As we streamed out of the theater at the end of Pierre, I overheard a fellow audience member trying to analyze what he’d seen. “Perhaps Shakespeare run amok,” he mused. It’s as good a description as any. Especially if you add Dickens run amok, the pastoral impulse run amok, Hogarth…well,…
Measured Ends takes us on a playful feminist romp through several Shakespeare plays. In the playwright’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the heroine, Helena, wins her reluctant husband, Bertram, by using an old folk-tale standby, the “bed trick.” Already married to Bertram — though the marriage remains unconsummated — Helena…
Oh, what can ail thee, knight at arms,Alone and palely loitering The sedge is withered from the lake And no birds sing… I met a lady in the meads. Full beautiful–a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. — from “La Belle…
You’re not just going out for an evening’s amusement when you attend Dearly Departed at the Avenue Theater; you’re participating in a prolonged goodbye to a Denver institution. John Ashton, the impresario who kept things hopping at the Avenue through twelve successful years, is closing up shop. The owners of…
Alan Bennett is the most English of English playwrights. Despite a steady output of quietly brilliant scripts and plays, he was for many years the least-known member of the original 1960s Beyond the Fringe group, which included Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. In the early ’90s, Bennett gained…
If Rattlebrain is a fair example, Denver-area comedy clubs have come a long way since the days when shows consisted of a succession of middle-aged guys wearing large turquoise jewelry and performing sexist monologues. The Rattlebrain Theater Company has taken over the basement of the venerable D&F clock tower on…
The best part of The Lion King is the first five or ten minutes. A solitary singer stands on stage: a brightly patched, wise-woman/jester figure. She turns out to be Rafiki, the baboon. Her song is full-throated and joyous, and it’s soon joined by other voices and rhythmic drumming. Animals…
Ruth Steiner, an author so renowned that she gets called on to testify in front of congressional committees that discuss funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, is yelling from the window of her Greenwich Village apartment to someone on the sidewalk below. We know from her muttering and…
The Taffetas are four singing sisters from Muncie, Indiana, beginning to experience their small level of fame: bus journeys to nearby towns, store openings, an award for “This Year’s Best Copy of a Copy” of a song. When we meet them, they’re in the New York studio of a show…
There’s a lot right about Bourbon at the Border, and it’s given a first-rate production by the Shadow Theatre Company, but ultimately the play is betrayed by didacticism and a weak ending. The evening is introduced by a young girl with a terrifying smile and an even more terrifying message:…
It’s hard to imagine Harold Pinter’s Betrayal being given a better production than the one currently at the Denver Center — an elegant set, excellent actors — but somehow, though I enjoyed the experience of watching it, in the final analysis, the play left me cold. Perhaps this was because…
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice began its life in London’s West End, as a play written by Jim Cartwright to showcase the amazing vocal talents of actress Jane Horrocks. Horrocks — best known to American audiences as the daffy Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous — has a knack for…
August Wilson’s Jitney is a capacious, large-minded, wordy, generous, emotional grab bag of a play that continues working on you for some time after you’ve seen it. In fact, more than one viewing would be required to plumb all of the work’s riches. The action takes place in a storefront…
The three plays that constitute the Morrison Theatre Company’s evening of one-acts, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, are based on a short-story collection of the same name by Evergreen resident Joanne Greenberg. Greenberg is the author of several works of fiction; her most famous novel, I Never Promised You a Rose…
There are two observations I can make about the Curious Theatre Company’s dark-themed farce, Fuddy Meers: I laughed out loud several times during the performance, but afterward, I couldn’t figure out the point. Claire (Ethelyn Friend), the play’s preternaturally chipper protagonist, wakes every morning to a world washed clean. She…
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…
