It’s the music that matters most in Appalachian Strings. But the vibrant production now at the Denver Center Theatre Company is also a history, both of “hillbilly” music and of the people of Appalachia. The writing in this engaging piece is sometimes a trifle overwrought, the people idealized beyond the…
There may be more people on stage than in the audience, but the crowded space in the small Dorie Theatre is alive with ferocious goofiness in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Dated and simplistic as Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 tale may be, it still carries the moral force of a great old…
And now for some socially redeeming theater: Ojibwa Indian poet and playwright Tomson Highway’s poignant contemporary exploration of Native American life, The Rez Sisters, at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center. Once in a while a play comes along that opens a window into another world–then moves through the window and…
Film critics used to grouse about how stage plays never really transfer well to the screen–at least until Kenneth Branagh started transforming Shakespeare into cinema. And yet a well-written play provides smart dialogue, even when the setting is too confined for the big screen. Far, far worse than turning a…
“Two planks and a passion” is how Christopher Selbie describes the kind of theater he believes in–theater that emphasizes the art of acting, the imagination of the actor, and the imagination of the viewer. Four years ago Selbie formed the Compass Theatre Company with a few friends and a measly…
We’ve had a lot of little devils hoofing it on the Denver boards recently–Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Lucifer Tonite and the Jerry Lewis rendition of Damn Yankees have come and gone from local theaters since December. Beethoven’s devil was a sophisticated shape-shifter who never succeeded in seducing Beethoven into mediocrity. The…
Movies about parenthood tend to exaggerate the icky-diaper issues. Over the last few years, a new emphasis on Dad’s role in a baby’s life have produced a slew of sentimental foolishness like Look Who’s Talking, Three Men and a Baby, Junior and the insufferable Nine Months. But it’s not as…
A terrific set and wonderful lighting design help set the mood in the Arvada Center’s Jungalbook, a worthy adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling children’s story. In a mysterious green jungle somewhere in India, a little man-cub is born and abandoned only to be retrieved by a stately panther and reared…
Men are incapable of fidelity, integrity or profound affection–and they’re shallow to boot. Frantic for validation, women backstab each other over worthless guys, dump and are dumped over the slightest cause and would be better off learning to make their careers more important than their relationships. Sound familiar? Romantic love…
If only Sam Shepard had never gone to Hollywood. He was such an amazing playwright before fame, fortune and Jessica Lange got ahold of him. Why area theater companies don’t produce his early plays more often is a mystery; they’re beautiful, weird and perceptive, and they offer actors plenty of…
Bertolt Brecht remains one of the few great geniuses of twentieth-century theater. Marxist didacticism notwithstanding, his best plays set up contradictions upon contradictions that shake us awake and require us to think poetically. Because finally, it is Brecht’s poetry more than his politics that penetrates through to truths about the…
Rootless youth trying to figure it all out, angry young men and women, bright, soulful and lost–it may sound very Rebel Without a Cause, but Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia at the Theatre on Broadway is wholly contemporary. From the marvelous graffiti art decorating the set to the Rollerblades on Buff’s energetic…
The Thirties produced great Hollywood comedies and a few equally dazzling Broadway offerings–sophisticated yet crazed, darkly perceptive about human frailty, and often politically subversive (all the best comedy is subversive in one way or another). The Marx Brothers, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, W.C. Fields, Noel Coward, Ben Hecht and so…
Big hair, ponytails and full skirts with bobby socks may sound like the Fifties, but the bubblegum in Suds has a definite Sixties flavor. The compilation musical at the Vogue Theatre is one of those nostalgia trips meant to tickle the boomers–and their grown-up babies who grew up hearing replays…
The young always accuse the previous generation of screwing up the world–and very often for good reason. But when they try to go and fix it, there’s another fine mess to clean up. Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek’s Tango is a social allegory with an absurdist twist–there’s a thread of reason…
Brash and bawdy, George Bernard Shaw’s one-act Great Catherine is now playing with his more talky Overruled in a terrific CityStage Ensemble evening, Shaws Together, calculated to bust a gut. As extravagant as both of these little plays are, director Greg Ward keeps his delightful cast tottering on the brink…
It’s easier to preach than it is to teach–but too many contemporary playwrights are still on the pulpit. With all the white-collar crime undermining public confidence in Wall Street these days, one might suppose an angry little play exposing the selfish, callous nastiness of it all would be most welcome…
The great thing about a comedy such as Much Ado About Nothing is its treatment of potential tragedy. There’s a lot of thought behind all those laughs. Shakespeare examined what malicious false witness could do in Othello–how it might turn a good and loving husband into a murderous fool. In…
The 1932 film version of Grand Hotel is best remembered for Greta Garbo’s languid “I vant to be alone.” A better signature line was never invented for an actress–particularly since Garbo was a famous recluse. No one could ever read that line again without invoking her presence as the elusive…
It’s Arthur Miller time in Denver; works by the American playwright have been staged by no less than three local theaters in the past month. And Industrial Arts’ moving, if somewhat choppy, production of Miller’s timeless All My Sons provides an interesting contrast to his more popular but less dynamic…
Agatha Christie’s wonderful murder mystery Ten Little Indians showed up in the movies as And Then There Were None to creep out several generations of fans. The 1970s musical spoof of Christie’s original, Something’s Afoot, adds another dimension of macabre merriment to the legacy. Christie’s original plot may be more…
Inside a moral vacuum is a bad place to be: Not only is it fraught with violence and suffering, it’s boring, too. But somehow that boredom is conveyed without boring the audience in The Lida Project’s consuming production of Edward Bond’s notorious urban horror story Saved. It all takes place…
