You rarely come across a genuine original, especially a truly original performance, but Jessica Austgen is one: sort of pouty, very precise in movement and speech, capable of both absolute gooniness and breathy seduction. I’ve never seen anything like her lean, mustached Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the Theatre Group’s Twelfth…
In Love’s Labor’s Lost, Don Adriano de Armado is almost always played purely as a buffoon, and an endlessly talkative one at that. So, like many of Shakespeare’s extravagantly comic characters with their time-bound puns and word games, he tends to be more annoying than amusing. But in this production,…
Unlike most actresses who play Olivia, Jadelynn Stahl has no time for the character’s usual posing and passivity. Instead, her Olivia is a luscious, black-haired beauty with a melodious voice and a gift for farce who seizes life by the scruff of the neck and shakes it till she gets…
When you’ve got either Baierlein or his wife, Sallie Diamond, on stage, you’ve got fine theater. Put them together as Bill and Betty, the hospitable couple in Greek Treats, and the result is an evening of pure pleasure. Entranced by their mythical off-stage friends, Jason and Medea, Bill and Betty…
John Sloan played the romantic, caustic, moody Berowne in Love’s Labor’s Lost with energy, wit, youthful exuberance and a genuine understanding of the language. His performance confirmed the expectation raised last year by his irrepressible Mairtin in A Skull in Connemara that this was an actor to watch…
As Collected Stories begins, a worshipful young writer comes to a famed and brilliant older author for advice. As the play progresses, the novice matures into a poised young comer, a surrogate daughter to and ultimate betrayer of her mentor. Heather Nicolson brought charm, vitality and intelligence to the role,…
Many a bold-faced name have given performances in Eve Ensler’s original Off-Broadway hit, but it was Margot Kidder who brought it to life in Denver. She gave one of the wildest, most raucous and also most generous-spirited performances ever to grace an area stage, giving new meaning to the phrase…
In her first appearance as Professor E.M. Ashford, Susan D’Autremont was appropriately chilly and forbidding. But she brought an almost radiant kindness to her second appearance, at the bedside of her protegé Vivian Bearing, finally calling on Shakespeare’s “flights of angels” to see the dying woman to her rest…
For Wit, Terry Dodd coaxed nuance and passion from a play that — though it reliably reduces audiences to tears — has always struck us as thin and smug. Her production created a connection to a deep and ancient sea of inner sadness that even Emma Thompson and HBO couldn’t…
I’d venture to guess that no one, but no one, would attend a production of Titus Andronicus except under duress, but this version is inviting and howlingly funny. Five actors played all of the roles, the set was a cunningly fitted-out van in the middle of an empty space, the…
Hicks has been working with August Wilson’s work for so long now that he almost seems to breathe these plays’ silences, words and rhythms. For King Hedley II, he brought together a fine group of local and out-of-town actors, elicited generous, full-hearted performances from them and balanced the performances one…
The dancing in this show provided all the customary joys of synchronized kicking and tapping, along with loads of wittily unexpected moves. In “I’ve Got Rhythm,” which served as the first-act finale, everything and anything became a musical instrument — miners’ helmets, pizza pans, a plunger and the dancers’ bodies…
Michael Brown’s set for Love’s Labor’s Lost provided all kinds of sweeps and nooks for playing areas, as well as embracing both the romantic and the rational. The outdoor scenes were all dappled, gray-green shadow, framed by beautifully twisting trees; inside, there were shelves of books and scientific instruments. And…
Kenn Penn created a gutsy, complex setting for Alchemy of Desire — one of those archetypal, steamy, swampy bayous, with vines reaching everywhere. Even the weathered wooden steps and platforms reached out into and divided the audience…
From the pieces of furniture worn by the actors in one number to the hanging rubber pullets and clock headdress of another, the costumes for When Pigs Fly were wildly, exuberantly over the top, a pure visual expression of the evening’s liberating energy…
When Pigs Fly was a collection of songs, puns, bits and skits performed by a collection of men in drag and directed by the estimable Nicholas Sugar. It was not only bring-down-the-house funny, but also a brave and poignant affirmation of the gay lifestyle and the joys of being out…
For the famed title number in the Boulder Dinner Theatre production of Singin’ in the Rain, director Ross Haley provided a kind of monster play pool for actor Brian Norber to stomp, sing and dance in. Front-row audience members were given slickers, and they and Norber enjoyed a mutual good…
Though the play itself was hard to embrace at times, a combination of Jacobean revenge tragedy and nineteenth-century melodrama that almost worked, Pierre’s production values were impeccable. Vicki Smith’s set design was elegant and expressive, and Pierre was worth attending just to watch the play of Don Darnutzer’s gorgeous lighting…
Broken Words is a collage of poetry and prose put together and performed by actors Anthony Zerbe and Roscoe Lee Browne. The result is a magnificent evening that includes the words of Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott and W. H. Auden, among others. Both actors are relaxed and consummate…
Though it was warm and celebratory, this Christmas Carol also gave Dickens’s melancholy depiction of poverty in Victorian England its due. The set was ingenious, the costumes sparkled, the child actors were appealing, and Randy Moore gave Scrooge a wistful edge. Take a child this year…
First came Patty Dobrowolski and Nancy Cranbourne in Mrs. Schwartz and Dober, a series of overlapping improvised monologues about the actresses’ lives, including Cranbourne’s bitter-comic re-enactment of her mother’s increasing dementia and her own incomprehension. Then there was the truly mind-boggling Ed: The World Made Dress, written and performed by…
Freak Train is a wild ride through good, bad and ugly forms of personal expression. Rappers, poets, aspiring bards, monologists, puppeteers, karaoke kings and every other permutation of performer turn up to meet, greet and, in some cases, confound the Bug Theatre crowd, which is usually composed of sympathetic fellow…
