With all the parties and workshops and roundtables mashed-up with the shows, there are more than 350 events at this year’s Boulder International Fringe Festival, playing out in twelve days at eighteen venues. So how do you choose what to see? Fringe frontman Dave Ortolano says this year offers at…
The Laugh Track Comedy Festival had a strong debut last night at the Bug Theatre, featuring eleven local and out-of-state comics that slaughtered the audience with a blend of hyper self-loathing and irreverent politics. The festival continues through Saturday nigh, delivering a seemingly endless lazy susan of short films and…
The Laugh Track Comedy Festival will descend on Denver tonight, bringing three days of comedy performers and films that are sure to make your sides split. To help you navigate the thirty short films and over forty comedians, festival co-director Evan Nix sent us his top ten picks of events…
Brazilian music and dance are taking over Boulder for the first annual Colorado Brazil Fest, hosted by the Boulder Samba School. The three-day Brazilian culture immersion festival, from Aug. 2-4, will feature music and dance performances showcasing local talent, a variety of workshops, Capoeira demonstrations, and, of course, traditional Brazilian…
I’d almost describe Driving Miss Daisy as a courtly piece. Written in the 1980s, the play deals with racism, but in a muted, thoughtful way. There’s no big drama, no didacticism, no major political message, just an examination of the changing lives of three people in Georgia as they move…
Summer shows at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre are family-friendly events, intended to hold the wandering (and wondering) attention of children, and this year’s Cinderella is no exception. Created by Rodgers and Hammerstein for television in the 1950s, it’s charming, sweet and slight. Once again — as he did so notably for…
Claire and Emmy are fifteen, which means they’re right on the cusp: worldly and womanly in some respects — and certainly in their own minds — and confused children in others. They feel themselves wildly sophisticated as they chug down wine stolen from a parent’s liquor cabinet in Deirdre O’Connor’s…
As the long, hot summer of 2012 blazes on, the idea of Christmas in July starts to look pretty cool. But that’s not the only reason the cabaret-style Denver’s Dangerous Theatre is bringing back an abbreviated version of its, um, Christmas classic, Kentucky Claus, a slightly raunchy backwoods holiday story…
Sharing stories is possibly the saddest yet most uplifting aspect of facing public tragedy, and we’ve been hearing a lot of them in the last few days — about people who died too soon, saved lives through small acts of bravery, and whose own lives were changed forever in a…
Today Randy Weeks is president of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and executive director of Denver Center Attractions, but when he first met impresario Robert Garner in 1978, he was an undergraduate three courses shy of his marketing degree and looking for a summer box-office job. Garner, who…
The Edge Theatre Company gives the last few performances of It’s Just Sex this weekend, and the show is worth a visit. Not that the script is deep. It isn’t. But it is clever, funny and mildly titillating, and makes for perfect date-night entertainment…
Scholars have said many thoughtful things about Shakespeare’s women, but Tina Packer, who helmed the highly respected Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts for three decades, may be the best guide: She not only has the required analytic ability and the passion, but she has also inhabited these women, exploring their…
The Colorado Theatre Guild’s seventh annual Henry Awards will be presented tonight at the L2 Arts & Culture Center, 1477 Columbine Street. The festivities start at 6 p.m. with cocktails and a silent auction, followed by the official awards ceremony at 7 p.m.; an after-party will move the fun to…
In any given theatrical season, the likelihood of seeing David Mamet, Christopher Durang, or Neil Labute in the lineup is fair. The likelihood of seeing O’Neill, Miller, Beckett, Chekhov, Moliere, or (it goes without saying) Shakespeare is even better. But there is never a guarantee of seeing even one female-written…
In her standup appearances, Natasha Leggero critiques terrible pop culture while wearing evening gloves and pearls — but her witty, spot-on commentary takes the gloves off, at least figuratively. The comedian, who’s appeared on Chelsea Lately, Burning Love and Free Agents, is bringing her Servantless Household Tour to the downtown…
When we interviewed hometown-boy-gone-big T.J. Miller last week, he’d just gotten back to Beverly Hills and was preparing for a quick trip to Denver to debut his new Nix Bros. collaboration: the “Denver” video that premiered at Film on the Rocks Tuesday. After that, Miller headed straight to London –…
T.J. Miller loves Denver. He was educated by the rough blocks of Colfax, by the teachers at East High School, and by the comedians who came before him. After working odd jobs here and there to support his comedic obsession, Miller has finally established himself internationally on the comedy circuit…
Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is a farce about a farce. It relies on all those familiar farcical conventions — lots of doors with people going in and out of the wrong ones, a woman in her underwear and a man with his pants down around his ankles, sexual innuendo, blows,…
Art can be funny — sometimes inadvertently — but rarely do we see a show pointedly dedicated to funny art. But Art You Can Laugh At, curated by Eric Matelski and opening today at MacSpa, is an exhibit that revels in silliness: Its sole purpose is to make us guffaw…
The theater world is full of Richard IIIs quipping, posturing, lying and murdering their way through thickets of bodies to the English crown. The role is catnip to actors because it’s juicy and bigger than life, and the bloody monsters of twentieth-century history — Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet…
Foul-mouthed, hilarious, shameless standup comic Louis C.K. rolled out his latest direct-to-fans initiative last night, saying that he was selling tickets for his upcoming tour directly to fans, much in the same way he sold his special “Live at the Beacon Theatre” online for $5 late last year. The upcoming…
The setting is a functional living space, bare-bones but lovingly furnished with pots of gardenias. There’s a large bed in the center. We hear voices — some laughter, a woman complaining, a man soothing, explaining — and a couple emerges through a trap door. It’s a bit of a struggle…
