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9 Circles. On March 12, 2006, five soldiers stationed at a dangerous traffic checkpoint in an area of Iraq that the military called the Triangle of Death entered the nearby home of a fourteen-year-old girl named Abeer Qasim Hamza. Steven Green, a private, took her parents and six-year-old sister into…

Becky’s New Car is fast and fun but doesn’t stick with you

Playwright Steve Dietz never bores me. His dialogue is usually smart and his imagination fresh. He likes to come up with intricate plot twists, bend theatrical form and refuse the audience a satisfyingly tied-up — or even entirely comprehensible — ending. Becky’s New Car is the lightest of his works…

Drama and humor mix well in The Whale

It takes guts and ingenuity to write a play in which the protagonist is a morbidly obese man, constantly on stage and essentially tethered in one place. Charlie is dying of his own weight. He sleeps on the sofa — propped up so he can breathe — and spends almost…

String of Pearls puts women in the spotlight

Although the Avenue Theater has moved around and changed hands now and then, it’s still been a fixture on 17th Avenue for 25 long, good years. To kick off its 25th anniversary season, the Avenue will jump into 2012 with its fifth annual Womens’ Performance Series, a showcase for the…

Present Laughter‘s mix of style and vulgarity works

Belgians and Greeks do it, Nice young men who sell antiques do it Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. The Brontes felt that they must do it, Ernest Hemingway could just do it Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. Tennessee Williams, self taught, does it, Kinsey with a…

Let Ballet Nouveau Colorado make you feel like dancing

Got an itch in your tights to take up dancing? You’re not the only one. One way that adventurous dance companies like Ballet Nouveau Colorado bankroll work that’s not run-of-the-mill is through instruction. BNC, for instance, offers year-round dance and fitness classes for all ages and ability levels, from toddlers…

Theater openings are off to a fast start in January

If the flurry of excitement and variety we’re being offered in January is any indication, this is going to be an amazing year for theater. The month opens on a light note: a 1930s Noel Coward play set in the big-haired 1980s. This isn’t the kind of interpretation you expect…

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Phantom. While playwright Arthur Kopit and composer Maury Yeston were still putting together Phantom, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Operatrundled onto the scene, and their backers vanished — along with any chance of a Broadway opening. This Phantom is much smaller-scale than Webber’s, with less spectacle and more emphasis…

Black Actors Guild does the most with Doin’ the Most

The Black Actors Guild was originally founded by five juniors at the Denver School of the Arts who were frustrated with the available material and also by the stereotype of the black actor, according Ryan Soo, the guild’s director of operations. “A lot didn’t apply to them, and a lot…

Laurents’s updated West Side Story comes to Denver

Any new production of West Side Story has to stand up to the dozens of high-school productions we’ve seen over the decades, as well as our communal memory of the movie and intimate knowledge of the score: Sing the first phrase of “Tonight” or “Maria” or “I Feel Pretty” to…

Vaclav Havel’s revolution was a testament to the subversive power of art

Vaclav Havel, the unassuming playwright dissident who helped spearhead the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia, died on December 18. He became the country’s president after the revolution, presiding over its peaceful break-up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, leaving and then returning to the office, before…

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It’s a Wonderful Life. The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a much-loved American classic. Some families watch it together year after year at this time, like Miracle on 34th Street and varying versions of A Christmas Carol. What makes It’s a Wonderful Life interesting and original is the twist,…