One of the things I love about Buntport is how the company comes at a subject from a genuinely original, sideways angle. Dramas based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers are usually romantic swashbucklers. But the Buntporters, who create their scripts through a collaborative process, were more intrigued by news…
The Hot L Baltimore. Director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever have, by staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel. The play is a kind of extended tone poem about life in a seedy hotel filled…
I wanted to sing along to the pulse-quickening rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” that closes Woody Guthrie’s American Song — as the cast of this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production was urging us to do, and everyone around me was doing — but I couldn’t, because I was crying…
The man onstage (the character is actually called Man) begins by telling us he’s an unreliable narrator, and goes on to prove it in scene after scene. He tells a story about how he ran into Belinda, the girl he loved in high school twelve years earlier — or perhaps…
Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine for…
By staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel, director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever enjoy in Denver. The Barth is home to many indigent seniors suffering physical or mental disabilities; it’s one of…
Buddy…The Buddy Holly Story is basically a concert attached to a flimsy afterthought of a plot. Buddy Holly was one of the pioneers of rock and roll, and a huge influence on the musicians who followed him. He rose from obscurity as a country singer in Texas and then created…
Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine for…
I couldn’t help worrying when I heard that End Days, the new play being mounted by Curious Theatre Company, featured Stephen Hawking, Jesus Christ, a goth girl and a teenage boy who dresses as Elvis — not to mention 9/11. Such a semi-hip assemblage seemed to signify a young playwright…
The king in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine…
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Director Gavin Cameron-Webb has set this production in a summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917, just before America’s entrance into the First World War. The proceedings open with a long mime sequence, showing the flirtatious Jaquenetta being courted by her two swains — the absurd…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
Director Gavin Cameron-Webb has set Love’s Labour’s Lost in a house in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917, just before America’s entrance into the First World War. The set, by Andrea Bechert, is green and appealing, with topiary trees, two slim stone statues flanking the stage and, in the center, a…
I expected a lot more of Central City Opera’s fiftieth-anniversary production of West Side Story. I’ve been in love with Leonard Bernstein’s music since I first heard it decades ago, and over the past few years, I’ve listened to many gorgeous voices in the intimate and historic Central City Opera…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
Macbeth is one of the most familiar of Shakespeare’s plays, and with each new production, I look to see what the director has accomplished in the way of re-interpretation, depth of understanding or clarification. For this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, Lynne Collins has added a number of interpretive touches. Early…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
No one really knows whether there was a barber in Victorian London who slit his customers’ throats and passed their bodies down a chute so that his harridan lover could make meat pies of them. There are evocative snippets in an old newspaper, a couple of popular nineteenth-century serials, an…
I’m generally a fan of playwright Steven Dietz’s cunningly constructed, verbally agile and often thought-provoking theater pieces, but I was surprised by Honus and Me. Although it wasn’t listed as part of the Aurora Fox’s children’s series, it turns out that Dietz adapted the play from a book by Dan…
The Last Five Years. This intimate two-person musical involves the breakup of a marriage. When Jamie and Cathy met in New York, he was an aspiring writer and she an actress. Success came for him fast, while she continued to inhabit the dreary, ego-pummeling world of auditions and summer stock —…
This is how the New York Times’s 2003 review of Matt and Ben begins: “Is there anyone who isn’t sick of Ben Affleck, with his J.Lo and his Gigli and the salaams he elicits when he deigns to show up in Project Greenlight?” But therein lies my problem with this…
Thaddeus Phillips, who visits Buntport every year or so, is one of the most interesting theatrical forces around. His Lucidity Suitcase offers proof that all you need for great theater is creativity, imagination and performers with guts, talent and integrity — performers like Tatiana Mallarino and Phillips himself. Phillips approaches…
