It’s hard for me to review Suddenly Hope, currently playing at the New Denver Civic Theatre. On the evening I attended, the auditorium was filled with people who looked and sounded like my New York aunts and uncles or my cousins from Israel. Also, the musical celebrates a concept of…
Miners Alley is a brand-new theater company with a decade-long pedigree. After years in Morrison, artistic director Rick Bernstein recently moved the group to Golden, housing it in an intimate, brand-new theater above the Foss Drug Store. There, he mounted an interesting production of The Elephant Man last month. The…
Reaching for Comfort is, among other things, a study of dysfunction: dysfunctional birth families, dysfunction within marriage, a dysfunctional society. The play opens in 1980. John Lennon has been shot. Ronald Reagan is about to become president. We’re fully absorbed in the characters’ personal lives, but those lives are also…
Local playwright Melissa Lucero McCarl’s Painted Bread is a mixed bag. It’s full of passionate feeling, but I also found myself bored and restless for long stretches while watching it. Still, the ending was moving, and the patterns and colors of thought evoked by the play stayed with me. Painted…
The Paragon Theatre Company originally scheduled Michael Frayn’s Alphabetical Order as the last show of the 2002-’03 season. Instead, the company is showing a piece by David Sedaris and his sister, Amy, called The Book of Liz. I have no idea why Paragon’s plans changed, but as Hamlet so memorably…
Joel Fink has brought a strong directorial hand and some judicious cutting to Cymbeline. The result is a clean, clear, very watchable production. It’s hard to classify this play as comedy or tragedy, but a self-assured cast makes sure you know when to laugh, when to shiver in empathy and…
When Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, it was a bit of a shock in many quarters. The Italian writer considers himself a jester, and his plays are cheerfully but powerfully anarchic. He mocks authority, turns officialdom on its ear, unearths unpopular truths and speaks consistently…
By and large, when you have a good cast you have a good production of Hamlet, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s cast is very strong. Tony Marble gives an energetic, intelligent rendition of the title role; Hollis McCarthy is an interesting Gertrude. Tony Molina produces a convincingly power-hungry Claudius, and…
Pure goodness tends to be less dramatic than evil — or even ordinary human frailty. It’s a truism that Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost is far more interesting than his God. Gabriel’s Daughter tells the story of Clara Brown, a pioneering Colorado figure who endured slavery, was freed, and devoted…
Director Robin McKee has made two risky choices for her production of The Taming of the Shrew. She has presented the play as pretty much an unadulterated love story, with Kate and Petruchio clearly gaga for each other from their very first encounter, despite all their subsequent yelling and jousting…
My primary conclusion after seeing Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Enrique Granados’s Goyescas at the Central City Opera was that hearing singers of this caliber in a reasonably-sized auditorium with good acoustics, their voices flowing freely and undistorted by mikes, is a rare privilege. Soprano Emily Pulley’s song about the…
One of the things that distinguish Shakespeare from all of the playwrights who preceded him (and almost all who followed) is the emotional complexity of his characters — and, indeed, of his entire worldview, in which comedy and tragedy are inextricably intertwined. Some of the characters in his comedies are…
The outline of a black eagle on a red background painted on banners and signs dominates the action of Su Teatro’s Papi, Me and Cesar Chavez. This eagle is the symbol of the United Farm Workers, founded by Chavez in the 1960s to improve the lot of the men, women…
Chicago is a dark musical that scorns the very idea of redemption. The characters’ venality reflects the corrupt society that spawned them. The only innocent is a desperate, non-English-speaking Hungarian woman, who is ultimately hanged for her faith in American justice. Although the milieu is completely different — Chicago is…
Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri yields almost unalloyed pleasure. It’s about as light and frothy an opera as I can imagine, with a plot that reads like Gilbert and Sullivan at their sunniest and a number of songs as outrageously funny as they are melodically and rhythmically scintillating. Mustafa, the Bey…
A life in art requires absolute dedication. We all know about the obsessive writing and rewriting, the pain-filled, sweaty workouts in the ballet studio and the hours of instrument practice of the serious artist. It’s this kind of passion that’s on view in Take Me Out to the Ball Game…
This revival of 42nd Street is a musical-comedy lover’s musical comedy, a self-referential tribute to an artform that’s already self-referential and artificial at its most sincere. Writers Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble don’t even try to create multi-dimensional characters or to imbue the hoary old plot (bright-eyed ingenue becomes a…
I really wanted to be a lot more amused by The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) than I was. Some of the bits were clever, and the three appealing actors — Keith Hershman, C.J. Hosier and Eric Mather — worked so damn hard. Sadly, the audience was tiny on…
Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana is essentially a one-joke play. Fortunately, the joke is so savage, and it’s taken to such outrageous and unthinkable lengths, that the result is a startling and original evening of theater. It doesn’t hurt that the dialogue is always inventive and sometimes downright lunatic, or…
There’s a lot of excitement surrounding the production of The Elephant Man at the Miners Alley Playhouse in Golden. The playhouse didn’t exist until recently. What existed was the Morrison Theatre Company, which, under the direction of Rick Bernstein, mounted performances and offered acting classes in Morrison for over a…
When Mark Lundholm appeared at the Ricketson Theatre in Addicted: A Comedy of Substance last year, I was blown away by his talent as a performer but had mixed feelings about the material. It was often hilariously funny and sometimes insightful, but it was weighted down — particularly in the…
Jake’s Women, now being staged by the Nomad Theatre company, is a strange pastiche of a play. It’s clearly autobiographical, combining those snappy, comic Neil Simon one-liners with some thoughts on the relationship between fiction and life, as well as a serious attempt at self-analysis. The central concept is a…
