the Starcatcher, I started wondering: What is it with the New York critics? They were so excited by this show — exhilarated, ecstatic. They loved that the tech wasn’t grindingly, massively hyper-expensive, but rather low-key, using ordinary objects in the way that experimental…

Mike Birbiglia on funny sadness and self-deprecating comedy

Mike Birbiglia is not interested in your laughter. Or at least, that’s not all he’s interested in. While most comedians shy away from long-form jokes — for fear of not getting any laughs and being stuck with a sinking ship for ten minutes — Birbiglia is all about the long-term…

High Plains Comedy Festival: Local comics to watch

This weekend Denver’s funny business will mark a significant milestone with the High Plains Comedy Festival. While the scene has put together a handful of notable comedy fests over the years with Laugh Track and the Fine Gentleman’s Club’s Too Much Funstival, High Plains will be the first nationally recognized…

Buntport member Erin Rollman’s amazing next act

We’ve all heard of the concept of paying it forward, but Erin Rollman, one of the creators and mainstays of Buntport Theater, is taking it several steps further than most of us could ever have imagined: She’s donating a kidney to someone she’s never met. Evan Weissman, longtime Buntport collaborator…

High Plains Comedy Festival: Behind the scenes with Andy Juett

We’d both been to some pretty amazing comedy festival setups ranging from Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon to the now defunct HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado and we both agreed that Denver deserved a truly sustainable festival that would be uniquely “Denver.” We thought by joining forces with creative fire stokers like Pete and Virgil Dickerson that we could make something special. Between our collective backgrounds and interests it just ended up being a pretty great team. It’s like Sesame Street. Cooperation is a real fucking thing.

Now Playing

50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…

Comedian Ben Roy on motorcycles, politics and how he’s like Bill Cosby

Comedian and Westword feature subject Ben Roy is about as widely known as comedian can get in Denver. In addition to performing at the upcoming High Plains Comedy Festival, Roy will be headlining a show at Comedy Works downtown at 7:00pm on August 25th. Westword caught up with Ben to discuss his politics, being a comedy outsider, his motorcycle, his non-fictional reading habits, and how he’s like Bill Cosby.

Do comedians and journalists need bad things to happen?

The next four weeks in Denver will see a tsunami of comedy events. There are four killer standups at Comedy Works (Craig Ferguson, Mike Birbiglia, Marc Maron, Kevin Nealon), two comedy festivals (High Plains, Funstival) and the Oddball Comedy Tour (Dave Chapelle, Flight of the Conchords). It’s raining microphones in…

Marc Maron on sobriety in art and not speaking to ex-wives

If you believe that podcasting saved comedy, then Marc Maron is a messiah of humor. After enduring divorces, a flaccid comedy career and losing his job on Air America, in 2009 Maron launched the WTF podcast, recorded in the same garage he often contemplated killing himself in. Today WTF is…

Peter and the Starcatcher lands in Denver

In 2012 Peter and the Starcatcher left the Tony awards ceremony with five trophies, including best performance by an actor, best sound design of a play, best costume design of a play, best scenic design of a play, and best lighting design of a play. Now the company is on…

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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel…

Steel Magnolias is in the pink at the Barth Hotel

Steel Magnolias was inspired by the death of playwright Robert Harling’s diabetic sister, and I’ve tended to think of it as a pale-pink, Hallmark-card production — which is appropriate, since the ailing Shelby is obsessed with pink and is busily planning a sugar-pink wedding while ensconced in the home salon…

In the Heights celebrates life, love, community and music

A lot goes on in three days in Washington Heights, Manhattan — at least as portrayed in In the Heights. Graffiti Pete gets driven away from Usnavi’s bodega — where everyone stops for light, sweet coffee in the morning — before he can make his mark on the door; Usnavi…