Two actors, a brother and sister, linger in the backstage area of a theater in a strange, unnamed country. There’s junky furniture, a round table with a painted rose at its center, a trunk covered with labels and a tall statue that could represent anything, godly or human, malevolent or…
I tried to watch English director Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on video once, but I gave up after thirty minutes or so. Maybe there’s something about the combination of wretched and unlikable protagonists, aimless activity, a snickering approach to violence and lots of splattered blood that’s…
The Denver Center complex hummed with activity last Saturday night. On the streets outside, cars circled aimlessly around the full parking structure. In the Buell, Tony Curtis maundered onto the stage in Some Like It Hot, and a stage away, playwright Martin McDonagh’s mean-spirited brothers tormented each other in The…
I must admit, I don’t see the point of Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, a play about a pair of hateful and hate-filled brothers, set in a bleak Irish village called Leenane (this is the third of a trilogy of plays set in this place). One of the brothers, Coleman…
Most of us remember the 1952 movie version of Singin’ in the Rain for the inspired partnership of Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly and the infectiously upbeat songs of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. The plot revolves around Hollywood and the film industry just as America was discovering talking…
The Full Monty began as one of those small, unassuming British movies about unemployed men in a gritty, industrial town — in this case, Sheffield, Yorkshire. These workers see their neighbors, wives and girlfriends rushing to a Chippendales-style male strip performance, and they decide to raise some money by staging…
There are evenings when my job seems like the best in town, and the Shadow Theatre Company’s Lady Day at Emerson¹s Bar and Grill provided one of them. The lights come up on a muted gray-green background, a piano, a nosegay of gardenias on a round table. Piano notes sound,…
Time, that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week, To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives. — W.H. Auden “My husband wanted to leave,” an attractive blond woman told me during the intermission for The Skin of Our Teeth,…
There is simply no way of explaining musical genius on the order of Mozart’s, and I think that’s the puzzle at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s glittering and celebrated play, Amadeus, which received all kinds of awards and attention when it first opened in London, in 1980, and again four…
As far as I can tell, David Lindsay-Abaire, author of A Devil Inside, has a good education, an effervescent imagination, a lot of smarts, a highly developed comic sense — and nothing much to say as yet. The play is full of ugly, violent imagery, but none of its deaths…
There’s something about the idea of separating the mingled good and evil within each of us that won’t let go of the imagination. Part of the appeal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the early seasons lay in the character of Angel, the vampire with a human soul, the dark,…
When a writer wants to explore complex issues, it makes sense to pick a simple format. Lee Blessing has set his 1988 play, Two Rooms, in — appropriately — two rooms and limited the cast to four. There’s Michael Wells, held hostage in a dank cell in mid-1980s Beirut. And…
Alone on stage at the Aurora Fox, working on a set designed as a grimy basement, actor Greg Price is in almost constant motion, shuttling between the phone on his desk, a wall intercom and the red phone of an alarm box adorned with a huge blinking red light. From…
Dorian, the musical version of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray now playing at the Buell, boasts some of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time. Unfortunately, everything else about the show is mediocre: It features stock characters, a dumb script, a pedestrian plot, some major…
The scene is a flowery, chintzy little apartment; a woman is reading on the couch, a man writing at a desk. Pretty soon they’re bickering. They rehash past relationships and their own history (they seem unable to agree on how they came together), discuss and dismiss the possibility of a…
Ethelyn Friend is a wonderful performer. Working alone in the intimate upstairs theater space of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, she holds her audience spellbound for over an hour as she tells the story of her two grandmothers, both classically trained singers. Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me consists of…
The Arvada Center’s staging of Neil Simon’s The Dinner Party makes for a pleasant evening of theater: mild, inoffensive, expertly staged and occasionally very funny. Two men appear in the chi-chi private dining room of an expensive French restaurant. The play’s contemporary, but the room, with its Fragonard-style mural, crystal…
For the first twenty minutes, I think I’m feeling alienated from what’s going on because a priest appeared on stage before the play and started to lead us in prayer — a real priest, not an actor in a clerical collar. There’s something disorienting about living in a culture so…
My Children! My Africa! may not be South African playwright Athol Fugard’s strongest and most complex work — it’s single-themed, talky and repetitive — but it fully communicates his largeness of spirit and his humanistic approach to the anti-apartheid cause. Beautifully performed by the Shadow Theatre Company, the play packs…
I don’t think I’d call this a good production of Shakespeare’s high-spirited sexual tease of a play. The problem isn’t that the Theatre Group’s Twelfth Night is staged on a shoestring — a lot of local companies overcome that limitation — or that many of the costumes (with the exception…
The set is an arrangement of black platforms and boxes. It stretches a long, long way back so that — despite the overall intimacy of the theater — an actor standing in the rear looks very small and far away. Periodically, grotesque forms limp, shamble or crawl around this space…
In Oscar Wilde’s famed novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist remains youthful and beautiful through all the decades of his evil life. Only his portrait, hidden in the attic, reveals the ravages of sin and time. Dorian Gray, the OpenStage musical production now showing in Fort Collins, worked…
