In its portrayal of corporate ruthlessness, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was pretty daring for its time. Back in 1961, when it premiered on Broadway, a lot of people still admired the business world. The musical shows an ambitious young man, J. Pierrepont Finch, angling his way…
Uncle Vanya is a challenge for any contemporary director, since most audience members won’t know what to make of all those talky Russians freely airing their deepest desires and despairs, periodically insulting each other, occasionally bursting through with declarations of unrequited love — and all this without the upbeat, therapeutic…
The headlines across the country this morning proclaim “Denver bets on a county fair, aiming at hipsters,” which would have been fine, except for the fact that the best thing about the County Fair, like all County Fairs, is the animals. Goats and chickens and roosters and adorable rabbits all…
Bobcat Goldthwait says that when he couldn’t make people feel awkward with his stand-up comedy, he tried to do that with the movies he wrote and directed — films like Shakes the Clown (where Goldthwait stars as a depressed and alcoholic clown who gets framed for murder) Sleeping Dogs Lie…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
A Touch of Spring starts out as such a charming romantic comedy that it’s a shame when it dissolves into a diffuse and wordy second act. Samuel Taylor’s rarely performed 1968 play has one foot in the ’50s (it’s set in 1959) and another in the late ’60s, that era…
Jake has always been a batterer — when he was a boy, he stomped a little goat he loved — and he always feels terrible afterward, alternating between denial and a crippling sense of guilt and grief. As A Lie of the Mind opens, we hear a voice talking in…
Dave Foley is not gay. “Some people get mad if I say that I’m not gay. They think it’s homophobic,” the comic said. “If I sleep with a woman, well, that’s just a hate crime. Some people thought we were all gay on the Kids in the Hall because we…
Tomorrow night, Ginger Sexton and the Sexton drag empire take over the Gothic Theatre for the second annual Apocalyptic Ball, a celebration of life and a fundraiser for the Colorado AIDS Walk. Sexton — who by day is known as make-up artist Briceson Ducharme — started up the variety showcase…
Although the musical — one of the sillier holdouts from an era when theater was more, you know, theatrical — is mostly exploited these days for its camp potential (see: The Book of Mormon), it’s still not quite dead as a study of human emotion, either. And although the idea…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
An early Shakespeare play based on a Roman comedy (Plautus’s The Menaechmi), The Comedy of Errors utilizes a lot of plot devices that were hoary even in Shakespeare’s time — although naturally, they’re at least used deftly. As the play opens, Egeon, a Merchant of Syracuse, has been captured in…
There’s something to be said about being in the right place at the right time, especially in show business. Just ask Jimmy Pardo, host of the highly successful podcast Never Not Funny. “I was ahead of the curve, when nobody knew what podcasting was,” he explains via cellphone from a…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
Every year, director Terry Dodd finds a play perfectly suited to the historic lobby of the Barth Hotel, with its long central desk and gleaming wooden furnishings, and stages it as a benefit for Senior Housing Options, an organization that provides humanistic, caring homes for indigent seniors in several facilities…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
When I think about the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Romeo and Juliet, the predominant image is of Jamie Ann Romero as Juliet, longing to consummate her startlingly sudden marriage and leaping onto the bed, arms outflung, to implore the night, “Give me my Romeo.” At this point, she doesn’t know that…
Some of the best acting you’ll see anywhere. A brilliantly putrid set design. Haunting sound effects. Taut direction. On an Average Day is a first-rate production — but unfortunately, the play itself feels like an early exercise, full of sound and fury, signifying not much of anything. John Kolvenbach is…
Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…
What started as a somewhat edgy film by the raunchy and iconoclastic John Waters morphed into a sugar-sweet, much-loved, Tony-winning musical about self-acceptance and the need for all of us to also accept others. Now Hairspray has taken over the stage at the Arvada Center, where the year is 1962,…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has been an integral part of my thinking for a long, long time. It seems at first so simply written, so straightforwardly sentimental, that you hardly notice how deep and wise it is, but then scene after scene lingers in the imagination. For example,…
Man, our heads are really in the toilet these days. Wait. Are jokes about boobs considered “toilet humor”? Whatever, this photo probably qualifies as a dirty joke, just because its funny to say the word “booby.” Technically, on this sign we saw outside the Vine Street Pub yesterday said “Boobby,”…
