Out of work? Here are four cool auditions for Front Range thespians

Theater seasons are revving up all over town, and as always they cover the gamut: serious, classic, thoughtful, imaginative, pandering, comic, adventurous, silly or just plain fun. On our random list of upcoming auditions, there’s something for everyone. Get out your head shots, confidence and chops, actors. And a sense…

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Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

PHAMALY takes on the business world and succeeds

In its portrayal of corporate ruthlessness, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was pretty daring for its time. Back in 1961, when it premiered on Broadway, a lot of people still admired the business world. The musical shows an ambitious young man, J. Pierrepont Finch, angling his way…

Germinal Stage reveals the comic layers in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is a challenge for any contemporary director, since most audience members won’t know what to make of all those talky Russians freely airing their deepest desires and despairs, periodically insulting each other, occasionally bursting through with declarations of unrequited love — and all this without the upbeat, therapeutic…

Denver County Fair is a hipster paradise for animals and Bat Boy

The headlines across the country this morning proclaim “Denver bets on a county fair, aiming at hipsters,” which would have been fine, except for the fact that the best thing about the County Fair, like all County Fairs, is the animals. Goats and chickens and roosters and adorable rabbits all…

Now Playing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

In A Touch of Spring, two decades collide in Rome

A Touch of Spring starts out as such a charming romantic comedy that it’s a shame when it dissolves into a diffuse and wordy second act. Samuel Taylor’s rarely performed 1968 play has one foot in the ’50s (it’s set in 1959) and another in the late ’60s, that era…

Briceson Ducharme on The Apocalyptic Ball and living with HIV

Tomorrow night, Ginger Sexton and the Sexton drag empire take over the Gothic Theatre for the second annual Apocalyptic Ball, a celebration of life and a fundraiser for the Colorado AIDS Walk. Sexton — who by day is known as make-up artist Briceson Ducharme — started up the variety showcase…

Five musicals based on weirdly tragic true stories

Although the musical — one of the sillier holdouts from an era when theater was more, you know, theatrical — is mostly exploited these days for its camp potential (see: The Book of Mormon), it’s still not quite dead as a study of human emotion, either. And although the idea…

Now Playing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

The Comedy of Errors is full of them

An early Shakespeare play based on a Roman comedy (Plautus’s The Menaechmi), The Comedy of Errors utilizes a lot of plot devices that were hoary even in Shakespeare’s time — although naturally, they’re at least used deftly. As the play opens, Egeon, a Merchant of Syracuse, has been captured in…

Now Playing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Chasing Manet is worth seeing for excellent acting and a great cause

Every year, director Terry Dodd finds a play perfectly suited to the historic lobby of the Barth Hotel, with its long central desk and gleaming wooden furnishings, and stages it as a benefit for Senior Housing Options, an organization that provides humanistic, caring homes for indigent seniors in several facilities…

Now Playing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

This year’s Romeo and Juliet at CSF is the best in years

When I think about the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Romeo and Juliet, the predominant image is of Jamie Ann Romero as Juliet, longing to consummate her startlingly sudden marriage and leaping onto the bed, arms outflung, to implore the night, “Give me my Romeo.” At this point, she doesn’t know that…

Curious Theatre’s On an Average Day is a first-rate production

Some of the best acting you’ll see anywhere. A brilliantly putrid set design. Haunting sound effects. Taut direction. On an Average Day is a first-rate production — but unfortunately, the play itself feels like an early exercise, full of sound and fury, signifying not much of anything. John Kolvenbach is…

Now Playing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Realism be damned, Hairspray gives us exactly what we want

What started as a somewhat edgy film by the raunchy and iconoclastic John Waters morphed into a sugar-sweet, much-loved, Tony-winning musical about self-acceptance and the need for all of us to also accept others. Now Hairspray has taken over the stage at the Arvada Center, where the year is 1962,…