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,…
For its production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Roundfish Theatre Company has taken over an art gallery set in the middle of a desolate Denver block, with painted brick walls, odd found objects dangling from the ceiling, and scribbly artworks. The place smells faintly of mouse droppings, and every so often…
What is there to say about the organization that reinvented the circus, losing the kitsch and keeping the razzle-dazzle, removing tormented performing animals and substituting the extraordinary potential of the human body, giving us clowns with intellect and soul instead of rubber-nosed horn honkers in tiny cars? If you’ve seen…
As you enter Germinal Stage Denver, you’re greeted in the lobby by Bill and Betty — you know they’re Bill and Betty because their name tags say so. Once you’re comfortably seated, they take the stage to welcome you. They explain with great excitement that Jason and Medea are about…
When Pigs Fly harks back to the days when gay theater was mostly an unabashed celebration of the gay lifestyle and the joys of being out. In the 1960s, Robert Patrick — who later wrote the acclaimed Kennedy’s Children — was putting on exuberant skits, shows and revues in tiny…
I have been hugely resistant to Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning play, Wit. I sat dry-eyed during the last moments of the Denver Center production last year as sniffling, Kleenex fumbling and stifled sobs broke out all around me. I was mildly seduced by the recent HBO version starring Emma Thompson, but…
Promethean Theatre deserves a lot of credit for tackling Cymbeline. Despite moments of humor, insight and beauty, it is, in terms of plot, one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. It’s as if he’d taken bits and pieces of action from half his other works — Othello’s jealousy, the parent-doomed love…
From the moment you enter the LIDA Project’s theater space, your attention is focused on the set: a large square of earth that dwarfs the seats surrounding it on all four sides. Clearly representing a city lot, it reminded me of the bomb sites found all over London when I…
