The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a much-loved American classic. Some families watch it together year after year at this time, like Miracle on 34th Street and varying versions of A Christmas Carol. So the first question that arises when you hear that author Joe Landry has made a…
Performance artist Michelle Ellsworth’s onstage persona is a fascinating mix of humility and daring, mockery and gentleness. She comes across as a deferential satirist, a playful deep thinker, someone who expresses serious concerns with effervescent humor, operating sideways and using movement, objects and a highly eccentric take on everyday concerns…
While many people might recognize Bill Pullman as Lone Starr in Spaceballs or the President in Independence Day, the movie star is also an accomplished stage actor who’s passionate about helping the performing arts. He’ll be at the L2 Arts & Culture Center tonight to support Visionbox, the Denver actors’…
It hit home for members of the theater community Sunday, when they opened the Denver Post and found a gaping void in the arts pages: There was no column by longtime critic and commentator John Moore. No review. Everyone had known John was taking the Post’s buyout. His Facebook fans…
The setting for The 1940’s Radio Hour is the Algonquin Room at the Hotel Astor in New York, where WOV radio (the V stands for Victory) is about to go on the air. In these days before social media and effortless continual connection, the excitement of radio is intense. WOV…
Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden. Although the Denver Center Theatre Company had great success with Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, a novel that reads rather like an unfolding tapestry, its versions of Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird felt like lectures. But playwright Laura Eason has…
The sixth annual round of the USA Fellowship grants — fifty awards of $50,000 each — were announced last night in Los Angeles, and exactly one went to a Colorado artist: Michelle Ellsworth of Boulder, for her work in the field of dance. Ellsworth has an MFA in dance from…
Buntport Theater’s Kafka on Ice — created by the company in 2004 — combines events from the author’s life with incidents in his famous novella Metamorphosis (you know, the one that begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a…
A Shirley Delta Blow show ain’t your momma’s drag tradition: though Saturday night’s performance at Hamburger Mary’s Club M is all queens, it’s not just glitter, choreography and lip-syncing. Blow and Co. bring a little comedy, some song and dance, and a whole lot of audience participation to the intimate…
In his comedy act, Anthony Jeselnik plays the asshole, cracking dark, arrogant, and hilarious one-liners. The persona has gotten him far; Jeselnik is now a prominent figure on Comedy Central’s roasts, has a successful stand-up career, and is in development for a television show on the same network. Jeselnik will…
A few years ago, when actor Gary Culig abandoned his beloved longtime role as Crumpet the Elf in the Bug Theatre’s perennial holiday production of The SantaLand Diaries, he left the local field wide open for a new kind of Crumpet, the sourly wry Macy’s elf based on the true…
Denver’s Vintage Theatre took on a major project when its members decided to take on Avenue Q: The Tony Triple Crown-winning adult musical featuring Muppet-like puppets, made from scratch with big, flappin’ dirty mouths, isn’t cheap to to stage, nor is it your everyday song-and-dance…
Cannibal! The Musical. Cannibal! The Musical began life as a movie written by pre-South Park and Book of Mormon Trey Parker, back when he was a film student at the University of Colorado. It starred Parker himself and Matt Stone, and later evolved — or perhaps degenerated — into a…
I’d missed the first two installments of Jeff Daniels’s Escanaba trilogy — Escanaba in da Moonlight and Escanaba in Love — so I had no idea what to expect from Escanaba: 1922, which was written last but is a prequel to the other two. I had a vague idea that…
If you also hate the holidays, you may enjoy professional smart-ass Adam Carolla’s one-man show on Sunday, December 4 at the Paramount Theatre. We have a pair of tickets to give away. Details below…
I’ve seen the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of A Christmas Carol more than once, and as someone who was brought up on a diet of Mr. Magoo, Reginald Owen, that nice thick novel by Charles Dickens and, later, Bill Murray in Scrooged, I never tire of it: Well-played by…
Collapse. Comedy doesn’t usually get the respect accorded tragedy, but if you analyze the way that playwright Allison Moore has put together Collapse — the varying rhythms of the dialogue (everything from a touching monologue to a hyper-rapid patch of stichomythia); the surprises that seem inevitable once they’ve occurred; the…
Playwright Arthur Kopit and composer Maury Yeston were still putting together their Phantom when Phantom of the Opera, the Andrew Lloyd Webber juggernaut, trundled onto the scene with its thunderous music, grandiose special effects and falling chandelier. Phantom’s backers quickly vanished, as did any chance of a Broadway opening. But…
Everyone has a story to tell, including Matthew Taylor. Once one-third of the local comedy trio A.C.E. (shorthand for American, Canadian and Englishman — you do the math), he lost his job when ensemble partners Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein hit it big with their performance piece, Girls Only. Which…
American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose. Written by Richard Montoya, of the San Francisco performance group Culture Clash, American Night: The Ballad of Juan Josetells the story of immigrants in America through a crazed mix of skits, historical references, inspired parody and moments of pathos and insight. But the…
When Blanche, desperate and destitute, comes to live with her sister in A Streetcar Named Desire, she finds Stella sexily and happily married to Stanley, a working-class yob — a Pole, not a Polack, as he angrily informs Blanche. The couple’s home in the steamy New Orleans French Quarter is…
Cannibal! The Musical began life as a movie written by pre-South Park and Book of Mormon Trey Parker, when he was a film student at the University of Colorado. It starred Parker himself and Matt Stone, and later evolved — or perhaps degenerated — into a stage production that bears…
