Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, published in 2001, arguably began the current debate about our broken food system. Schlosser has since written a book for children, and one about marijuana titled Reefer Madness, and he is working on an investigation into nuclear weapons called Command and Control — but Nation…
How perfect that Buntport is reviving Kafka on Ice — first produced in 2004, and one of my favorite of the company’s many inventive works — as part of a citywide celebration of all things Czech. First, because Franz Kafka is the Czech author best known in this country, with…
There’s a lot going on in The Catch, a world premiere that grew out of a reading at last year’s New Play Festival. Ken Weitzman’s script presents a swirl of ideas — some of them fairly obvious, but all explored in interesting ways. Preeminent among them is the well-worn concept…
Circle Mirror Transformation. At a small-town community center, four people are participating in an acting workshop run by Marty, who combines a little knowledge of theater with quite a bit of new-agey yearning. The participants are Marty’s husband, one-time hippie James; sexy Theresa, who spent time in New York and…
Playwright Michele Lowe writes well about art, and the central character in her Map of Heaven is an artist, Lena, whose paintings are maps of imaginary places, and who’s about to have her first big show. As the play opens, she consults in her studio with longtime dealer and gallery…
What a lark! What a plunge!” thinks Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as she steps exuberantly into her day, and that’s pretty much what I felt walking out of Curious Theatre after Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. The play is just so sweet, smart, honest and touching, such an absolutely delightful…
Hello, Dolly!Say hello to Hello, Dolly!, an old warhorse finding new life at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. The musical tells the story of a meddlesome widow, Dolly Levi, who makes a living connecting people. Ostensibly trying to find a wife for half-millionaire feed-store owner Horace Vandergelder, she’s actually plotting to snare…
I’ve always been a little suspicious of Fabio’s charm, his hand-kissing, and constant assertion of his Italianness, but he sure hit his stride this week in the Top Chef All Star Restaurant Wars. As his team’s maitre d’, he was warm, stylish, and intensely competent, charming the customers and displaying…
It’s no surprise that there’s no mention of cuisine in Czech Point Denver, the event series created around Opera Colorado’s production of Rusalka. Most people think of Czech food as heavy and uninspired. But that’s only when you look at it from the outside, or read descriptions in bland tourist…
Bedroom Farce. Bedroom Farce is the story of four couples and three bedrooms. The oldest pair, Delia and Ernest, are looking forward to a pleasant dinner and a quiet night. But their plans are upended by Susannah, the intensely neurotic wife of their socially obtuse son, Trevor. The depredations of…
I was surprised to discover that Jim Leonard’s The Diviners was written as recently as 1980. The play feels like a period piece, and not just because it’s set in the Depression. Buddy Layman, the central character, was brain-damaged by an almost-drowning at the age of four, during which his…
Visiting Golden Europe is like going to your Middle European auntie’s house for dinner on a Friday when you’re craving schnitzel, spaetzle or strudel. The Czech family that’s owned the place for fifteen years bustles around the kitchen as you eat, with the soft-spoken father periodically visiting the tables to…
Food is never a mere object, never just the thing in itself. Food always carries a story. Whether Cheetos or pepper, chocolate cake or honey-sweetened tea, a food item can evoke an entire culture, historical era or individual human life. When I think of Czechoslovakia, the country of my parents’…
What made Gilda Radner one of the all-time comic greats was her astonishing combination of fragility and complete disinhibition. She was raucous, sweet, lewd and confused. You really had no idea what she was likely to do at any given moment — spit, fall, collapse into uncontrollable laughter — nor,…
Operation Babylift, which flew hundreds of babies out of Vietnam after the 1975 fall of Saigon for adoption in the United States, has faded from national memory. But for actor Joe Wandell, born Hai Tran Thai and the son of a Vietnamese woman and a GI, it remains the central…
Bedroom Farce is the story of four couples and three bedrooms. The oldest pair, Delia and Ernest, are looking forward to a pleasant dinner and a quiet night. They chat peacefully about repairs to the roof, share a late-evening plate of pilchards on toast and cradle cups of bedtime cocoa…
The first act of Next to Normal is brilliant. As almost everyone surely knows by now, the subject is an unusual one for a musical: a woman’s long struggle with bipolar disorder. Mental illness is hard to dramatize. Most attempts degenerate into sob-sodden sagas about someone’s obsessive pill- and therapist-aided…
Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s musical Next to Normal won the Pulitzer for its authors — the book and lyrics are by Yorkey, the music by Kitt. Yet it began simply as an exercise for a musical theater workshop, one of those “show us everything you’ve learned in 10 minutes”…
December holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Solstice are forced to make their case to a bureaucrat intent on streamlining the calendar. Santa’s compulsive list-making may have far more sinister implications than most people realize. A festive dinner gets couples quarreling, while a young man fights his clock on…
Hello, Dolly! You’re looking for a warm, lively, music-filled, sweetly sentimental holiday season show — but you’ve had it up to here with Santas and Tiny Tims, as well as not-so-funny take-offs on Santas and Tiny Tims. Say hello to Hello, Dolly!, an old warhorse finding new life at Boulder’s…
In the film Dinner Rush — a terrific indie that everyone should see — the trendy young chef prepares a dish for an influential critic, played by Sandra Bernhard. We see him in the kitchen frantically throwing elements together, and the result is two angry red lobsters, feelers waving ferociously,…
Though I’ve managed to skip all Sugarplums, Scrooges and Child’s Christmases this year, I couldn’t avoid the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s A Christmas Carol. Director Philip C. Sneed’s readers’ theater approach — few actors, a cappella Christmas songs, minimal glitz, functional rather than exquisite sets and costumes — puts the focus…
