Hard to say if it was dance, theater, circus or dressage, but whatever it was, Cheval Théâtre provided an astonishing evening of entertainment during its extended Denver run last fall. Sitting in the audience, you sensed some mysterious, Cirque du Soleil-influenced story must be responsible for the goings-on in the…
Denver should be grateful for the foresight and dedication that originally gave birth to the Denver Center Theatre Company, which has assembled a talented group of artists and every year offers an eclectic and intelligent mix of plays — classic and contemporary, angry and light, humorous and tragic. The production…
Coyote on a Fence opened soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and it says much for the production that it retained its strength and seemed both true and important in the face of those terrible events. Bruce Graham’s play examines the death penalty in America and concerns two men…
We don’t quite know what to make of Thaddeus Phillips, who managed — all by himself — to perform two full-length Shakespeare plays, King Lear and the Tempest, during one strange and coldly electrifying evening at Denver’s Buntport Theater and who later amazed a sparse crowd at the historic Rossonian…
Around Christmastime, the Hunger Artists brought James Joyce’s The Dead to lyrical life amid the gleaming lamps and dark wood of the Byers-Evans House Museum in Denver. The reading was adapted and directed by Jeremy Cole, and it was a jewel, glowing and multi-faceted, communicating all the wistful power of…
This is a play about the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Or about a man playing that survivor on a stage. Then again, the man may be Adam, tending the Garden of Eden. There’s a woman directing the play. Sometimes she’s helpful, sometimes mocking, sometimes downright capricious. Maybe she’s…
It’s impossible to imagine anyone matching Nancy Cranbourne’s lunatic genius in Two Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization: A Hormonal Cabaret. Since she’s also a dancer, her comic bits — most of them created through improvisation — involve her head, her heart, her soul, her mind, and every nerve and muscle of…
There’s a lot of acting talent in Denver, so best actor is a hard call to make. How do you compare a larger-than-life performance like Bill Christ’s Cyrano with Gene Gillette’s affecting portrayal of a skinhead in Coyote on a Fence? Or to Brett Aune’s squawks and flutters in The…
Director Ed Baierlein knows his onions. For his production of the Edgar Lee Masters classic Spoon River Anthology at the Germinal Stage, he kept the production values low-key and snared the services of six fine and very different actors. The script is less a play than a collection of monologues,…
Rachel York is a spectacular performer, larger than life and meriting a boxload of descriptors: beautiful, passionate, volcanic (yet subtle), able to rage or weep on the instant, mesmerizing. The finest element in a very fine production of Kiss Me, Kate, York gave Cole Porter’s brilliant score everything it required,…
“Over the top” doesn’t begin to cover Marc G. Dalio’s performance as Belle’s oafish and ultimately rejected suitor, Gaston, in Beauty and the Beast. He came across like a huge, muscled and inexplicably animated cardboard cutout, prancing and preening, utterly in love with himself, his grin revealing teeth as large…
There’s a reason that I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change! has been running forever: In it, four attractive, talented and energetic young people whip through the joys and traumas of dating and coupling (and re-coupling) in scene and song. There are a couple of insightful comments and touching moments,…
Donald Margulies’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Dinner With Friends, muses on marriage and the substitute families that married people form with other couples. Two people, immersed in their own misery, separate. Their close friends — a pair of trendy and dedicated foodies — immediately sense the cracks in their own relationship…
Normally, when you find yourself paying attention to technical details in the theater, it means you’re bored and the production’s a flop. Not so with The Immigrant. Lighting designer Don Darnutzer’s effects were both lovely in themselves and integral to the musical’s theme: transparent skies with clouds flowing across them,…
Playwright Martin McDonagh has a wicked way with words, but he also understands that they’re only one of the ways theater communicates. Mick Dowd, the protagonist of A Skull in Connemara, is a handyman who has to dig up old skeletons in the village cemetery every year to make room…
The Everyman Theatre Company has done wonders with the bland, inhospitable 1950s-style office building it calls home, making one room into a snack area, another into a focused and inviting theater through the use of platforms and artfully placed lights. As for the sets, they reveal the same vision and…
Heritage Square offers fun in down-home style – first with food in a large, friendly dining room, followed by an outrageously hammy melodrama acted by seasoned and talented performers who are clearly enjoying themselves. These productions aren’t weighted down with either concepts of high art or the huge costumes, multimillion-dollar…
Songbird Lannie Garrett is the ultimate survivor, and her recent incarnation as Gloria Half Gaynor displays her savvy show-biz instincts. Not content with having created a Patsy Decline alter ego, Garrett now transforms herself into a disco diva one night a week, backed by a seven-piece band and singing all…
Bud Bradshaw makes an imposing woman. He, er, she, is 300 pounds and nearly seven feet tall in custom-made platform heels and towering wig. But the most unusual thing about Bradshaw is the fact that she, er, he, has a degree in quantum physics. He doesn’t much like to talk…
Not content with winning hearts and saving pooches with his appearances on cable TV’s Emergency Vets (on Animal Planet), funnyman/animal doc Kevin Fitzgerald stages an irregular (very) variety show that seems to have found a home on major holidays at the Comedy Works in Larimer Square. What’s not to love…
Most of the humor on Denver’s Channel 8 is inadvertent: It’s tough to take those endless city council committee hearings seriously. And while the people featured in @altitude: Life in the Mile High City aren’t putting on an act, either, the production team definitely takes an entertainingly skewed view of…
As a youngster, Denise Nickerson participated in projects that have garnered her eternal fame among members of two separate cults: She was in the cast of the 1960s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, and she co-starred as Violet Beauregarde, the obsessive gum-chewer who turned into a giant blueberry, in Willy…
