‘Tis the season, yet very few professional theater companies take up the religious significance of Christmas. A good thing, too, since the majority would muck it up with insincere pretensions. But the fact that most theater companies can’t do Christmas makes the fact that Eulipions can that much more exceptional…
They’re baa-ack–the original cast (save one) of Denver’s long-running Murder Most Fowl, that is. The play returns to the Avenue Theater this season as (A Very Merry) Murder Most Fowl. The plot’s the same, but the jokes are all new, and the interactive element remains the show’s primary draw–the audience…
No matter where you stand on feminist issues, David Mamet’s Oleanna at the Denver Center Theatre Company will tick you off. This is the kind of theater that sends you furious into the night–masterfully manipulative and absolutely scary. It’s scary because we know too much about propaganda–how ideologues throughout history…
Whenever a great novel is turned into a play, something inevitably will be lost in the translation. When the play is also a musical, a lot more of the original evaporates into thin air to make room for the song and dance routines. The most one can hope for is…
Moliere’s Tartuffe, now in a searingly funny production by CityStage Ensemble at Jack’s Theater, takes on religious hypocrisy with such fervent zeal that it laid its original audience to waste. But then Moliere’s patron, the “Sun King” Louis XIV, was overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of the irreverent playwright and…
It may not run as smooth as brook water, but the production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes at the Country Dinner Playhouse sparkles with the sophisticated nonsense that made all those great Thirties musicals so endearing. Andrew Lloyd Webber and his clones couldn’t pop a tune like Cole Porter (or…
Gilbert and Sullivan turned comic opera into an extraordinary form of satire in their time. Tarantara! Tarantara! at the Denver Civic Theatre is a gleeful yet oddly dark tribute to the great team. Plays like H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and Trial by Jury are still funny because the…
Farce can be insipid drivel or sublime madness, depending on the play and the wit of the director. Fortunately, Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the University of Colorado-Boulder is more sublime than insipid, more caustic madness than silly drivel. And though this production can lose its way…
Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, now at the Theatre at Muddy’s, exposes the murky side of scientific inquiry. Even professors of archaeology, we learn, can be despicable and put their egos before the well-being of others. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Somebody really does have…
OpenStage Theatre’s production of The Philadelphia Story, now running in Fort Collins, proves once and for all that unemployed rich people dashing about trying to find true love in romantic comedies are no longer interesting. Whenever their plight did engage us in the Hollywood films of the past, it was…
Reckless, now running in Boulder in a biting, smart production by the Actors Ensemble, might have been called Relentless Christmas–so much of the action takes place on consecutive Christmases and so many of the events are cataclysmic. But although Craig Lucas’s hilarious play skewers the season’s sentimentality, it isn’t about…
Education is more than it’s cracked up to be. And while Educating Rita, now at the Denver Civic Theatre, suggests the traditional ingestion and regurgitation approach can be improved upon, it never says how. Playwright Willy Russell’s effort may be fun to watch, especially with such engaging actors, but its…
The McCarthy era stunk. If you don’t believe that, be sure to catch Red Scare on Sunset at Industrial Arts Theatre. The satire by Charles Busch imitates the style of Red-scare films (I Married a Communist, et al.) that fed American paranoia during the Fifties. Ironically, these propaganda films were…
Mocking sacred cows is a venerable tradition in the arts, and as long as it’s done without any discernible taste (but with a good deal of wit), it satisfies our sense of the ridiculous without betraying original works. Remember Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales From Shakespeare? Like that perverse piece of…
Sometimes the dark is safer than the light. Sometimes a blind woman can “see” more clearly than those whose eyes have not dimmed. In Wait Until Dark, at the South Suburban Theatre Company, the heroine of the story is a young woman, recently blinded and still learning to maneuver around…
America loves its gangsters. Not the real ones, of course: We like our gangsters safely enshrined in the movies or on stage, and we like them to be Italian (one more outrageous prejudice). But while we admire the consummate movie godfather, Don Corleone, he’s still pretty scary; once in a…
Perhaps it takes an Eastern European to bring the Theater of the Absurd into the present; after all, people in that part of the world have seen so much more pointless cruelty up close. Pavel M. Dobrusky appears to be qualified, and the Czech director’s new Star Fever at the…
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of the great dream narratives of all time. There’s a lot of sense behind the nonsense verse and the bizarre behavior of all those whom Alice meets on her adventure. But then, the life of a dream has a logic of its own…
Ever the sentimentalist, playwright Neil Simon nevertheless has a knack for recognizing the ordinary citizen as interesting. Despite his penchant for safe answers and shallow ideals, Simon still manages to build hilarious dialogue and create characters in whom we invest emotionally. He takes us all in, and most of us…
When an ordinary bloke poses as a foreigner in a remote resort in Georgia, he becomes a magic mirror in which the good-hearted people around him see their better selves and watch their dreams of fulfillment unfold. The evil-hearted, on the other hand, are undone by what they see in…
It’s at the pinnacle of Western civilization, but King Lear is still, first and foremost, a ripping yarn. When a theater company pulls it off, the audience leaves thoroughly entertained and rich in wisdom. A new theater troupe has come to Denver, and the very first thing the Ad Hoc…
We are all related to each other, separated by only six people–six degrees of separation. You may not think you have anything in common with a monk in Tibet, but if you could trace a path through the right six people, you’d find a direct connection. This intriguing, if dubious,…
