In his many short stories, John Cheever skimmed the surface of bourgeois American family life, laying bare the pretensions of suburban culture and dissecting the hopelessness of its materialism in nicely served, if thin, slices of life. In A Cheever Evening, playwright A.R. Gurney stirs together a number of scenes…
John Patrick Shanley’s poignant Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a three-scene argument for love–the kind of love between a man and a woman that penetrates individual isolation via mutual kindness. And it’s delivered in an unusual package as persuasive as it is hard-edged–partly because the play is well-written,…
It’s almost impossible to put on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice today; if one excises the loathsome anti-Semitism from the play, one can’t help but do violence to its original meaning. Laurence Olivier managed to virtually reconstruct the play’s intentions by cutting lines and casting all the characters except Shylock…
The local husband-and-wife acting team of Moira Keefe and Charlie Oates couldn’t be much different from each other. Yet they have managed to stay married for nine years, and they share their often dark and mostly hilarious secrets in the show they wrote and perform together, Staying Married. This is…
Arthur Miller appears to have gained some wisdom in his old age. A man has to mature a long way in his understanding of the world and of women to write a play as insightful and kind as The Last Yankee. And the Denver Center Theatre Company has imported the…
The plays that George Bernard Shaw wrote in the late nineteenth century were popular because they were funny–and because, despite Shaw’s socialist politics and Darwinian outlook, the societal conventions he appeared to flout were actually refined under the scalpel of his wit. With a few notable exceptions, Shaw’s plays remain…
Over the past year, many of Denver’s most powerful and insightful theater productions have been political in nature, displaying a passion for justice without resorting to propaganda: My Sister in This House, Six Degrees of Separation, Star Fever, Parallel Lives, God’s Country, The Interrogation, Oleanna, Death and the Maiden and…
Resignation to suffering is the best playwright Hugh Leonard can offer as resolution to the accumulated pain of a lifetime. But the strength of his humanist viewpoint in A Life lies in its cultivated compassion. The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of this gentle reflection on one man’s life and the…
Director Israel Hicks zeroes in on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with fervor and style in his new telling of the classic tale at the Denver Center Theatre Company. He has the temerity to set the greatest of Shakespeare’s cautionary tales in old California (instead of old Verona), with Spanish dons…
Toward the end of John Guare’s tragicomic Landscape of the Body, one of the characters tells us that the mystery is always greater than the solution. This sentiment (seen most recently in the movie thriller Seven) may be oh so au courant, but it may also be a dodge–a way…
Thomas Merton, it’s fair to say, was an individual worth writing a play about. An American monk who lived a hermetic life out in the woods, he nevertheless kept up a mighty correspondence with many of the greatest writers of his age during a literary career that ran from 1941…
It may be juvenile, brash and silly here and there, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ultimately transcends its own naivete with delightful exuberance and dazzling production values. From lyricist Tim Rice’s humor to Webber’s sweet pop tunes to the sophisticated lighting and set designs, the…
The third play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Broadway Bound, is only ankle deep. But the wading is both more pleasant and more interesting than in the first two plays in the series, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. This last play is about writing–the desire, the tedium and the…
In a Pentecostal church near 11th Avenue and Acoma Street in downtown Denver, a corps of volunteer carpenters is busy building the only Elizabethan-style stage in Denver–and a one-of-a-kind theater arts facility. The church, where a small congregation still holds services on Wednesdays and Sundays, was recently purchased for $200,000…
The Aurora Fox Theatre’s striking production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus proves once again that one can abhor the sentiments of a playwright and still find depth, meaning and mastery in his work. But it takes an ingenious performance or two, luminous directorial insight and a willingness from the audience to…
Reviving the quintessential Fifties drama is no easy matter; so many of the values and beliefs of the period seem dated. The best approach is to be as true to the period as possible. Director Jeremy Cole takes Terence Rattigan’s charming Separate Tables–two linked one-acts from the England of the…
One can respect a play and hate it at the same time. Drawn in to the premise completely, you can ultimately feel manipulated, and finally angry. Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is just such a play–capable of awakening the darkest revenge fantasies and then convincing its audience that there…
Parents are difficult in every culture. If they’re kind, loving people who only want the best for their adult children, they can be pretty darn willful about just what that “best” might be. So grown-up offspring have to find ingenious ways of asserting their own independence while still preserving their…
It’s impossible to beat Alfred Hitchcock at his own game. Nobody could remake Dial “M” for Murder as a movie and make it work. But Frederick Knott’s 1950s crime play still crackles oddly on the stage. And Hunger Artists’ stylish production, though intermittently absurd, translates film-noir technique gracefully to the…
Once in a while a glimpse of something special comes through in a theatrical event. And Voices of the Children: The World of Brundibar is special. This is community theater as it should be: beautifully mounted, intelligent, moving and a little raw around the edges. Because the play is about…
When you think of Edward Albee, the word “hopeful” does not readily leap to mind. The author of The Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All Over, among many other dark dramas, lashes out at human cruelty, egotism and the inability to communicate across gender and class lines…
The great movie and Broadway musicals of the 1930s seem both naive and extravagant in hindsight. Depression-era folk wanted to lose sight of their dreary poverty in visions of glittery gowns and lighthearted romances. The humor in these shows was usually slightly naughty but never really earthy; the brash showgirl…
