I saw Yasmina Reza’s Art soon after it came out, on a visit to London with my daughter, Anna. Afterward, standing on the platform of the underground, we were accosted by a woman who had glimpsed us at the theater — an abrasive New Yorker — who wanted to know…
An O. Henry Christmas. Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark Card family shows and limp holiday parodies, this musical arrangement of two O. Henry short stories — “The Last Leaf” and “The Gift of the Magi,” created by Peter Ekstrom — is a refreshing option. “The Gift of…
William Gibson, who died recently at the age of 94, is best known for his play The Miracle Worker, and for making a star of the luminous Anne Bancroft, who played the lead on Broadway and later in the movie. The play tells the story of Annie Sullivan, a young…
I saw the Broadway version of The Producers when the touring company came to Denver four years ago. It was one of those shows you knew you had to praise: The New York critics were so excited about it that dissenting would make you sound like a bad-tempered provincial. And…
An O. Henry Christmas. Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark Card family shows and limp holiday parodies, this musical arrangement of two O. Henry short stories — “The Last Leaf” and “The Gift of the Magi,” created by Peter Ekstrom — is a refreshing option. “The Gift of…
Sometimes I don’t understand the decision-making at Germinal Stage Denver. I’ve had some of the most stimulating evenings of my life in this homey, cozy, unchanging little theater where — as the website blurb assures us — the actors are never more than thirty feet from your nose. I’ve seen…
Fat Pig. Neil LaBute’s plays are nasty, but they usually contain subtext, irony and ambiguity. Fat Pig has none of these. It’s flat and thin, a straightforward, almost schematic story with a quivering pink core. Tom, a shallow careerist male of the kind we remember from In the Company of…
Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark family shows and limp holiday parodies, Peter Ekstrom’s An O. Henry Christmas, now being staged by Miners Alley, is a refreshing seasonal choice. We all remember “The Gift of the Magi”: A young couple, dirt poor and madly in love, have no…
Ovid, otherwise known as Publius, has been banished from Rome and is traveling with Tiresias, standing at a crossroads, sticking out his thumb. Actually, he’s packed Tiresias in his bag, which the blind seer fiercely resents. In a fit of fury, Ovid burned the single copy of his epic poem…
Fat Pig. Neil LaBute’s plays are nasty, but they usually contain subtext, irony and ambiguity. Fat Pig has none of these. It’s flat and thin, a straightforward, almost schematic story with a quivering pink core. Tom, a shallow careerist male of the kind we remember from In the Company of…
Three misfit high school students in Salem, Oregon, come together on the debate society. Solomon longs to be a professional reporter and wants to reveal the right-wing mayor’s pederast activities in the school newspaper; Howie, a transfer student anxious to create a gay-straight alliance, is frustrated by his inability to…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Playwright Neil LaBute is a king of nasty, but I’ve also always thought of him as tough-minded, daring and original. Now that I’ve seen Fat Pig, though, I’m wondering whether I’ve been fooled. Is it just that nastiness almost always strikes us as clever; that we tend to think the…
The gang at Heritage Square Music Hall has invented a form of theater entirely its own — a combination of scripted and improvised lines, audience interactions, clever jokes and silly jokes that repeat in every show, and we’d be disappointed if they didn’t: What would be the point of a…
During intermission at The Glass Menagerie, I encountered a very beautiful girl in the ladies’ room — dark-haired, pale, slender, someone who might well be cast as the ethereal Laura Wingfield herself someday. She wanted to know if I liked the production. Yes, I said. She did, too, she said,…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross more than twenty years ago, but this study of unscrupulous salesmen pitching worthless plots in Florida is acutely relevant today. The hustlers who helped create the current financial meltdown by persuading thousands of working people to buy houses they couldn’t afford must be very…
It’s a few days before the election, and Charles Smith, the sitting president, is hoping for a second term. Trouble is, his poll numbers are in the toilet (or, as the script has it, “lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol”), he’s intensely incompetent, no one takes him seriously (even his Secret Service…
Les Misérables. This huge, sprawling musical is based on Victor Hugo’s novel, and the plot centers on the merciless pursuit of a freed prisoner, Jean Valjean, by a bitter police detective, Javert. In the course of the chase, which continues over several decades, we encounter everything from revolutionaries at the…
Braided Sorrow. No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set…
Michael Frayn’s brilliant Noises Off is one of the cleverest, funniest farces ever written. This is a play within a play — actually, a play outside a play. It depicts the struggles of a third-rate company touring the English provinces in a corny sex farce called Nothing On — lots…
Braided Sorrow. No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set…
