A Christmas Carol. The power of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — and the reason it keeps getting resurrected in so many forms, Christmas after Christmas — stems from the depths of sorrow that underlie the joyously optimistic resolution. Ebenezer Scrooge lives in a London where poor people face the…
Gifted is in many ways a standard family drama, complete with child-parent misunderstandings, sibling squabbles and the perpetual battle between wife and mother-in-law. But the interest level is decisively heightened by the fact that this is a mixed-race family — and we all know the fascinating stuff that happens when…
Jackie and Me. Jackie and Me ,Steven Dietz’s dramatization of a young-adult book by Dan Gutman, is a kids’ show, and also a remarkably flat and didactic one. It tells the story of a baseball-crazed boy named Joey Stoshak, who, with the help of a magical baseball card, goes back…
The power of Charles Dickens’s famous novella A Christmas Carol — and the reason it keeps getting resurrected in so many forms, Christmas after Christmas — stems from the depths of sorrow that underlie the joyously optimistic resolution. Ebenezer Scrooge lives in a London where poor people face the kind…
Jackie and Me. Jackie and Me, Steven Dietz’s dramatization of a young-adult book by Dan Gutman, is a kids’ show, and also a remarkably flat and didactic one. It tells the story of a baseball-crazed boy named Joey Stoshak, who, with the help of a magical baseball card, goes back…
This is it: Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Good-Bye is the last show at Heritage Square Music Hall — a strange venue that’s half true Western-style building, half pure Disney-level kitsch. If you’re already a fan of the 25-year-old troupe, catch this show immediately. And if you’re…
Rancho Mirage. The dialogue in Rancho Mirageis swift and clever and the characters are vivid, if not particularly deep or likable. But while the trials and tribulations of the three couples involved are standard-issue — infidelity, money problems — they’re presented in ways that are completely, off-the-map absurd. We start…
I’m no sports fan, but I am capable of responding to the myth and magic of baseball. A couple of years ago, I was absorbed and delighted by Ken Weitzman’s The Catch, which grew out of the Denver Center’s New Play Summit to receive a full production. This play presented…
Rancho Mirage. The dialogue in Rancho Mirageis swift and clever and the characters are vivid, if not particularly deep or likable. But while the trials and tribulations of the three couples involved are standard-issue — infidelity, money problems — they’re presented in ways that are completely, off-the-map absurd. We start…
Who knew Jerry Lewis was God? I certainly didn’t. But it’s the unmistakable voice of Jerry Lewis you hear when God appears to King Arthur in Spamalot at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre and instructs him to seek the Holy Grail. Lewis doesn’t actually appear on stage, of course, but it turns…
99 Histories. In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never-fully-defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
Over the years, there have been dozens of heart-tugging movies featuring a boy — usually lonely and outcast — and his dog. (Lonely little girls are equally attached to their pets, but they don’t get as much cinematic time.) Sylvia, now at the Lone Tree Arts Center, is about the…
The best part of Electra Onion Eater, which opens Buntport Theater Company’s thirteenth season, comes at the beginning, when Erin Rollman stages a television show called Cooking With Electra and proves yet again that she’s one of the top comic actresses around. Poor Electra is aiming at Julia Child-style chumminess…
Rhonda Brown got the kind of reviews actors dream about for her work in last year’s one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: the Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, and the production won a Best of Denver 2013 award for Best Political Theater. Produced and directed by Brian Freeland, it sold out…
For a while I try to figure out why I’m enjoying Rancho Mirage — currently having a rolling premiere at Curious Theatre Company and a couple of other companies nationally — so much. True, the dialogue is swift and clever — as Steven Dietz’s dialogue always is — and the…
Geoffrey Kent’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the highlight of this past summer’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and now that the festival has just released its schedule for 2014, Kent is already mulling the production he’ll direct next year: The Tempest. “I thought we made some bold choices on Dream,” he…
In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never fully defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
For those of us who don’t live in the immigrant world and interact with it only rarely and in routinized ways, the realities of immigrant life are hazy. Now and then a news story knifes through the haze: hundreds of workers deported seven years ago after raids at meat-packing plants…
Defending the Caveman. This is a low-key, low-budget one-man show, part standup comedy, part general nightclub act. Written by Rob Becker, the piece has been appearing in intimate venues around the country for several years. Becker was inspired by the comment he frequently heard from women that “men are assholes,”…
In Yasmina Reza’s Art, four wealthy, educated men fall out because one of them has acquired an all-white painting. The discussion in Catherine Trieschmann’s The Most Deserving isn’t conducted in such polished sentences, and the cast of characters is rural and far less privileged than Reza’s; even Edie, the possible…
I’m not giving anything away if I tell you that Philip Dawkins’s Failure: A Love Story is about three sisters — the Fail sisters — who all die in the year 1928, but not before each in turn has fallen in love with the wealthy, affable and apparently aptly named…
Defending the Caveman. This is a low-key, low-budget one-man show, part standup comedy, part general nightclub act. Written by Rob Becker, the piece has been appearing in intimate venues around the country for several years. Becker was inspired by the comment he frequently heard from women that “men are assholes,”…
