Unless you count bandleader Natalia Perez del Villar’s festive red vest, there wasn’t too much Christmas-y about the tenuously Christmas-themed Navidad Flamenca at the Mercury Cafe on Friday night. Though the band played a few villancicos, or traditional Spanish Christmas songs, the jingling bells your typical North American might expect…
Dixie is a booze- and sex-addicted, trash-talking, child-neglecting ex-con from Alabama who holds Tupperware parties in her trailer, and she’s invited you to this one. Dixie’s Tupperware Party really is a Tupperware party — you get a name tag and raffle number when you walk into to the Garner Galleria…
Pamela Mencher has spent eleven years working on her play — but in some ways, she’s been working on it her whole life. Born on a Lakota/Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Mencher spent her formative years there and on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana during the civil rights…
Dixie Longate has come to Denver to ply her Tupper-wares (har) at the Garner Galleria Theatre. The show opened last week and will be here through early January, so there’s still plenty of time to go and reevaluate your tupperware needs. I went on Friday. Truly, it was ridiculous –…
Marguerite Endsley wants to spread the word about something near and dear to her heart: pole dancing. And in the process, she wants to raise some money for a fellow pole dancer who recently suffered a horrific accident: 32-year-old Debbie Plowman, a mother of two from England who fell on…
At most performances, a front row seat is the most desirable spot to be — aside from marking your status as the best person to shank and rob after the show, it’s also the best way to see the action. At a comedy show, though, it’s a little different. Much…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
You’re looking for a warm, lively, sweetly sentimental holiday-season show, but you’ve had it up to here with Santas and Tiny Tims, as well as would-be funny take-offs on Santas and Tiny Tims. Say hello to Hello, Dolly! Boulder’s Dinner Theatre director Michael Duran has a long history with Hello,…
The Handsome Little Devils’ efforts to bring old-fashioned Vaudevillian melodrama to theatergoers in New York City has caught the attention of town’s snootiest critics. Earlier this year, the local troupe took their “Squirm Burpee Circus” act out east after securing a spot at the New Victory Theater off-Broadway, and the…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
Rachel, a housewife, is having what she characterizes as “one of my euphoria attacks,” babbling ecstatically to her depressed husband, Tom, about snow, their two sons, festive television shows and how much she loves Christmas. He interrupts to tell her he’s taken out a contract on her life. We never…
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan tends to steal God’s thunder; as depicted, he’s much more interesting than the Creator. The same is true of the wickeder of the two main characters in local playwright Tracy Shaffer’s W(hole). The play, receiving its world premier at Paragon, concerns the twisted, symbiotic relationship…
Unless you’re a troglodyte who lives under a rock and hates freedom, you’ve seen A Christmas Carol. The play, the cartoon, the movie, the movie adapted from the play that is also a cartoon based on a true story — you know the storyline like the underside of your house-rock,…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
The Band of Toughs — formerly the Aluminous Collective, which distinguished itself with an excellent production of Charles Mee’s Big Love last year — is back with a second offering: Finders Keepers Losers Weepers. The difference in quality is startling. Finders Keepers, which hitches together ensemble-developed material with an eighteenth-century…
The 39 Steps. This show is uninhibitedly silly — a take-off on a 1930s Hitchcock film, which itself was based on a novel by John Buchan. The plot didn’t make much sense in the movie — something to do with an attempt by foreign spies to steal British air defense…
All first-rate actors are first-rate in completely different ways, and Brian Landis Folkins is no exception. He doesn’t have a highly defined stylishness, doesn’t raise the temperature every time he walks across a stage or reduce audiences to tears with the suppleness of his emotions. With him, you don’t get…
The 1960s of Shout isn’t the era of revolution for the hell of it, wild and woolly locks, tie-dye, raucous pleasure, ragged form-busting music and lots of dope — though pot does eventually enter this world. Think of the start of that decade — Jackie Kennedy’s demure A-line dresses and…
The founders of Gravity Defied Theatre had their work cut out for them when they founded the troupe in 2008. In addition to facing the standard pitfalls and challenges of starting a new theater company, founders Keith Rabin, Jr., and Danny Harrigan had to carve out a viable niche in…
Around 11:34 last Friday, my phone rang, and on the other end of the line was what sounded like a 20-year old modem screaming at me with the type of digital candor only available to machines. “Excuse me?” I said. The sound repeated itself. And that was the beginning of…
The Container. There’s a little uneasiness before production begins, a shuffle for the restrooms, some groping in purses for water bottles. As they’re admitted, audience members must sign a release acknowledging that the experience will be claustrophobic, that they will be closed in, seated along the sides of a large…
Of all the days of the week, Tuesday is perhaps the one most conducive to despair, the one that really drives home the boredom of the working week and the one where there’s the least to do outside of the workaday drudgery. Which makes it all the more important to…
