The Elitch Theatre opened in 1891 as the first summer-stock company in the country; over the years, it hosted such legendary stars as Sarah Bernhardt, Douglas Fairbanks, Jose Ferrer, Barbara Bel Geddes, Grace Kelly, Lynn Redgrave and Vincent Price. Many years ago, I saw Shelly Winters there in 84 Charing…
The 1950s were anything but fabulous. The figure of Senator Joseph McCarthy loomed over the American landscape, instilling a sense of fear that pervaded every cranny, stifling independent thought and creating a culture so sanitized and asexual that it seemed wrapped in plastic. Men wore their hair militaristically short, and…
Every Secret Thing. Judy GeBauer’s Every Secret Thing deals with the effect of McCarthyism on a group of high-school teachers, and it couldn’t have premiered at a more fitting time. The play is based on GeBauer’s memories of a civics teacher in her high school who was called before HUAC…
Joe Orton is one of those working-class bad-boy authors that the British middle class so enjoys being poked in the eye by. John Osborne, author of Look Back in Anger, preceded him; Martin McDonagh is a modern example. Orton’s small body of work — all completed in the 1960s, when…
This is not a play, and it’s not exactly a cabaret act, either; it’s sort of a cross between a slumber party and a church service. The premise: A group of women who sang together as children in a choir called the Heavenly Voices comes together for a reunion. They…
This is the second time this season that I’ve watched an actress struggle into her pantyhose onstage. Both times, the sequence was brilliantly executed and brought down the house, and each version illustrated that actress’s particular strengths. In Modern Muse’s Bad Dates, it was Diana Dresser — blond and lithe…
Judy GeBauer’s Every Secret Thing deals with the effect of McCarthyism on a group of high school teachers, and it couldn’t have premiered at a more fitting time. Fox’s Bill (“Shut up!”) O’Reilly has just set his sights on a Conference on World Affairs panel at Boulder High School that…
Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. Apparently major changes occurred when members of Charles Schulz’s well-loved Peanuts gang reached their teens: Pigpen became a sex-obsessed, homophobic jock; Lucy entered a psych ward after setting the little red-haired girl’s hair on fire; Linus morphed into a dazed pothead; Schroeder…
I can’t really imagine this hoary old Broadway musical being done better than it is by the Denver Center Theatre Company — but part of me can’t imagine why anyone would bother doing it at all. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a cartoon of…
I suppose that a work as brilliant as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera is bound to be interpreted and reinterpreted on the stage, each version as much a mirror of its time and place as of the creators’ intentions. Intended as a satire that inverted social values and suggested…
Bold Girls. The four Irish women in Rona Munro’s evocative, elliptical Bold Girls try to carry on in the equivalent of a war zone, doing their best to shelter and care for their children, filling their lives with humdrum chores and small diversions. All four characters are strongly delineated and…
The lobby hero of the play’s title is Jeff, a security guard for a Manhattan apartment building, and the title — as you might guess — is ironic. As Lobby Hero opens, Jeff is engaged in conversation with his supervisor, William. The two men could not be more different. Jeff…
By some miracle, Ireland’s long agony seems to have ended with the current power-sharing agreement between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, a former commander in the Irish Republican Army. This deal, achieved in the last days of Tony Blair’s government, may be the British prime minister’s best and most enduring…
Dead Man Walking. We are one of the last Western nations to retain the death penalty, but you don’t hear much about it these days. Where executions were once front-page news, they’re now relegated to single paragraphs far back in the paper — if they’re mentioned at all. In an…
There it is. The last, ear-punishing note of the very last song, and the cast comes onto the stage for the curtain call. First the lesser characters form a smiling line that prompts a couple of people in the audience to stand up. Then the bigger fish rush forward and…
According to Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, major changes occur when members of Charles Schultz’s well-loved Peanuts gang reach their teens: Pigpen becomes a sex-obsessed, homophobic jock; Lucy’s in a psych ward because she set the little red-haired girl’s hair on fire; Linus, having been forcibly deprived…
Dead Man Walking. We are one of the last Western nations to retain the death penalty, but you don’t hear much about it these days. Where executions were once front-page news, they’re now relegated to single paragraphs far back in the paper — if they’re mentioned at all. In an…
Watching Mall*Mart, the Musical! at Curious Theatre Company is almost a schizophrenic experience; the two acts seem part of different productions. The first act details the life of one Walt Samson, a stand-in for Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, and shows his rise to wealth and prominence, as well as…
The genre is familiar. There’s a woman alone in a house on an island off the coast of Maine; a thunderstorm batters the windows. The woman is packing. She has set out three boxes: one labeled Trash; one, Remains to Be Seen; the last, Perpetual Care. The pale face of…
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is one ugly family that’s gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday. What almost everyone except Big Daddy himself knows is that he’s dying of cancer. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son…
I always get a little worried when I hear that a theater is premiering the work of a local playwright. On principle, I applaud it — absolutely. How’s a writer to learn stagecraft and dramaturgy without collaborating with actors, directors and tech people? And how can a city have a…
Set in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were vying for the presidency, Senator Joe McCarthy was busy with his anti-Communist witch hunts, and America was humming songs from South Pacific, Oklahoma! and The King and I, Red Herring is a piece of wit that exists on several…
