Most people in the theater world know Mark Collins as a critic — a temperate, thoughtful fellow, almost self-effacing. So it comes as a bit of a shock to see him swaggering around the stage as a boastful Ben Franklin, line dancing, or transforming into a huge, blubbery baby and…
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. The story of our seventh president set to propulsive emo-rock, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson could be the bastard child of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Spring Awakening, complete with torn-from-the-gut songs, black humor and lots of violence, suffering and blood. History is presented farcically —…
Buntport Theater solved a sizzling crime caper yesterday when a sheepish kid returned the stolen laptop on which the company kept its mailing list and other vital files. The theft happened while Buntport was conducting one of its regular Third Tuesday Great Debate. Since this one coincided with the second…
For Sweet Tooth, which opens tonight, Buntport Theater is again collaborating with musician Adam Stone — and that’s a very good sign. Two of this company’s weirdest and funniest works were created in collaboration with Stone. In the first, Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang., company members spoofed musicals and sang their…
At the center of Memphis, an energetic, Tony-winning musical dealing with race and music in the 1950s, is a white man, Huey Calhoun, who’s fascinated by black music. Stumbling into an underground rock-and-roll club, he’s greeted at first with suspicion, but wins grudging acceptance after declaring in song that this…
Artists tend to be praised and valued far more after their deaths than during their lifetimes, and clearly this paradox was not lost on Mark Twain, who wrote a play about Jean-Francois Millet — a real, famous and very brilliant painter of his time — called Is He Dead? In…
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. The story of our seventh president set to propulsive emo-rock, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson could be the bastard child of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Spring Awakening, complete with torn-from-the-gut songs, black humor and lots of violence, suffering and blood. History is presented farcically —…
Not many emerging playwrights would take on a New York Times critic, but Kristoffer Diaz, author of the Curious season opener, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, had no qualms about rebutting a blog post by Charles Isherwood. Isherwood had complained about the number of contemporary plays where characters break…
Ben Dicke, a local actor and director, was inspired, astounded, knocked out, when he saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in New York last year, and he decided it was a show that Denver audiences had to experience. The musical tells the story of our seventh president, set to propulsive emo-rock…
There are messengers all over Shakespeare. They fetch and carry, run on and off with news — but no one gives them much thought, despite the dangers of their profession. There are exceptions, of course: Someone occasionally flings a messenger a coin; at other times messengers are hit or killed…
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. The opening moments are pulse-poundingly exciting — music, live wrestling, flashing lights, tons of adrenaline from an already hyped-up audience. But the actual scripted beginning of the play is quiet, as a Puerto Rican kid called Mace describes his lifelong fascination with pro wrestling…
Elijah: An Adventure starts with an arresting visual image: a group of people posed on a dock in attitudes of farewell while a great liner prepares to head out to sea. On the deck stands Elijah, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, seventeen years old and about to embark on a…
The sixth play in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, Fences revolves around a deeply flawed protagonist, Troy Maxson. The year is 1957, and Maxson is a garbage collector; fairly early in the play, he becomes the company’s first black driver, only to complain later about the isolation of that position. Maxson…
Peter Davison is a juggler with a difference. He is co-artistic director of the Boulder Ballet Company, where he has danced roles ranging from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet to Herr Drosselmeyer in the annual Nutcracker, and has won the National Juggling Championship both as an individual and with his…
“Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed. — William Shakespeare, Othello As The Value of Names…
In the early decades of the twentieth century, millions of people fell ill with encephalitis lethargica, a disease that seemed almost supernatural or like something out of a fairy tale: These people froze. They experienced a suspension of all life and activity, becoming silent, still and comatose, sometimes for decades,…
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, based on John Gay’s satiric eighteenth-century piece, The Beggar’s Opera, burst onto the Berlin scene in 1928. Revolutionary for its time both in content and form, it rocked the art world, and it has since been staged and re-staged, as well as…
The opening moments are pulse-poundingly exciting — music, live wrestling, flashing lights, tons of adrenaline from an already hyped-up audience. But the actual scripted beginning of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety is quiet, as a Puerto Rican kid called Macedonio Guerra — Mace — describes his lifelong fascination with…
Curious Theatre Company opened its new season on September 1 with the regional premiere of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which is both a pure adrenalin rush and a significant aesthetic experience. Chad Deity breaks through the fourth wall like a hurricane and has the audience yelling…
I was teaching a class on news reporting in 2002 when the Bush administration opened the prison at Guantánamo Bay and ruled that prisoners there would be designated enemy combatants. I asked my students if they knew what that implied. They weren’t a particularly well-informed group, but they understood the…
The Book of Mormon finally arrived in Denver, freighted with a massive weight of hype, slick marketing, praise and excitement for this musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, both Colorado natives. The show had sold out within hours last January, with friends posting photographs of themselves holding tickets…
The Book of Mormon finally arrived in Denver, freighted with a massive weight of hype, slick marketing, praise and excitement for this musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, both Colorado natives. The show had sold out within hours last January, with friends posting photographs of themselves holding tickets…
