Ethelyn Friend is a wonderful performer. Working alone in the intimate upstairs theater space of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, she holds her audience spellbound for over an hour as she tells the story of her two grandmothers, both classically trained singers. Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me consists of…
The Arvada Center’s staging of Neil Simon’s The Dinner Party makes for a pleasant evening of theater: mild, inoffensive, expertly staged and occasionally very funny. Two men appear in the chi-chi private dining room of an expensive French restaurant. The play’s contemporary, but the room, with its Fragonard-style mural, crystal…
For the first twenty minutes, I think I’m feeling alienated from what’s going on because a priest appeared on stage before the play and started to lead us in prayer — a real priest, not an actor in a clerical collar. There’s something disorienting about living in a culture so…
My Children! My Africa! may not be South African playwright Athol Fugard’s strongest and most complex work — it’s single-themed, talky and repetitive — but it fully communicates his largeness of spirit and his humanistic approach to the anti-apartheid cause. Beautifully performed by the Shadow Theatre Company, the play packs…
I don’t think I’d call this a good production of Shakespeare’s high-spirited sexual tease of a play. The problem isn’t that the Theatre Group’s Twelfth Night is staged on a shoestring — a lot of local companies overcome that limitation — or that many of the costumes (with the exception…
The set is an arrangement of black platforms and boxes. It stretches a long, long way back so that — despite the overall intimacy of the theater — an actor standing in the rear looks very small and far away. Periodically, grotesque forms limp, shamble or crawl around this space…
In Oscar Wilde’s famed novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist remains youthful and beautiful through all the decades of his evil life. Only his portrait, hidden in the attic, reveals the ravages of sin and time. Dorian Gray, the OpenStage musical production now showing in Fort Collins, worked…
Perhaps this will give you some idea of the effect of I Love a Piano: The morning after seeing it, seated in my hairstylist’s chair while he snipped away, I started humming “Cheek to Cheek.” Just as I was beginning to wonder if I was embarrassing him and should stop,…
Mark Lundholm is a terrific performer. He holds your attention effortlessly. He’s vital, funny and charming, and he also communicates strong emotion, moving freely from anguish to laughter and back again. (If anyone wants to excerpt this review for publicity purposes, this is where to stop.) But even though Lundholm…
I wasn’t in the best of moods when I took my seat in the Buell Theatre auditorium for The Music Man, but I was expecting to get jolted right out of my doldrums the minute the production started. I remembered Meredith Willson’s songs as catchy and appealing. (I’m sure I…
I walked into the Denver Center’s Stage Theatre harboring the darkest of suspicions. I’d read all about The Vagina Monologues — who hasn’t?–but somehow I’d managed to miss the show on its previous visits to Colorado. It sounded like a lot of other allegedly feminist phenomena that bother me. Take…
The Boulder Dinner Theatre’s version of Paint Your Wagon makes for an enjoyable evening, although I suspect it has very little to do with Lerner and Loewe’s original musical. This production is primarily a vehicle for A.K. Klimpke, a onetime favorite of melodrama audiences at the Heritage Square Music Hall…
Richard III think the main problem with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Richard III is that it’s such a monochromatic production. The play presents Richard’s murderous path to power, his brief possession of the crown and his bloody fall at the hands of the heroic Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII…
Cell Block Sirens of 1953 Cell Block Sirens of 1953is a campy take on women’s prison movies — both mainstream and pornographic — which plays on the gleeful general assumption that these places seethe with sadism and forbidden sex. The play begins with a drumroll. Then we see Hope standing…
Deborah Curtis gives a strong performance in the Nomad Theatre’s Shirley Valentine, and director Donald Berlin scarcely puts a foot wrong. But all of this talent presents itself in the service of a trite and shallow script. As the lights come up, we’re introduced to the Manchester kitchen of Shirley…
A Midsummer Night¹s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most successful plays, weaving together not only several plot strands, but disparate worlds: human and fairy, courtier and tradesman, Hellenic and Elizabethan. It’s magical, funny, good-humored with only the smallest trace of melancholy, and filled with sublime poetry. But it also appears…
This one’s easy to review: Just go see it. Oh, you want reasons — and I guess my editor needs a few more words. So here goes. From our first glimpse of the chorines in their glittery costumes and huge headdresses, we know that the Arvada Center’s Crazy for You…
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. — John Milton, Paradise Lost In Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, the mind — famously — gets a little help from other people. A man and two women find themselves trapped after…
Along with The Mikado, Pirates of Penzance is probably one of the silliest, happiest and best of Gilbert and Sullivan’s brilliant oeuvre, full of nonsense and punning, spilling over with gorgeous music. The story concerns a young man named Frederic, who, having been mistakenly apprenticed to a band of pirates…
First performed in 1947, Brigadoon was the earliest major musical hit for Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, the team that went on to create Camelot and My Fair Lady. Though the libretto for Brigadoon is slight and sentimental, the show is filled with wonderful songs — some as…
With Macbeth, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival company has accomplished something close to impossible: It has enabled us to see one of the great tragedies afresh. You attend a Shakespeare play with certain expectations. There are scenes that move you every time you see them, such as Shylock leaving the courtroom…
A talented young tapper makes it all the way from Wyoming to New York’s Carnegie Hall, but thanks to the malfeasance of a New York Times critic, his performance is a disaster. (“More stumble than silk,” sneers the reviewer the next day. “More slip than slide.”) From here, Thaddeus Phillips,…
