The pacing lags when it should accelerate, and the actors’ delivery never matches the dialogue’s sharp brilliance, but the Upstart Crow Theatre Company’s production of The Rivals is a gorgeously costumed community theater production. In addition to providing Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play with an adequate staging, director Joan Kuder Bell…
Of the thirty-plus songs that constitute the musical revue Jerry¹s Girls, only one proves to be more than a display of vocal pyrotechnics or choreographic cuteness. Oddly enough, that distinction belongs to a tune that’s performed in drag by an actor whose ambling gait, ill-fitting gown and rouged face drew…
British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is often regarded as England’s version of Neil Simon. But while both master craftsmen have an affinity for rim-shot-style comedy — Simon started out as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, as did Mel Brooks and Woody Allen — they are careful to…
Perched atop a high, bare platform and isolated in a pool of bluish-white light, a search-and-rescue pilot talks about why she’s devoted herself to serving the needs of others even as she chooses to reside on life’s perimeter. Surveying the landscape below, the youthful Maxine (Kristin Erickson) quietly says to…
As wrongheaded as it is well-intentioned, CityStage Ensemble’s world-premiere production of Bad Money flounders from the very first scene and never gains much of a foothold thereafter. Ostensibly written in the style of film noir, which uses ambiguity to heighten mystery, cloak clever plot twists and slowly reveal character, David…
Eleven-year-old Miguel knows all too well that his journey into manhood will begin only when his father takes him on the family’s annual sheep-herding trip to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. When the crucial decision day arrives, though, Papa says Miguel must remain behind, forcing the disappointed youth to endure…
Hampered by pacing problems and a couple of lackluster opening scenes, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Show-Off doesn’t hit its stride until the end of Act One, when a mother-daughter debate over love and marriage kicks the proceedings into high gear. Penned by veteran vaudeville entertainer George…
For much of the past year, pundits the world over have wondered whether John Barton’s Tantalus would be a millennium-defining hit or flop. Much like the nature of Greek myths themselves, British theater legend Peter Hall’s twelve-hour-plus production proves less absolute, drifting between scenes of wonderment and rhetoric, feeling and…
Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the…
The truth-telling games and litany of deceptions that litter Conundrum State Productions’ version of The Maiden¹s Prayer might be tolerable if director Scott Gibson were to provide Nicky Silver’s play with an adequate staging. As it is, the two-act play languishes under a slew of problems, including vast passages of…
Poets are often harbingers of truth who rail about society’s ills from the relative safety of life’s cheap seats. They weather worldly rejection and familial contempt in the hope that something they say or do will better the human race. The knotted-up artistes at the epicenter of Craig Lucas’s Missing…
Mabel Tidings Bigelow has lived most of her ninety years contemplating her choices in life. The feisty Massachusetts salt aspired at an early age to be the first woman to swim the English Channel in the direction opposite to the one taken by Channel pioneer Gertrude Ederle (who swam the…
Cracking wise about this or that presidential candidate doesn’t seem so insulting in a country united in the belief that all politicians are laughingstocks. Unkind remarks about an artist of the moment, however, can have dire consequences in a society divided over aesthetic matters. Serge, Marc and Yvan have what…
What role does the artist play in a world that equates fame with ability? Are creative types required to defer to the paying public’s likes and dislikes? Or are they duty-bound to subvert and question convention, no matter what the cost? Despite some rough going early on, those questions ultimately…
When David Loper has trouble retrieving a crucial computer file for a valued client, he does what any office drone would — he decides to pull a hard copy of the file from the company’s central file room and fax it off as soon as possible. Shortly after he learns…
He’s produced some 65 Broadway shows, served as a boardmember and the American producer for Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and single-handedly changed Colorado’s cultural landscape by building the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Beginning this weekend, however, Donald R. Seawell, in conjunction with the RSC, will unveil what…
Fresh from a mid-morning rehearsal break, several members of Xpressions, a local troupe made up of youths between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, regroup at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center’s tiny upstairs theater for a scheduled run-through of the play they’ve written together. After listening to a few encouraging…
When last we left The Kentucky Cycle, the ill-fated Rowen and Talbert clans were embroiled in the same sort of inbred conflict that nearly tore apart the nation during the Civil War. As Robert Schenkkan’s nine-play epic continues in Part Two, the descendents of both families wage a different kind…
The time commitment required to see all of The Kentucky Cycle shouldn’t deter area theatergoers from sampling Robert Schenkkan’s nine-play, six-hour epic (the first half, which includes five of the short plays, opened a few days ahead of Part Two, which will be reviewed in this space next week). The…
The raw emoting and whiny arguing that plague many experimental productions are, thankfully, in short supply in Lucifer Tonite, Denver playwright Don Becker’s scathing ode to the vexations of science, religion and various other weighty subjects. Propelled by Nils Kiehn’s tour-de-force turn as a raconteur-ish Satan, the two-hour work stimulates…
Plagued by divisions between working folks and the well-to-do, Germany, like much of the industrialized world in 1928, teeters on the brink of socioeconomic collapse. Seemingly oblivious to this pervasive gloom — or perhaps too aware of it — a steady parade of movers, shakers and edgy dream-chasers keeps the…
Actors who portray Shakespearean villains, heroes or clowns are sometimes tempted to overinflate the dialogue for epic effect or add tiny mannerisms to humanize larger-than-life characters. But neither approach, by itself, does dramatic justice to men and women who are part invention, part human, and whose needs, wants and desires…
