When most of us think of The Wizard of Oz, we generally think about Victor Fleming’s iconic 1939 film. Or maybe we think of L. Frank Baum’s original book, or, if we’re theater buffs, we might think of Tim Kelly’s popular stage adaptation. That last one was the one the…
Nancy Smith founded her aerial dance school Frequent Flyers Productions in 1988, expanded to a new studio in January, and now brings the 12th annual Aerial Dance Festival to The Dairy in Boulder this weekend, August 6-8. She’s been hanging around (as it were) in the aerial dance community for…
Beauty and the Beast. Though it’s backed by expert musicians and technicians, the real miracle is the Phamaly company itself. The leads are as good as — and often better than — anyone you’ll see anywhere. Jenna Bainbridge is the sweetest Belle imaginable, with a clear, strong soprano and, paradoxically,…
The first scene in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing is between a husband and the wife he suspects of adultery. She has just returned from a purported business trip to Switzerland, which he believes she never took. The dialogue is swift and urbane, with wry ruminations on digital watches, the…
Debreceni can speak with authority about the differences between the look of a zombie and the aesthetics of a werewolf. Debreceni, who runs Back Porch FX out of Aurora, has spent the past three decades developing his ability to create illusion on stage and on film. A makeup artist and…
Denver theater audiences are famous for the ease with which they award standing ovations — a few friends of the cast rising, then a handful more, finally a largish section center front — while folks further back pick up their belongings and head furtively for the door. That’s not how…
Photographer Kate Levy brings these photos from Drama Drag Fridays, hosted by Nina Flowers. Writes Levy of the party on Friday: “Nina Flowers hosts drama drag at Tracks every last Friday of the month, each month inviting a contestant from Ru Paul’s drag race, in which Nina participated (and did…
He infiltrated the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and almost single-handedly destroyed the Black Panthers. Using subversive and often illegal methods, he amassed file upon file of potentially embarrassing information on the major politicians and public figures of his day. He was also a secretive figure and a reputed…
It’s a rock-and-roll musical that puts a main character named Jesus in a land where people worship boobs. It’s also a classic hero-myth set to interpretive dance. It’s The Lovinator, and it’s going to be weird — but co-creator Brian Powell says it won’t be so weird as to not…
Beauty and the Beast. Though it’s backed by expert musicians and technicians, the real miracle is the Phamaly company itself. The leads are as good as — and often better than — anyone you’ll see anywhere. Jenna Bainbridge is the sweetest Belle imaginable, with a clear, strong soprano and, paradoxically,…
There are times when I want to scream at a director doing Shakespeare: For God’s sake, if you don’t like the damn play, don’t stage it. For this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, Scott Williams has tarted up Measure for Measure with all kinds of extraneous trickery: red umbrellas and vinyl…
The songs from South Pacific are part of our daily diet. We hum them; we pray they don’t turn up in TV commercials; we endure bad renditions in a thousand amateur productions; and we occasionally stop to marvel that these melodies — “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “This Nearly…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
I love Phamaly, but I’m frequently unenthusiastic about the troupe’s choice of material. I skipped January’s Barefoot in the Park, having long ago been exposed to all the Neil Simon any human being should have to endure in a lifetime. When I heard that the current offering is the Disney…
If “Try to Remember” doesn’t move you, The Fantasticks plain isn’t working, and though the song carries all kinds of memories for me, I couldn’t summon up so much as a wistful thought hearing it sung in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production. As written, the show is sweet, pretty, clever…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
I’m not sure why director Lynne Collins chose to set her King Lear in the late nineteenth-century American West, since it doesn’t add much of anything to the theme or story. But it does very much fit the persona and acting style of John Hutton, who makes a fine, easy-talking,…
The premise of Steve Martin’s entirely ahistorical Picasso at the Lapin Agile is that Picasso and Einstein met at an artists’ hangout in Montmartre in 1904. The play that results is a meditation on the nature of creativity and the role of science and art in the twentieth century —…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
At the start, Hedwig and the Angry Inch seems like a hipper, wilder, more raucous and contemporary variation on a theme that’s been around since Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright in the ’60s: the loneliness and ultimate psychic disintegration of a gay diva. But the show soon sets…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
Dietrich & Chevalier. The Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier we all remember were artificial figures, carefully lit, costumed and photographed, their media images manipulated and protected. They were stunning in their glamour and originality, but meant entirely for the screen. For his play, Dietrich and Chevalier, Jerry Mayer has unearthed…
