Dan works at a newspaper — he’s an obituary writer — and encounters Alice, a part-time stripper, when she steps in front of a cab and gets knocked down. He escorts her to the hospital. There Larry, a dermatologist, looks her over briefly. Some time later, Dan — now happily…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel Singer…
It’s wonderful to discuss Shakespeare with someone as intelligent, insightful and, above all, passionate as Tina Packer, who brings her Women of Will: The Overview to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival this weekend. Packer, who led Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts for three decades, talks about Shakespeare with reverence, but also…
Fifteen minutes before the Boulder Farmers’ Market opens Saturday, a line of some twenty or thirty people has formed in front of the Morton’s Orchard stand. Word is out that the first peaches are at the market. These early peaches won’t be as sweet and juicy as later ones, and…
With Nigel Gore — an actor who comes to Shakespeare with a lot of authority and a willingness to take all kinds of risks on stage — playing the lead, and advance publicity that alluded to guns, smoke, Afghanistan and gruesome death scenes, I was expecting a thrilling Macbeth from…
Collected Stories. Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories is a small, tight play about a relationship between two women. But beneath the cozy, familiar milieu and the smart dialogue, there are evocative questions, and there’s also a sea of feeling. Ruth is a respected and important writer, though her reputation rests primarily…
This week, the cherries finally appeared at the Boulder Farmers’ Market — and as far as I know, these cherries from First Fruits Organic Farms in Paonia are the only Colorado-grown cherries available in the entire state. In many religions worldwide, first fruits are traditionally offered up to priests and,…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) five years ago — so I’m not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, does make…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cast for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first offering in this year’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, has many strengths. When did you last even notice who played First Fairy? Or Peter Quince? When the former is Nicole Bruce and the latter Greg West, you notice and…
For every kind of fruit, there’s a moment of perfection. At a certain time an apple, for instance, will be bright and crisp, perfectly balanced between sweet and sour. A week or two later, those apples are still delicious — but there’s a shade less crunch and the flesh has…
The entire street smells of fresh dill, and there are all kinds of new and enticing things at the Boulder Farmers’ Market Saturday: glowing red and yellow beets, carrots, little new potatoes (just wash well, boil and then roll them around in melted butter with shreds of mint. Conventional, but…
Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories is a small, tight play about a relationship between two women. But beneath the cozy, familiar milieu and the smart dialogue, there are evocative questions, and there’s also a sea of feeling. Ruth is a respected and important writer, though her reputation rests primarily on a…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cast for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first offering in this year’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, has many strengths. When did you last even notice who played First Fairy? Or Peter Quince? When the former is Nicole Bruce and the latter Greg West, you notice and…
There’s a cooking contest at the Boulder Farmers’ Market today. A week earlier, Elizabeth Marsden and Cacy Britton had bested several other students in a competition at Boulder’s Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, and they are now facing off against each other at one of the market stalls, surrounded by…
Pretty much everyone who loves food has read Michael Pollan, knows about the argument by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham in his book Catching Fire that cooking is what made us human in the first place, and understands that food is more than a bunch of inert substances whose only function…
Early this year, it looked as if the Colorado Shakespeare Festival might be on its last legs. But after some re-organization, a strong marketing push and a tightening of the festival’s focus, the New York Times named the CSF one of the summer’s hot tickets — and A Midsummer Night’s…
In February 1941, some two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, designating certain areas of the country as military zones. As a result, many Japanese people, immigrants and citizens, were interned in dismal, isolated and primitive camps. They lost their homes,…
It’s hard for any actor to hold the audience’s attention when he’s on stage with a fantastic pro like Larry Hecht. Oh, wait. I’d meant to begin with this: It’s hard for any actor to hold the audience’s attention when he’s on stage with a fantastic pro like Nigel Gore…
God of Carnage. Let’s start with the setting, so pristine, white, minimal and tasteful — chairs with gracefully curving legs, a glass table on which art books are meticulously arranged, a vase of white tulips, nicely grouped. Even if you didn’t know the play’s title, you’d know what’s about to…
I was first attracted to the Fior Di Latte booth at the Boulder Farmers’ Market by the word “gelato.” Then I noticed the elegant black-and-white design of the booth, and heard the lively sound of someone speaking to the vendor in Italian. And with the first taste, I was hooked…
There was a time when many young people believed they could levitate the Pentagon by surrounding it, holding hands and chanting; dissuade a soldier from killing by placing a flower in the barrel of his gun; and put an end to war, corruption, racism, repression and pollution through nakedness, love-making…
Philip Sneed, former artistic director for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is now executive director for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities — and although the people now running the festival decline to say much about his time there, they’re clearly looking forward to a Sneed-free season. In the…
