From its unappetizing title to its use of a narrator Lockstock, a police officer who pontificates humorously about exposition, metaphor and politics for the benefit of a quintessentially Dickensian orphan named Little Sally Urinetown is a self-consciously anti-musical musical. The songs are tuneful, varied and appealing, and almost every one…
With Season’s Greetings, estimable and prolific English writer Alan Ayckbourn has created an antidote not only to the usual Christmas saccharine, but also to all of the half-baked, skit-filled attempts to make the holiday hip. The play shows a dysfunctional middle-class family gathering for their annual celebration. These people have…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
I want to like Arthur Miller’s plays — and I do like his politics. But the truth is, I have trouble with Miller even at his best — with his lack of humor, ponderousness and stultifying self-pity, with his dated tropes and florid language. And The Price, currently playing at…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
I had a great time at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre’s Crazy for You, and now I’m trying to figure out just why. First and foremost, I suppose, were the songs. You know how it is with musicals, especially those from the first half of the twentieth century, on which this show…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
The morning after I saw tempOdyssey, I was at the Boulder Farmers’ Market buying chicken parts for stock. “These are probably still warm,” said the poultry man, handing me a plastic bag of feet. “The chickens were running around on them yesterday.” This was an image I didn’t particularly want…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
With its battered floors and bright galleries, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is an unusual venue for theater, but in some ways a very fitting one for Lee Kalcheim’s Defiled, or the Convenience of a Short-Haired Dog. In the first gallery — which you must pass through to reach…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
Almost everything about OpenStage Theatre’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan is superb, with the exception of the director’s basic concept — and that’s a very big exception. The cast, led by Jessica V. Freestone as Joan — a strange, stubborn young peasant woman of fifteenth-century France who emerges…
The novel Phantom of the Opera was written by Gaston LeRoux in 1911. Although it has inspired several films, most people know the story from the massive, windy Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, with its throbbing score and astonishing special effects. Before that version hit, playwright Arthur Kopit and songwriter Maury…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
It was the end of the week, and I was so tired I was leaning on my friend’s shoulder as we waited for Someone Else’s Life to start. I could tell this was going to be a classy production by Conundrum. All the signs were there: the high-quality stock on…
As I was going up the stair I saw a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away. — Hugh Mearns In Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, an unworldly young governess is employed by a wealthy Londoner to…
Amadeus. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s glittering, sumptuous version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus focuses more on a clean, elegant delivery of the text than on the passion at the play’s core. The central figure, Antonio Salieri, was the best-known composer of eighteenth-century Vienna, an upright man dedicated to serving his…
The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of The Weir is the third I’ve seen in six years, and it’s easily the best and most moving. One reason for this is director Terry Dodd’s strong and nuanced sense of place. The play is set in a rural pub in County Leitrim, Ireland,…
Occasionally, it’s really nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang, now at the Playwright Theatre, posits…
Amadeus. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s glittering, sumptuous version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus focuses more on a clean, elegant delivery of the text than on the passion at the play’s core. The central figure, Antonio Salieri, was the best-known composer of eighteenth-century Vienna, an upright man dedicated to serving his…
Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, first published in 1890, is a play about the havoc wrought by an out-of-control woman, a woman who’s torn and driven by impulses she herself cannot understand or control. Hedda combines a certain romantic magnificence — think Shelley and Byron, think Emily Bront’s wild, wild Cathy…
The Denver Center Theatre Company has staged a glittering, sumptuous version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus that focuses more on a clean, elegant delivery of the play’s text than on the passion at its core. The central figure, Antonio Salieri, was the best-known composer in eighteenth-century Vienna, an upright man dedicated…
