The intimate Germinal Stage Denver theater is a perfect venue for The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter’s claustrophobic puzzler of a play. On the stage, the furniture is almost insultingly nondescript — a round wooden table, worn-looking chairs, a bulbous fish ornament. We’re inside an English bed-and-breakfast run by a very…
Artie Shaughnessy is an untalented songwriter with a dream — and it’s because she feeds this dream, as well as his ego, that he loves Bunny, his confident, glossy, mindlessly positive girlfriend. The fact that he’s married to the aptly named Bananas presents very little problem: As soon as he…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
Shelita is a poised and successful book editor, a young black woman determined to bring the urgent voices of her history and her people to life. As Thomas Gibbons’s play Bee-luther-hatchee opens, she’s riding the wave of a major success: A memoir she’s published has become a phenomenon, achieving bestseller…
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is a short, brilliantly constructed, engrossing play that seems straightforward on the surface — but there’s a lot going on below. The action begins with a voice speaking in the dark. As the lights come up, we see that this voice belongs to Father Flynn, who’s…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
The Merry Wives of Windsor tells the story of Sir John Falstaff — but not the cunning, cowardly and hilarious knight of the history plays, the Lord of Misrule who led astray a young Henry V and represented all the joys of drunkenness and revelry. No, this version is pretty…
Anyone who’s spent time in class listening while a self-important academic spins webs of obfuscatory words around a relatively straightforward idea, who has felt almost annihilated by the sheer number of those words, will sympathize with Carol, the perplexed and ultimately vengeful student in David Mamet’s Oleanna. If, on the…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
I passed the first act of My Fair Lady in a haze of pleasure. This is the touring version of Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed London production, complete with high-tech values, stunningly beautiful costumes, and leads who have significant and impressive resumés. The direction is inventive, making many of the familiar songs…
There is one intensely effective passage in Elyzabeth Wilder’s Gee’s Bend. Against her husband’s wishes, the protagonist, Sadie, has gone to Selma to march with Martin Luther King Jr. She returns, bloodied and half blinded by tear gas, to find that her husband has locked her out of the house…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
Stones in His Pockets is a small play — charming, wistful, not quite sure what it wants to be. It starts out as one of those clash-of-culture satires. A film company has plumped itself down in a village in rural County Kerry, Ireland, disrupting everyday life. Caroline Giovanni, the lead…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
Over the last few years, Curious had become somewhat peripheral on the mental map where I chart the progress of Denver’s serious theater companies. Curious’s casting was often uneven, and its choice of material occasionally poor. With last month’s 9 Parts of Desire, however, the company moved into strong focus,…
I really don’t know why I get such pleasure out of returning to Heritage Square Music Hall again and again to watch pretty much the same kind of entertainment — though obviously with variations — but I do. The current production, The Baseball Show, is actually a remount of Take…
Contrived Ending. This play is local author Josh Hartwell’s homage to the movies and, in particular, to the old-fashioned art house. All the action takes place on a beautifully detailed and realistic facsimile of a cinema lobby, and the play actually sounds and feels like a lot of movies — Reality…
Halfway through her best-selling Nickel and Dimed, a book examining the minimum-wage way of life, author Barbara Ehrenreich stops for a disquisition on cleaning other people’s toilets. “The first time I encountered a shit-stained toilet as a maid, I was shocked by the sense of unwanted intimacy,” she writes. “A…
Contrived Ending. This play is local author Josh Hartwell’s homage to the movies and, in particular, to the old-fashioned art house. All the action takes place on a beautifully detailed and realistic facsimile of a cinema lobby, and the play actually sounds and feels like a lot of movies — Reality…
Although the play’s been around over thirty years, I’d never seen D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game, and at the beginning, I expected it to be a heartwarmer. Two old people connect on the seldom-used porch of their retirement home, a dusty, cluttered place of battered chairs and cast-off household objects…
As you walk into the familiar Buntport space, the scent of popcorn envelops you. Contrived Ending, which is premiering here, is local playwright Josh Hartwell’s homage to the movies and, in particular, to the old-fashioned art house. All the action takes place on a beautifully detailed and realistic facsimile of…
