Germinal Stage Denver is leaving the building: Late last year, Germinal Stage founder Ed Baierlein announced that after 26 years in the now-crumbling north Denver theater at 44th and Alcott, he was selling the property and the forty-year-old company would vacate the space after one last golden season. See also:…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel Singer…
The Phamaly production of Fiddler on the Roof did something miraculous: It made me forget all the hackneyed productions I’ve seen over the years and reminded me of how great the music is, how evocative the story. “Sabbath Prayer” brought an image of my mother — now long gone —…
Though drag has been a part of the Denver County Fair’s programming since it started in 2011, the county fair-style beauty pageant has now become a full-on production. Crowned Miss Queen of the Denver County Fair 2011 and host of last year’s drag contest, Nuclia Waste will head up the…
Simply put, Lucha libre is fun. Stand up comedy is fun. Put them together, and you have fun overload. The idea came to me after the 2012 Too Much Funstival, during which we put together a few tag team lucha libre matches from the MxW Pro Wrestling promotions before the stand up comedy and music at a show. The crowd was entirely a comedy crowd, but they ate it up. They were loud and rowdy, cheering the good guys and booing the bad guys. Seeing this planted the seed in my brain that eventually sprouted Lucha Libre & Laughs.
While previous summers have given comedy fans a handful of semi-decent shows to look forward to, this August is so packed with top-shelf talent that it’s difficult to limit a list of the highlights to just ten shows. In the month ahead we have two female comedy duos, two local…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel Singer…
John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, first produced in 1971, is satiric, poignant, farcical, highly metaphorical and filled with poetic flights of language, strange juxtapositions and dream descriptions; it’s smart but falls apart in the second act; and it’s theatrical-realistic and original, but very much in line with the…
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even…
Last week Kanye West dropped a promotional video for his Yeezus album in the form of a (comedic?) tribute to the film American Psycho. The clip is a near mirror image of the unforgettable scene in which Christian Bale axes Jared Leto after torturing him with a pedantic speech about…
So a bear walks into a bar… This is no joke. On July 18, a full-grown black bear stopped in Lonigans Saloon in Estes Park. Owner Dave Callahan had just finished cleaning up the kitchen at 9 p.m., then took out the trash and headed home — missing the bear…
In a comparatively short period of time, Troy Walker one of Denver most sought-after comedians, a designation he’d likely dismiss with a modest scoff despite its accuracy. A regular at Comedy Works, Walker has opened for some of the most prominent comedians in the country on their way through our humble cow town and also served as a fine ambassador for our scene during recent trips to Portland’s Bridgetown Comedy Festival and in Los Angeles where he performed at UCB’s Put Your Hands Together. This week, Westword asked Troy about his favorites books, his influences and his time in law school.
While the UMS weekend was packed with sexy locals flaunting their primal lust for aesthetics and scenester flirting on and off the stage, on Saturday afternoon I was part of a significantly geekier and less arousing event: the UMS Funny Face Off, a panel of comedians debating comedy journalists at…
Jim Hunt is one of the most respected, well-reviewed and best-loved actors in the Denver area. He has given memorable performances as a wheedling tramp in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker; a foppish musician in Bach at Leipzig; the loving, baffled father of Eurydice, who has passed into the land of…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel Singer…
There’s no real hero in Richard II. In fact, everyone in the play is pretty wicked. Watching the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, I remembered a historian’s comment after a corpse assumed to be Richard III was found under a parking lot in Leicester. Richard’s indefatigable defenders had hoped this corpse…
Closer. Dan is an obituary writer at a newspaper, and he encounters Alice, a part-time stripper, when she steps in front of a cab and gets knocked down. He escorts her to the hospital. There Larry, a dermatologist, looks her over briefly. Some time later, Dan — now happily married…
The plight of Edward Snowden — still holed up at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on Monday — illustrates the Kafkaesque nature of national borders. He is in a transit area, which represents neutral territory. He’s not in Russia, so Vladimir Putin has no obligation either to consider granting him asylum or…
Near the beginning of Curtains, Jessica Cranshaw, the untalented and unpleasant star of Robbin’ Hood — a musical within the musical — collapses during a rehearsal, clearly the victim of foul play. A young cop is called in to solve the murder, and the mystery unfolds in a manner familiar…
Zombies have built their cultural cachet on the inherent dread of moldering, hungry death that stands up and comes after you. Still, the grisly cannibal corpses have always had a lighter side as well, and some of the very best zombie films, from Return of the Living Dead to Shaun…
The ultimate aim of good satire is to parody an unintentionally funny event as accurately as possible, while spicing it up with a little exaggeration and sarcasm. But sometimes the comedy gods throw you something so ridiculous, so shockingly unreal, that all you have to do is xerox it and…
Dozens of drag stars, burlesque dancers, comedians and musicians from all over Denver and the nation came out for a good cause on Friday: The fourth annual Apocalyptic Ball, themed “The Awakening” this year, raised funds for local AIDS organizations. For more photos from the evening, check out our full…
