For every parent out there worried about pedophilia, Doug Stanhope offers a reassurance: In all likelihood, nobody wants to fuck your kid. That bit is up there on the list of incredibly offensive Stanhope material, but it’s by no means all there is; over the course of his twenty-year career,…
American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose. Written by Richard Montoya, of the San Francisco performance group Culture Clash, American Night: The Ballad of Juan Josetells the story of immigrants in America through a crazed mix of skits, historical references, inspired parody and moments of pathos and insight. But the…
Certain moments from the past decade of reviewing remain indelible. I can still conjure Mare Trevathan’s riddling phrases in The Skriker; Nick Sugar’s bravura-filled but crumbling Hedvig; Randy Moore as A Christmas Carol’s Scrooge, knocked out by the sheer joyous wonder of a household chair; William Hahn’s protracted suffering in…
Rebecca Northan, a Canadian actress, walks a highwire in her almost-one-woman show Blind Date — almost, because two zealous men periodically pop in and out to check on her, facilitate the action or plough into the audience impersonating waiters. The evening begins as Northan sits forlornly at a cafe table,…
The melody of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It” floated in and out of downtown for thirty minutes Saturday. While the cries and tub-thumping of Occupy Denver protesters were louder, and the people dressed up as gorillas for the Gorilla Run seemed stranger, Denver’s first city-sponsored performance piece…
Tomorrow afternoon, all ninety members of the Bear Creek High School marching band will be strutting around downtown playing their instruments, individually. Each high schooler in Playing Apart (First mentioned on Backbeat) will be dressed in street clothes and playing for a mile or so (in the same territory as…
The whole point of Vox Phamalia: Quadrapalooza, the Physically Handicapped Actors and Musical Artists League comedy show opening tonight at the Avenue Theater for a two-weekend run, is that differently-abled people (or whatever the politically correct terminology is this week) have a sense of humor about themselves. And they think…
The Lion King is about to roar into the Denver Performing Arts Complex, followed by a revival of West Side Story. Such shows are not just popular with audiences, but with bogus ticket sellers, too. “We just want to make people aware that we’re really the only authorized ticket sellers,”…
American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose. Written by Richard Montoya, of the San Francisco performance group Culture Clash, American Night: The Ballad of Juan Josetells the story of immigrants in America through a crazed mix of skits, historical references, inspired parody and moments of pathos and insight. But the…
There’s something about the work of Athol Fugard — or at least about this particular work, The Road to Mecca — that reminds me of the plays of August Wilson. It has the same rich sense of place and culture, the same emotional complexity and the same kind of humanism,…
The Grawlix comedy show has been selling out the Avenue Theater since it launched (it runs the last Friday of every month), so we figured it was time to catch up with one of the founding members, Andrew Orvedahl to talk about the history the show and its future, including…
What’s a dance club without booze? Some might say “intolerable,” but Darina Miteva — perhaps better known as DJ Darina, Bulgaria’s #1 female DJ — would beg to differ. “Everything is full of drunk people,” Miteva says. “People at home don’t like the environment in the nightclub.” Miteva, who doesn’t…
When local actor Royce Wood saw an announcement last week that Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel The Magicians was in development to become a Fox television show, he knew he wanted to be a part of it. “How on earth do I get from here, Denver, Colorado, to you know, the…
The play Enrique’s Journey, adapted by Su Teatro artistic director Anthony Garcia from the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nazario, debuted last weekend in Denver, bringing to light the harrowing story of Central American immigrants who risk life and limb riding the tops of freight trains north, in search of…
My Hideous Progeny. When Mary Shelley — poet, essayist, novelist and, most famously, the creator of Frankenstein — lost one of the four babies she conceived with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (only one child ultimately survived), he placed her in a tub of ice water to stop the hemorrhaging that…
Immigrants and those who support them often talk about the richness and vitality that newcomers bring to this country, from the original settlers to the slaves dragged here in chains to the lonely and much-reviled Chinese men who built the railroads (Chinese women being legally excluded at the time). They…
Although rare, there were once American musicals that talked about politics and even acknowledged that poor people existed. Bertolt Brecht was their father. Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, written in 1937, was a fable about workers and corporate greed so outspoken that the House Un-American Activities Committee tried to…
Improv theater is risky, especially when it calls for pulling an unsuspecting audience member onto the stage for the entirety of the show. Case in point, the Garner Galleria’s production of Blind Date, in which the show’s creator and only star, Rebecca Northan, hand-picks a fellow from the crowd to…
Of Love Songs for Poomouse, which opens tonight in Boulder, this much we know: It stars Bobby Dartt, whose unique sense of humor and elan is central to the musical revue. And it is all about the love songs — during the first half, Dartt covers some favorites; in the…
Clybourne Park. Racism persists, but the ways in which we feel and express racism change with the times. Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, at the end of which the Youngers, a struggling black family, are about to move into a…
One of the main things that differentiated America’s hippies from their counterparts around the world — France, Mexico, Poland, Germany and Ireland were all seething with protest at the time, and the Soviet Union drove its tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to quell the Czech spring — was a zany…
To Kill a Mockingbird is an institution, a revered American novel that’s a must for every high-school curriculum, the inspiration for a well-loved film starring Gregory Peck and scripted by Horton Foote. Mockingbird has influenced discussions of race ever since Harper Lee’s novel first appeared in 1960; idealistic lawyers like…
