The Oscar Wilde Experience feels less like a full-fledged theater production than a warm, pleasant evening spent with friends. The show is in the Byers-Evans House, which was built in 1883; with its dark wood furnishings, shadowy corners and shelves of old books, it provides the perfect backdrop for an…
It may seem like the members of the Addams Family have been featured in every incarnation imaginable: from animated characters to action figures to even inside of a pinball game. The wealthy, macabre-obsessed family has come a long way since it first debuted in the pages of the New Yorker…
Steven Burge, who’s currently starring with Damon Guerrasio in Love Child, a hoot of a show at the Avenue Theater, is one of the funniest actors anywhere. So it was a surprise to learn that he has to face down intense fears before he can step onto a stage. It’s…
Over his many years as a public (and bespectacled) face, 54-year-old funny man Drew Carey has paid his dues as a Marine, a stand-up comic, a sitcom star, an improv guru and, in his most recent incarnation, the on-air host of The Price Is Right. And on his current tour,…
While many comedians themselves may prefer a stiff drink, marijuana has, for some time, been the drug of choice for comedy audiences. From Lenny Bruce’s satirical pamphlet on the dangers of the herb, to sketch comedians like Cheech & Chong and Dave Chappelle building whole careers around it, entertainers have…
The six members of the Buntport Theater Company like taking up strange facts, historical anomalies and odd and eccentric bits of information and working them into their communally created plays. After one Buntporter spotted Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for tickets to La Bohème at the Santa Fe Opera,…
In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play. Playwright Sarah Ruhl uses the orgasm as the prism through which she views the entire Victorian world — and, by extension, our own. From the orgasm, entirely misunderstood and invisible in those repressive times, emanate ripples that change not only the relationships…
When Scared Stiff premiered last week night at The Bar, a small crowd of bizarro movie buffs gathered to see cult classic Plan 9 From Outer Space. But it wasn’t just the campy Ed Wood-directed flick that brought folks in — it was drag queen Alexus Vain’s commentary, which runs…
Second City Chicago is this country’s Mecca of funny. Among its famous alumni are John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Steve Carrell and Tina Fey. It also happens to be the place where Frank Caeti, formerly of MadTV, and Matt Craig, a former Saturday Night Live writer, first met and performed together,…
In her book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd, philosopher of science, provides an exhaustive investigation into the female orgasm. After exploring many theories about the orgasm’s origins and purposes, she concludes that it is a vestigial trait like men’s nipples, a…
Ron White is best known for his appearances on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour with fellow comedians Jeff Foxworthy, Larry The Cable Guy and Bill Engvall. But his signature cigar, glass of scotch and conversational delivery has made him popular with a wide audience. White uses his personal life and…
Kurt Lewis won the Best New Theater Space award in 2008 for Crossroads Theater, the ambitious Five Points space he’d developed, but he ran into financial and health problems. And in January 2010 Denver took over Crossroads, adding it to the city’s Arts & Venues lineup. Now Lewis would like…
“I have not deserved this.” -Desdemona [IV.i.236, Othello] In 2005, more than 1,100 women in the U.S. were killed by a partner, a third of the total number of women who were murdered, according to the federal Bureau of Justice. The department calls it “intimate homicide,” a sort of contradiction…
The last time I saw Molière’s The Misanthrope, it was gorgeously staged at the Denver Center, with an elegant set adorned with flying cupids; a huge, round, rose-trimmed bed that dominated the stage through the entire second act; and costumes that entirely expressed their wearers’ over-the-top personalities, so that the…
Scientists have long understood that farts are hilarious. What’s less understood, however, is why. In all seriousness, though, actual scientists have been trying to theoretically understand humor since the time of Aristotle without much success — until University of Colorado Boulder professor Pete McGraw came around with a pretty good…
Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone is a tough act to follow, but Buntport Theater Company is going for it with the last show of the season, The Roast Beef Situation. The play, which opens at 8 p.m. tomorrow, is old- — as in eighteenth-century, clown-troupe-style Commedia dell’Arte…
Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) is about orgasms — but it’s neither titillating nor smutty. Ruhl has been called one of our most brilliantly imaginative playwrights, and locals have seen her luminous work before at the Denver Center, Curious Theatre Company and the Boulder Ensemble…
It’s a brave proposition to start a new theater troupe, but Wit Theatre Company, an ensemble of eight that formed just a few months ago, is ready to put on its first show. Make that almost ready…
The 11 Minutes Theatre Company has revived Fuenteovejuna, a seventeenth-century play by Lope de Vega based on a historical incident that took place in 1476. Fuenteovejuna is a small village that has come under the control of a violent and amoral commander. The play begins by celebrating the joyous innocence…
The beef started on Facebook. Creeped out by last week’s TIME cover story about attachment parenting — you know, the weird one with the preschool-age kid standing on a stool and suckling his mom’s tit — I penned an essay for the Village Voice about how much attachment parenting sucks…
Over the past year, Curious Theatre Company has given us a first-rate production of Pulitzer winner and Tony nominee Clybourne Park; 9 Circles, the regional premiere of a deeply humane investigation into the psyche of an American soldier on trial for war crimes; and now Red, which received ecstatic reviews…
There are two major threads in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. There’s the primary plot, in which Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria, decides to dress as a man and signs on as a servant to a local nobleman, Orsino, with whom she rapidly falls in love. But Orsino sends Viola off to…
