The Arvada Center’s production of The Dinosaur Play is filled with a wide array of sights and sounds, but the most impressive spectacle occurs shortly after the lights dim, when a stodgy professor wanders on stage and delivers a lecture about paleontology. The audience, made up almost entirely of elementary…
What becomes of an entire class of people when its members are summarily rounded up like common criminals, even though they’ve never committed any crimes? Are they to maintain their dignity when told that such imprisonment is for their own protection? Should they hold fast to democracy’s ideals when they’ve…
Filled with more raunch than a Friars Club roast, the first part of Bag Ladies Ball is initially hard to swallow. The interactive dinner-theater show, being staged in a second-floor meeting room at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in central Denver, is playwright and director Melvyn Benetti’s response to…
The best thing about Black Box Theater Ensemble’s trio of one-acts, The Whole Shebang, is that the Boulder-based company has a good time without taking itself too seriously. That’s no mean feat in a drone-prone town that holds meetings about pet-guardianship and garbage-ownership rights. The three plays, presented at the…
A program note gives plenty of notice that A Question of Mercy examines difficult issues, and the first scene certainly sets a somber, thoughtful tone. However, playwright David Rabe’s look at AIDS and assisted suicide doesn’t hit home until the character of Anthony appears on stage for the first time…
When Another Antigone premiered off-Broadway in 1988, higher education’s radar screen was aglow with a growing number of issues that threatened to crash an already overloaded system. With funding scarce in the post-Reagan years, deans couldn’t motivate tenured professors to change their ways and, at the same time, couldn’t afford…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Much Ado About Nothing boasts some beautifully staged scenes and well-crafted performances, especially actress Robin Moseley’s bravura turn in the role of Beatrice. But while the visually pleasing production engages now and then, it adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts…
An abundance of stock characters and melodramatic situations might prompt a lesser director to turn Flyin¹ West into a hiss-filled potboiler; but in director Jeffrey Nickelson’s capable hands, Pearl Cleage’s 1992 play becomes an expansive ode to courage, self-determination and the price of freedom. The two-hour-plus drama is being given…
Rehashing a centuries-old debate, an erstwhile film critic (and aspiring moviemaker) declares that the theater has no relevance for his generation. Naturally, that remark doesn’t sit too well with his girlfriend’s mother — an accomplished stage actress who reminds the young man that creating art is a greater calling than…
The performers’ spotty British accents make whole sections of dialogue unintelligible, and the pacing often lags where it should accelerate, but the Aurora Fox Theatre Company’s production of Communicating Doors proves to be an entertaining comic thriller anyway. On the strength of some strong performances, beautifully realized design elements and…
It’s not surprising that no one disrobes in Closer, British playwright Patrick Marber’s full-frontal look at sexual mores and modern relationships. The play’s four London dwellers seem so comfortable obsessing about sex — and its sometime companion, love — that taking their clothes off hardly seems necessary. The two-hour drama,…
Shortly after bidding adieu to his bustling wife, a Malibu writer settles into a porch chair and begins his work. Seated at one side of a sparely appointed stage, the wiry figure peers at the audience with a gaze that both acknowledges our presence and enlists our imaginations. He rises…
Director Hugo Jon Sayles’s choice to present Ain¹t Misbehavin¹ as a New York City “rent party” lends the collection of Depression-era tunes a laid-back informality that makes the audience feel at home starting with the first note. The Broadway musical revue, now showing at the Nomad Theatre in Boulder (following…
Nuncrackers: The Nunsense Christmas Musical is a collection of sketches, songs and sight gags that work best when they’re briskly paced and centered on a single character. During its many multiple-character scenes and lame segues, however, Dan Goggin’s musical revue about the Little Sisters of Hoboken fizzles into a predictable,…
Nothing in Maynard has changed since the Civil War,” says a young woman of her Texas community’s stultifying ways. Consigned to a life of folding clothes, screaming at her three kids and indulging in midday liquor-laced gossip sessions, Hattie’s sweeping assessment doesn’t seem that far-fetched to anyone who’s spent her…
Encouraged in no small measure by the fact that Denver’s cultural groups annually outdraw all local professional sports teams combined, several ambitious theater companies have recently elbowed their way onto the city’s crowded stage. Rather than join forces with established organizations that operate their own spaces (and boast loyal followings),…
About ten minutes after Stop Kiss begins, we learn that its two main characters, a pair of young women oblivious to their surroundings at the moment their mouths met in romantic bliss, were violently attacked while hanging out in a Greenwich Village park during the wee hours of the morning…
It’s hard to believe that what happens in Miracle on 34th Street bears any resemblance to everyday life. But as the Nomad Theatre’s entertaining revival demonstrates, the story has the ability to awaken ideals long ago beaten into a coma by megadoses of hard reality. Of course, those who attend…
Its title is a clever play on Tantalus, the high-priced Greek epic that effectively displaced the Denver Center’s annual presentation of A Christmas Carol, but theatreMEDINA’s Santaless: The Twelve Plays of Christmas proves to be a collection of aimless skits worth considerably less than its $20 admission. Haphazardly constructed and…
Anton Chekhov is as famous for writing pause-filled comedies about frustrated dreamers as Eugene O’Neill is for penning dramas with more stage direction than dialogue. Beyond their writerly quirks, however, both men were masters at creating unforgettable characters. And the Shadow Theatre Company’s evening of one-acts pays homage to each…
A product of its time that proved powerful enough to transcend the tumult of ensuing decades, The Fantasticks opened at New York’s Sullivan Street Playhouse on May 3, 1960, and has been running there ever since. Although its universal appeal is unparalleled in musical theater history, some critics continue to…
Antigone’s two brothers, both sons of Oedipus, have died in each other’s arms while fighting for future control of their uncle Creon’s throne. In order to send a message to future revolutionaries, King Creon has decreed that one of the slain will be left to rot outside the walls of…
