The Winter’s Tale, part of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is a peculiar hybrid of a play. It begins as tragedy, then lurches into full comic mode. There’s a sixteen-year gap in time, more comedy, and it’s back to gravitas for the final scenes. The play contains many familiar tropes –…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
Twelfth Night begins with the lovestruck Count Orsino ordering up music to match his pleasurably melancholy mood. When his “If music be the food of love, play on” is answered by cheerful calypso sounds and he proceeds to practice a few dance steps, you know you’re in the hands of…
The Full Monty. The Full Monty follows a group of men who are out of work in Buffalo, New York. Amazed to discover that the women of the town are willing to pay high prices to watch a Chippendale-style strip show, the men decide they have nothing to lose and…
Central City Opera’s Madama Butterfly is beautifully sung, if a little over-directed. First performed in 1904, Puccini’s opera tells the story of an American officer, B.F. Pinkerton, who is stationed in Japan and enters into an exploitative union with a teenage geisha. Such fake marriages, which the groom could leave…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
My friend Julia, 24 years old, tall and striking and a one-time ballet dancer, was wearing rhinestone-encrusted stiletto heels for the occasion. When she rose to her feet, put her hands to her hips and did “The Time Warp,” I knew the Avenue Theater’s Rocky Horror Show was a success…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
This was the most fun I’ve had at the Arvada Center — in fact, the most fun I’ve had at the theater for a while. This venue generally attracts a pretty staid crowd, many of them middle-aged and older, and it was clear that some people were offended by The…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. He smelled of decay. His head was so large that he couldn’t sleep lying…
Humble Boy. Although Humble Boy is literate, with eccentric characters, some absorbing scenes and occasional unexpected moments, somehow the structure doesn’t hang together. And all the esoteric talk about space and time and the habits of bees seems more an attempt by playwright Charlotte Jones to impress the viewer than…
There’s a lot that’s good about Humble Boy, currently showing at the John Hand Theater. The play is literate, with eccentric characters, some absorbing scenes, occasional unexpected moments — but somehow the structure eluded me. And all the esoteric talk about space and time and the habits of bees seemed…
Independence is a story about three very different young women and their terrifyingly possessive, half-mad mother. Kess, the oldest daughter, left the family and remained out of touch with her mother for four years. She’s a successful academic, living in Minneapolis with her lesbian lover. At the beginning of the…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
Topdog/Underdog features two brothers in a dingy, inner-city room. Lincoln and Booth — their names were given to them by their feckless father as a joke — tell tall tales, spar and play tricks on each other. For a while their bickering seems lighthearted and affectionate. Lincoln, an expert at…
Summer Lovin’, at Heritage Square Music Hall, is a string of songs held together with a thin thread of plot. A traveling troupe arrives at an old theater planning to stage a play, only to discover that the place is closed while the theater board contemplates converting it into an…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
This is one of those reviews that finds me struggling as I sit at the computer: Imagine the classic movie scene in which the protagonist has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering persuasively into an ear. Or think of this as a battle…
The set is spare and symmetrical, an apartment dominated by a bank of gray-lit windows and furnishings in varying shades of black and gray. This is downtown New York, ash-covered in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. We hear the sound of a plane engine getting louder and louder, newscasters’…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
Little Tina Denmark was born with talent. No one knows where it came from — her mother is a perky, cookie-baking,’ 50s-style housewife, her father always away on unspecified business — but dancing and singing are in her blood. So when Tina loses the lead in the school musical, Pippi…
