The greatest strength of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul lies in the hour-long opening monologue, in which an eccentric British housewife, holding an outdated guidebook to Kabul, tries to get her arms around the great, rich, anguished and turbulent mystery that is Afghanistan. Surrounded by people of diverse cultures and religions, sequentially…
I actually had to think for a few minutes to remember last night’s Quickfire Challenge on Top Chef, perhaps because it was as much, or more, about plating than food. The chefs, who are still in the Bahamas, had to split into two teams of two and create a hundred…
Memory deceives. The written word tries to encapsulate memory, but it, too, deceives — and sometimes it deceives deliberately. And so does playwright Steven Dietz. His plotting for Fiction is cunning, and the layers of complexity he builds around the basic concepts of truth and fiction are even more so…
I was enthralled the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil, forever ago when all that myth, glitter and spectacle was new to me. I still remember one specific moment clearly: I had the luck to be sitting very near the stage, and at the end of the performance, the…
The Field. Bull McCabe has been farming a few acres for several years — fencing, tearing out weeds, fertilizing — until the barren soil has become a lush pasture for his herd of cows. And now the owner, a poor widow, needs to put the field up for sale. Enter…
Something weird and vampiric is happening to Mike Isabella and Richard Blais on Top Chef: Mike is getting chubbier and cockier by the week, while Richard shrinks visibly, becoming ever thinner and more irritable, muttering that he hates, hates, hates everything he cooks — and this after receiving praise from…
Written in 1939, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is showing its age — both in the dated characterizations and the high-pitched, melodramatic tone. This is a serious melodrama, though, exploring the shifting of an era as, thanks to industrialization, the old order in the American South gives way to the…
Though it’s set in rural Ireland in 1965, John B. Keane’s The Field, now playing at the Denver Vic, tells a universal story about land — at least on one level. Bull McCabe has been farming a few acres for several years — fencing, tearing out weeds, fertilizing –until the…
“Antonia,” crooned Paula Deen after last night’s Quickfire Challenge on Top Chef (which, naturally, required deep frying), “you won.” Antonia wept. Somehow in all the fuss and hurry, she’d neglected to make the requisite two plates for the judges — she’d made only one — and that technicality lost her…
It’s been a big week for Kelly Liken of Vail’s Restaurant Kelly Liken, who was named a James Beard semi-finalist for Best Chef: Southwest (for the third time) — and then fed Michelle Obama and three friends over the weekend. Liken recently competed on Top Chef, and Michelle Obama heard…
As Reasons to Be Pretty opens, Steph is railing at her lover, Greg. The girl’s a spitfire, with a habit of tossing Greg’s goldfish into the john when she’s angry, but at this moment she’s beyond all reason, incandescent with rage, a shrieking, spitting harridan who won’t allow the poor…
If memory holds, I tried reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment when I was a dutiful little swot of about seventeen, and didn’t get much beyond the murder of the old pawnbroker. It’s one of those seminal works I’m sort of ashamed of not having read but probably never will now,…
I tend not to like contrived and cutesy challenges, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the chefs putting together cookies for Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster and his friends Elmo and Telly when they visited the set of Wednesday night’s Top Chef, seeing everyone’s expression lighten suddenly as the Quickfire was explained,…
It’s rare for aficionados to encounter an opera they haven’t seen dozens of times before and whose arias they can’t comfortably warble in the shower — and that’s part of what makes Opera Colorado’s Rusalka exciting. The opera is rarely shown in the United States, and has never before been…
When the folks at Buntport Theater acquired a sheet of artificial ice, they knew they had to create a skating show. And — given the strange and roundabout pathways by which their collective brain functions — that naturally put them in mind of Franz Kafka. Kafka on Ice, first staged…
It’s hard to get enthusiastic about another production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve seen so many oafishly boring and over-the-top Bottoms; puppet-like Hermias and Helenas; Demetriuses and Lysanders so generic you can’t tell them apart; annoying Pucks. And just what in hell is a director supposed to do with…
The Catch. Ken Weitzman’s play explores the well-worn concept of baseball as a metaphor for America itself, but in new and interesting ways. In the hands of Darryl Love, the boastful, charismatic player at the center of the story, the ball itself becomes a symbol, its seams stitching over the…
This weekend’s New Play Summit at the Denver Center Theatre Company made it clear that after decades of sometimes sputtering movement, Denver has finally become a serious force in American theater. A large crowd — local and national playwrights, press folk, tech people, poor actors and rich benefactors, along with…
The Quickfire Challenge for the Top Chef All Stars last night was to make fondue — and the contestants would judge each others’ offerings. Who’d have thought that old ’70s party and ski-lodge favorite could have been so cunningly reimagined? Antonia used smoked salmon and fromage blanc. Richard added chili…
Having created a full-out exploration of women’s relationships to their vaginas in The Vagina Monologues, feminist Eve Ensler has turned her attention to female bodies in general in The Good Body, a compassionate, would-be reassuring look at the near-universal American neurosis on the subject. The show is watchable and empathetic,…
The Catch. Ken Weitzman’s play explores the well-worn concept of baseball as a metaphor for America itself, but in new and interesting ways. In the hands of Darryl Love, the boastful, charismatic player at the center of the story, the ball itself becomes a symbol, its seams stitching over the…
They sent Tre home on last night’s Top Chef All-Starsbecause his risotto wasn’t loose enough? Give me a break. Perhaps it tasted terrible. Perhaps Anthony Bourdain was right in saying the focus should be on the rice, not the accompanying ingredients (Antonia had commented earlier that Tre wasn’t cooking the…
