Children of war suffer in myriad ways. They witness and sometimes experience violence, suffer hunger and disruption, see their parents helpless and unable to protect them from vast, frightening and incomprehensible forces. Displaced children are a predictable product of conflict. Even for those left physically unhurt, the losses are incalculable…

Founded last year by Keith Rabin as a part of Lucent Performing Arts, Ignite Theatre is signaling great seriousness of intention, lining up an ambitious production schedule for the coming year that includes Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and the Pulitzer winner about mental illness,…

Edward Albee’s brilliant The Play About the Baby is really a play about age, life and experience. It’s mesmerizing to watch, raising all kinds of associations — comfortable and familiar, uncomfortable but still familiar — along with echoes of things you know and other things your thoughts have only touched…

Joe Wandell spent a large part of his life wondering who he was, and in his one-man show, Mekong Joe, he invites you in on the search. This isn’t one of those all too common protagonist-finding-himself stories, because Wandell’s story is anything but common. In 1976, during the U.S. withdrawal…

Summer shows at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre are family-friendly events, intended to hold the wandering (and wondering) attention of children, and this year’s Cinderella is no exception. Created by Rodgers and Hammerstein for television in the 1950s, it’s charming, sweet and slight. Once again — as he did so notably for…

I’d almost describe Driving Miss Daisy as a courtly piece. Written in the 1980s, the play deals with racism, but in a muted, thoughtful way. There’s no big drama, no didacticism, no major political message, just an examination of the changing lives of three people in Georgia as they move…

Claire and Emmy are fifteen, which means they’re right on the cusp: worldly and womanly in some respects — and certainly in their own minds — and confused children in others. They feel themselves wildly sophisticated as they chug down wine stolen from a parent’s liquor cabinet in Deirdre O’Connor’s…

Today Randy Weeks is president of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and executive director of Denver Center Attractions, but when he first met impresario Robert Garner in 1978, he was an undergraduate three courses shy of his marketing degree and looking for a summer box-office job. Garner, who…

The Edge Theatre Company gives the last few performances of It’s Just Sex this weekend, and the show is worth a visit. Not that the script is deep. It isn’t. But it is clever, funny and mildly titillating, and makes for perfect date-night entertainment…

Scholars have said many thoughtful things about Shakespeare’s women, but Tina Packer, who helmed the highly respected Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts for three decades, may be the best guide: She not only has the required analytic ability and the passion, but she has also inhabited these women, exploring their…

Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is a farce about a farce. It relies on all those familiar farcical conventions — lots of doors with people going in and out of the wrong ones, a woman in her underwear and a man with his pants down around his ankles, sexual innuendo, blows,…

The theater world is full of Richard IIIs quipping, posturing, lying and murdering their way through thickets of bodies to the English crown. The role is catnip to actors because it’s juicy and bigger than life, and the bloody monsters of twentieth-century history — Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet…

The setting is a functional living space, bare-bones but lovingly furnished with pots of gardenias. There’s a large bed in the center. We hear voices — some laughter, a woman complaining, a man soothing, explaining — and a couple emerges through a trap door. It’s a bit of a struggle…

The Oscar Wilde Experience feels less like a full-fledged theater production than a warm, pleasant evening spent with friends. The show is in the Byers-Evans House, which was built in 1883; with its dark wood furnishings, shadowy corners and shelves of old books, it provides the perfect backdrop for an…

A few days after I’ve seen Love Child, the notes on my pad — a mix of observations, reminders and actual quotes — make absolutely no sense. “I have no name.” “Xander’s in a trance.” “You’re firing me? Your own mother?” “Chef from Greece…big knife…” “She never screwed Richard.” “I…

Steven Burge, who’s currently starring with Damon Guerrasio in Love Child, a hoot of a show at the Avenue Theater, is one of the funniest actors anywhere. So it was a surprise to learn that he has to face down intense fears before he can step onto a stage. It’s…

In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play. Playwright Sarah Ruhl uses the orgasm as the prism through which she views the entire Victorian world — and, by extension, our own. From the orgasm, entirely misunderstood and invisible in those repressive times, emanate ripples that change not only the relationships…