Election season is fraught with rhetoric, innuendo, accusation and hyperbole. Facts are twisted, motives interpreted and failings magnified–each candidate spins his own image and spins the other guy’s, too. And this is the way it has always been in politics. CityStage Ensemble’s Dan Hiester recognizes spin-doctoring when he sees it,…
“Children’s theater” too often equals boring pap–badly written, stupidly produced and amateurishly performed. But it can be magical, inventive and beautifully realized. Children’s theaters in Minneapolis, Louisville, Chicago and Seattle have done fabulous work ministering to the imagination of kids while entertaining and even enlightening them–and all without boring their…
What you want to achieve with Peter Pan is magic. And the Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production, adapted from J.M. Barrie’s original, makes it. It’s a little too long for the squirmy set–there are a few slow places that don’t keep the little ones involved, and a half-hour trim…
Maybe it’s just the revue format that’s hard to get a handle on, but the intermittently amusing A Thurber Carnival at RiverTree Theatre doesn’t quite make it as an integrated evening of theater. Though the performers appear to have plenty of affection for the mild witticisms of longtime New Yorker…
Newtonian physics, time versus eternity, the glories of landscape architecture, and sex. English playwright Tom Stoppard doesn’t mess with the small stuff in Arcadia; he’s looking for the Big Picture and what it all means. Whether he’s looking in the right place–the world of science–is open to debate. But at…
The play may be the thing, but movies have always voraciously consumed the literature of the stage–and with wildly mixed results. A lot of plays simply don’t belong on screen (most anything with fewer than ten characters, for example). A lot of modern plays need the intimacy of the stage…
The trouble with message plays is the annoying tendency of the moral to get stuck in your throat as the playwright tries to ram it down. Very unpleasant. That’s why a play like Mark Dunn’s The Deer and the Antelope Play is rare and welcome: Its message is so clear,…
It may be hard to believe now, but truly great talents once graced the world of television–and viewers across America knew how to appreciate a good gag or a searing drama. Before the era of sitcoms and car chases, before cynical admen took control and cut up the airwaves into…
There are no surprises in the touring production of Leonard Bernstein’s fabulous West Side Story, but there fortunately are no disappointments of any importance, either. Baby-boomers are bound to sink into a pleasant pool of nostalgia over this one: Where were you when the 1963 movie version opened across the…
The Melancholy Dane has been done by so many so well that every performance of Hamlet is haunted by the geniuses of the past. Recognizing just how haunted the part is, playwright Paul Rudnick brings back the specter of one of those geniuses, early American movie star and Hamlet extraordinaire…
Director Louis Malle’s 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street brought David Mamet’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya to the screen. It’s a magnificent movie, beautifully written and a veritable textbook on the art of acting. But it has left a big problem for theater companies: How in the…
Victor Hugo’s magnificent, sardonic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame is everywhere you look these days. Disney’s animated musical interpretation was a smash hit, and even The Simpsons television sitcom satirized Andrew Lloyd Webber’s penchant for musicalizing tragedies in its hilarious “Hunchback” episode. Still another rendering of the dark medieval…
Back in 1959, Hollywood called it The Fugitive Kind, and Marlon Brando’s brooding sexuality and Anna Magnani’s voluptuous realism made it a dark meditation on the nature of jealousy and violence in a small Southern town. It was as good a movie as Hollywood could produce. But Hollywood could not,…
Improv can be deadly; when it’s bad, it’s horrid. Good thing Comedy Sports is alive and well and living it up downstairs at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. After ten years and 1,900 performances (making it the longest-running show in Denver), the ensemble group has developed a distinctive persona. The performers…
Whatever else you can say about the performances at the Heritage Square Music Hall, there’s nothing else quite like them in Denver. The current hybrid production Sweeney Todd (no relation to the Stephen Sondheim musical) is part sketch comedy, part old-fashioned melodrama, part musical and part obnoxious silliness. It’s also…
Excruciatingly funny, dark as a dungeon and peculiarly exhilarating despite its bleakness, American Buffalo secured David Mamet’s leading place in American theater when it was produced on Broadway in 1977. The killer cast it attracted then, including Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage, indicates just what a jewel it…
Innovation has its price, and the liberties Denver director Jeremy Cole has taken with The Adding Machine, Elmer Rice’s famous 1923 experiment in expressionism, may not please purists entirely. But you have to hand it to Cole; he has found exciting ways to translate the dated designs of expressionism into…
Tuna, Texas, is one nightmare town–everybody in it is a jerk, a sociopath or a pathetic loser. The townspeople can be amusing, but not amusing enough to make you want to pay them a visit. And maybe that’s what’s wrong with Greater Tuna, now in a popular revival at the…
It’s not clear why ex-newsman Walter Cronkite felt it necessary to narrate a piece like this–yes, that’s his voice booming over the loudspeakers–but another celebrity, the Karate Kid, sure kicks up a fuss in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The musical satire of big business and the…
King Arthur, what a guy. Somehow the grand old Celt still appeals to the popular imagination. Many works of art have spun out from the legends of Arthur and the Roundtable, and there are good reasons for the current revival of interest in the King and his court–and in the…
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote some of the best comedies of their era, teaming up in the 1930s and 1940s to produce, among other hits, the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can’t Take It With You, which later became one of Frank Capra’s greatest movies. Hart was long on plot,…
Samuel Beckett thought it all through for us–what it means to live in a world where God is absent. In such a world, life is absurd because it has no ultimate meaning. If there is no God, we are all fools and clowns scrambling for bits of comfort and amusement…
