A man stands alone on the small square stage of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, a gun to his head — except that the gun is really his own hand. He tells us that he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, that we in the audience are ghosts,…
In choosing to mount Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, the Trouble Clef Theatre Company has taken on a hugely ambitious project and, to a large extent, has succeeded with it. Written in the early 1980s, Sunday in the Park is a musical about art, its place in…
The central joke in the ’40s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace concerns spinster sisters Abby and Martha Brewster, who are pillars of the local church, much loved in their community, and always happy to provide soup for the sick and hospitality to the lonely. They live with their nephew, Teddy,…
Littleton’s Everyman Theatre Company is mounting a skilled and lovingly detailed production of a play that ultimately may not be worth the actors’ or the director’s time. The beautifully realized set is a young girl’s bedroom, with apple-green walls, shelves full of books and bric-a-brac, an Exercycle, a trio of…
Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure! — from a White Rose leaflet Germany’s White Rose movement served as a small, clear candle shining during a murky, terrifying time. Where did a group of students acquire the courage and independence of thought to…
In Spoon River Anthology, the unquiet dead of a fictional small town come back to speak. They are the characters imagined by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915; his free-verse anthology was later adapted for the stage by Charles Aidman and produced on Broadway in 1962. Today, Spoon River Anthology is…
The kettle had had the last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star. There…
The Theatre Group’s version of Cabaret is heavily influenced by Sam Mendes, the celebrated English director who revived the musical in New York a few years ago to a chorus of critical praise. That run still continues. It places more emphasis on the seedy viciousness of the milieu than either…
Brother Mine is a well-intentioned play that explores serious topics. Malcolm, the protagonist, is a young black man who was given up for adoption by his jazz-musician father and raised by a loving white family. He struggles with issues of identity and community, while his much-loved older brother, Anthony, has…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Hamlet takes a while to jell — until after the intermission, in fact. There are good moments before that, but not enough of them; there are also moments bad enough to provoke giggles. Take the earliest scenes, in which the watchmen and Hamlet’s…
You have to like In Search of Eckstine: A Love Story: The cast is extraordinarily affable, personable and energetic, and the music is so seductive. That’s not to say, however, that this Shadow Theatre Company production is perfect. The script, by Jeffrey Nickelson and Hugo Jon Sayles, has its charm,…
There are weaknesses to the musical version of Mark Harelik’s play The Immigrant. The dialogue is sometimes flat-footed. The plot holds few surprises, and there’s no real arc to the action. The songs are uninspired, and one of the four castmembers has a voice more powerful than pleasant. As a…
Nobody really expects a musical to have incisive dialogue, profound meaning or an interesting plot — though some of them do. But what a musical really can’t do without is music (clever lyrics help, too), and the stuff Carol Hall composed for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is, for…
It caused me to spend a restless night thinking about the apparently intractable problems of race relations in America, so I have to assume Spinning Into Butter succeeds as a play on some level. On the other hand, I found large chunks of playwright Rebecca Gilman’s dialogue intensely irritating –…
It’s hard to watch A Streetcar Named Desire as if you’d never seen it before and had harbored no mental image of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, had never heard anyone say, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” had never shuddered with mingled repulsion and fascination as…
In writing The Swan, a play about a swan who turns into a man, Elizabeth Egloff has mined fertile mythic territory. Zeus, of course, had a habit of taking on animal form when he was set on a sexual conquest. He became a swan in order — famously — to…
The relationship between literature and performance is a complex one. Theater can affirm the brilliance of a work of literature or (at least temporarily) destroy it, so that we leave a production of, say, Hamlet or Measure for Measure wondering guiltily if Shakespeare’s reputation hasn’t been…well…just a bit overblown. Fortunately,…
The touring production of Kiss Me, Kate at the Buell Theatre offers many pleasures, one of the foremost being Rachel York’s dazzling performance as Kate. The musical was first shown on Broadway in 1948. It’s a sexy romp, an assemblage of brilliant songs (the show represented Cole Porter’s triumphant return…
Oooohhhh! That’s the exclamation of disappointment from a woman standing behind me and applauding as the curtain closes, the house lights brighten and she realizes the ecstatically leaping, singing figures on the Arvada stage are irrevocably lost to her. Clearly, she’d have been happy to sway and clap along with…
Going to the Bug Theatre for The Santaland Diaries is like dropping in on a high-spirited Christmas party. People in Santa hats scurry about; every surface is crammed with toys and decorations. Pretty soon you find yourself singing along to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” while fellow guests mime the…
This version of Little Women — The Musical first played at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center three years ago, and it was voted best new musical by the Denver Drama Critics Circle. The show brings to life Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Civil War-era children’s book about the four March…
Conundrum State Productions, which claims to stage “theater for the discriminating audience member, as performed by the seriously unwell,” is presenting three short plays under the umbrella title Mortal Fools at the LIDA Project Theater. Each play contains something worthwhile — a fragment of insight, a snippet of surprise, a…
