When he was a student at Yale in 1974, Walton Jones created The 1940’s Radio Hour, a tuneful, low-key Christmas charmer. Jones went on to a career in writing, directing and teaching, eventually taking over the theater division at Colorado State University. There he wrote a sequel: The 1940’s Radio…
The Diary of Anne Frank. The Denver Center Theatre Company has mounted Wendy Kesselman’s rewritten version of The Diary of Anne Frank, the 1955 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett that not only sugarcoated the horror that drove Anne into hiding and eventually destroyed her, but — in deference to…
Forget the 1950s play and movie about Anne Frank’s diary, the generations of schoolchildren assigned to read the book, the myths that have arisen around the image of Anne Frank herself, the controversies about the way she’s been represented. Just focus on Anne Frank’s words. After all these years —…
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a kind of thespian hell, in which actors who are clearly capable of so much more are stuck forever in stale shows as punishment for being bad in some way. If so, Plaid Tidings definitely qualifies. There are a few good things about this holiday…
For Better. Karen has just become engaged to Max. She’s met him face-to-face only once, but they’ve conducted a three-month relationship via cell-phone conversations, texting and instant messaging. Everyone in Karen’s small circle —- sister Francine, brother-in-law Michael, old friend Stuart (who’s secretly in love with her) and Francine’s best…
After you’ve finished your dinner and listened to the usual pre-show stuff about sponsors and visiting groups, out of the corner of your eye you see an old man shlumping around the stage, checking furniture, fiddling with props. Minutes go by without much more happening, and the audience continues to…
By 8 p.m., the place is jammed. Some in the audience look as young as high-schoolers, while others seem to be college students; there are couples, gay and straight, and a scattering of older folk. People greet each other and make plans for post-theater drinks. But they quiet down once…
For Better. Karen has just become engaged to Max. She’s met him face-to-face only once, but they’ve conducted a three-month relationship via cell-phone conversations, texting and instant messaging. Everyone in Karen’s small circle —- sister Francine, brother-in-law Michael, old friend Stuart (who’s secretly in love with her) and Francine’s best…
Karen has just gotten engaged to Max. She’s met him face-to-face only once, but they’ve conducted a three-month relationship via cell-phone conversations, text and Instant Messaging. Everyone in Karen’s small circle — sister Francine, brother-in-law Michael, old friend Stuart (who’s secretly in love with her) and Francine’s best friend, Lizzie…
Macbeth. Setting Macbeth in the old West should work. From what we know, eleventh-century Scotland was a violent and lawless place, a place where the dirty, drunken louts and desperate whores of our own frontier days would fit right in. Unfortunately, director Geoffrey Kent’s vision is far too literal and…
This production of Macbeth, the first directorial effort by actor and fight choreographer Geoffrey Kent, promised to bring new life to Shakespeare’s tragedy by setting it in America’s frontier West — not the West of national myth, enshrined in John Wayne movies, but the grimmer and more violent terrain of…
Guy, now in his early forties, has a habit of loving and leaving his women. He holds out promises of long-term commitment but tends to vanish when things get serious or difficult. Shortly before his planned marriage to an almost-23-year-old nurse, he decides to look up four of his past…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
The setting is a hovel in England’s Cambridgeshire fens, a flimsy wood structure that offers only the barest protection from the elements, both natural and human. The protagonists are a pair of gardeners who have lost their jobs at Cambridge University’s Christ Church College — Wattmore because of accusations concerning…
The curtain call saddened me. As the performers gathered on stage looking jacked up and happy, audience members were already pushing along the aisles and heading for the doors. I could understand their impatience: It had been a long and unsatisfactory evening. At the same time, I think it’s rude…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
As I was going up the stairI met a man who wasn’t there.He wasn’t there again today.I wish, I wish he’d go away. Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a strange, hour-and-some-long monologue. It contains passages about both a sad little boy and a failed love affair, and some viewers…
My Old Lady begins like a clash-of-cultures comedy of manners, as Mathias Gold, a penniless, middle-aged American, enters the stylish Paris apartment he’s inherited from his father and discovers the apartment’s one drawback: Under a typically French agreement called a viager, the place comes with its previous owner, who is…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
Any play by John Patrick Shanley is worthwhile, but Defiance is a far slighter script than other works of his that I’ve seen. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged by the Denver Center Theatre Company in…
In 1936, the year it was written, You Can’t Take It With You would have been described as zany or madcap. It’s about the doings of a dotty, vaguely artistically inclined family. Penelope Sycamore writes plays because someone once left a typewriter on the doorstep. Her husband, Paul, makes fireworks…
How I Learned to Drive. “Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her…
