The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
I remember a friend once talking to me about a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The melancholy nobleman Jaques has just joined his exiled fellows and is excitedly describing a recent encounter: “A fool, a fool, I met a fool in the forest.” In some of the most…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
Actress Lucy Roucis, who’s playing the witch Addaperle in The Wiz, her thirteenth production with the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors’ League (PHAMALy), has a standup routine about the pros and cons of her Parkinson’s disease, which she recites softly during a break in rehearsal: Pro: Killer parking spaces. Con:…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
Because I grew up in London, where the ghosts of Roman soldiers, Saxon traders, Renaissance poets, Victorian merchants, Cockney fishmongers, bishops and queens and kings and murdered princes whispered beneath the pavement, it took me a long time to acknowledge that there was any such thing as Colorado history –…
Love is hard to find. If you find anything — anything at all — remotely resembling it, you should hang on for dear life. Or at least take a long, thoughtful second look, no matter how absurd the thing seems initially or how tempted you are to cut and run…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
An old woman lies dying as her son sits by the bedside. Tension vibrates between them. Each character offers a poetic monologue that feels a bit forced; when a playwright has someone gaze out above the heads of the audience and wistfully emote, the writing needs to be more powerful…
There are many, many ways for a production to be awful, and The Yiddish Are Coming, at the New Denver Civic Theatre, hits on just about all of them. It’s a cheap little venture — small cast, easy set and costumes, empty-headed concept — put together for the sole purpose…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
The Tennessee Williams one-acts at Germinal Stage are tone poems, mood pieces, as much about language as they are about character and action. They are also about love, loss and despair. Couples reach for each other but are unable to connect; each play ends in stasis. Like all great writers,…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
The scene is Deola’s dog-grooming salon, where Deola is also setting herself up as a psychic. Three of her friends meet here weekly to play bid whist, and on this occasion they are joined by a fourth, Edna, a newly divorced friend of Deola’s from Texas. Much of the first…
When Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was first produced in 1966, the idea of telling the story of Hamlet from the perspective of two minor players seemed truly daring. It’s less surprising now, but OpenStage’s production of Tom Stoppard’s play still yields intriguing moments. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, school friends of…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
Before the action begins, you contemplate set designer David Lafont’s rendering of a grimy one-room flat, filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. There’s a rolled-up carpet, an unusable gas stove, a toilet seat hanging below the ceiling and a porcelain toilet back leaning against a wall. A tennis racket…
Andrew Jorgenson — whom everyone calls “Jorgy” — has been running his New England Wire and Cable Company with integrity for decades, avoiding debt, providing decent jobs and helping keep his community vital and solvent. He’s supported in this by his loving longtime companion, Bea. Enter the vulgar, doughnut-craving Lawrence…
Crowns. The music in this piece– gospel songs and spirituals, church music with a touch of rap — includes such well-known pieces as “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” as well as several less familiar songs, and it is just as lively, moving,…
I enjoyed Crowns most when I closed my eyes and just listened. The music — gospel songs and spirituals, church music with just a touch of rap — includes such well-known pieces as “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” as well as several…
Fiction. Michael and Linda, both novelists, are long and happily married. But Linda has just been diagnosed with a brain tumor and told she has three weeks to live. She knows the kind of story almost everyone with a terminal diagnosis hears again and again — the exciting new treatment…
The first scene of Fiction pulls off a telling bit of trickery. Two people argue and banter over espressos in a Paris cafe. Playful, self-conscious and hyperliterate, they seem a long-married couple. But as they rise to leave the cafe, the woman extends her hand in farewell, and we realize…
