Comic Potential, now at the Aurora Fox, takes flight on the performance of Jessica Austgen as robot JCF 31333 — or Jacie Triplethree. Alan Ayckbourn’s play is set in the near future, when the entertainment industry has descended even further into chattering idiocy than it has today. In a third-rate…
I don’t know about you, but I worry when I read this kind of thing in the notes a theater provides about a playwright — in this case, Caridad Svich, in the program for Alchemy of Desire/Dead-man’s Blues: “Svich sees Alchemy/Blues as an ideal example of her visceral connection to…
I know times are tight, but this won’t do. Watching Saturday Night Fever at the Buell, it was hard to remember that the auditorium had hosted such scintillating musicals as Kiss Me Kate, Swing and The Full Monty in the past couple of years. Saturday Night Fever feels grubby and…
The violence wrought by the Manson family continues to hold our imagination. There’s something about the confluence of evil, pop culture (the best known of the group’s victims was beautiful blond movie star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant) and the politics of the late ’60s that feeds our…
George Orwell’s reputation has been a little clouded of late. For decades after his death, he was seen as a kind of secular saint, a truth teller, a font of wisdom and decency whose writing brought desperately needed clarity to a murky world. But there were always grumblers, and the…
There’s a lot of charm, humor and zest in director Anthony Powell’s production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. It’s an odd play — short on plot and long on punning and wordplay, full of courtship and poetry, but for the most part skirting any deeper conception of love. Ferdinand, King…
Sylvia is about a middle-aged man, mildly depressed by his companionably routine marriage and meaningless job, who finds a stray pup in the park and brings her home. The pup, Sylvia, is enchanting, distracting, puzzling and endearing, and naturally, his wife doesn’t like her at all. The plot concerns the…
Titus Andronicus has always bothered Shakespeare scholars, some of whom simply refused to believe that the great man actually wrote the blood-drenched monstrosity. In his famous Tales From Shakespeare, Charles Lamb noted that Titus was “not acknowledged” by the critics whose assessment of dates he used, “nor indeed by any…
The school auditorium where Su Teatro has staged Roosters is an unprepossessing environment; it resembles a large black box. The sound is flat, and naked bulbs light the stage. But director Phil Luna has made ingenious use of the space, placing the audience on three sides so that the performance…
The year is 1940. A young couple meets on a train traveling east from California. That is, the man sits down next to the clearly reluctant woman, talks to her, jiggles his leg, eats noisily. He tells her he’d intended to be a pilot but has been discharged from the…
For years, writers Jane and Michael Stern have been eating their way across the country, frequenting places with names like Mamie’s, Al’s and the Busy Bee. They’ve described food and given recipes, but most of all, they’ve documented the way small-town eateries take their place at the heart of their…
I expect to be blown away by any August Wilson play. And I’m used to the fact that at the Denver Center, I’ll find skilled and generous-spirited actors, many of whom have held Wilson’s words in their mouths and felt his rhythms in their bodies over several years and through…
It’s a smart, funny, fantastical ride, with moments of real insight and some genuinely profound echoes, but I found the politics of Paula Vogel’s The Mineola Twins puzzling and a little disconcerting. Actually, my problem may be less with the script itself than with the way the playwright and director…
A Closer Walk With Patsy Clineis a tribute to the famed country singer; the slender plot is just an excuse for a string of songs. So everything hinges on the acting and singing talent of the actress playing the title role. Emily Walter has a strong voice and exuberant energy…
It’s fun to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet in an auditorium full of middle- and high-school students, as I did when I attended Openstage Theatre’s final dress rehearsal in Fort Collins. The students’ giggles at the raunchy bits, half-comprehending response to the milieu and genuine grief at the…
Since it opened two years ago with Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, Littleton’s Everyman Theatre has been one of the metro area’s best and most interesting small venues. Now the company has closed its doors, a victim of budget problems and shaky economic times. Everyman was housed in a fairly…
There’s a power to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that defies analysis. On one level, it’s a sentimental fable, a codification of the tamed bourgeois, Victorian Christmas that replaced the dangerous excesses of earlier generations, when drunken laborers took to the streets to sing, challenge the rich and turn propriety…
A new company called Rorschach Productions has put together a sequence of short plays that constitutes one of the more interesting evenings of theater around. It’s a combination of late-ish Samuel Beckett and very early Sam Shepard titled An Evening of B.S. In the first piece, Beckett’s Catastrophe, a director…
The Nomad Theatre’s Cinderella, directed by Deborah Curtis, is perfect for children. It’s slight, charming, tuneful and funny. There’s no uncertainty about the story or how it will end, so you can just settle in and enjoy the talented performers and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs. The evening opens with the…
Children of Eden is a very literal rendition of two Bible stories — those of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood. These narratives provide a good excuse for colorful props and costumes, a large cast and lots of ecstatic singing. Other than that, it’s hard to figure out a…
Rattlebrain Theater should have everything it needs to become a destination for the young and hip, a thronged local hot spot, the kind of place no in-the-know visitor to Denver would think of missing. It’s in a great location: the old D&F clock tower, slap-bang in the middle of the…
Nancy Cranbourne and Patti Dobrowolski, creators of the hysterically funny theater piece Two Woman Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization, are a Boulder institution. Or perhaps I should say “treasure.” Their newest offering, Mrs. Schwartz and Dober: Show and Tell for Grownups, is the first act on a double bill at the Boulder…
