George Burns, having just died, finds himself in limbo. To enter heaven and reunite with his professional partner and beloved wife, Gracie Allen, he has to audition for God. The audition is a recounting of his life. Burns was born Nathan Birnbaum on the New York’s Lower East Side. The…
Born to Be Loud. Born to Be Loud consists of a string of songs from the late ’50s to the ’80s. Some are sung straight, some satirized, some clearly intended as an homage to a particular band or performer; they’re stitched together with all kinds of humor and hokum, and…
Robert Dubac is currently workshopping Inside the Male Intellect (TV. 10.0) at Rattlebrain Theater because he’s about to tape it for cable. This show is an updated version of The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron, an engaging monologue that began in Denver almost a decade ago and has since traveled the…
Racism is a common topic in theater, but before attending Dael Orlandersmith’s lacerating Yellowman, I had never seen a play that explored racism within the black community itself — that is, the contempt felt by some lighter-skinned African-Americans toward their darker-skinned brethren and the reciprocal rage it engenders. Some analysts…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
Again and again, Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai puts you in that state of enjoyment where you’re not even capable of thought; you’re just watching, breath suspended, wanting what you’re seeing to go on forever. Everything one associates with Cirque du Soleil is here — the artful settings and costumes, the…
I used to evoke a lot of laughter and derision from erudite friends and from my writing students by telling them about my passion for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but there was a lot more to the show than met the eye. The ghouls, monsters and vampires Buffy faced almost…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
I enjoyed Tracy Shaffer Witherspoon’s Saints and Hysterics, currently being presented by the Paragon Theatre Company; I found myself for the most part interested and sometimes moved. But I’m not sure it holds together as a play. Genuinely original images alternate with a lot of picked-over feminist ideas, and the…
I was worried as I settled down to watch Born to Be Loud. I’d invited a 26-year-old friend along, and I couldn’t help noticing that the audience was rather, well, elderly. On weekends, the Heritage Square Music Hall audience includes people of many types and ages — young couples, families…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
I guess basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The cellar of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., 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,…
Some people think of critics as the artistic equivalent of meat inspectors; they see our job as going from place to place stamping performances as prime, choice, select or — heaven forbid — cutter. We’re the arbiters of taste who will tell them what to miss and what’s worth attending…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is interrupted by a series of sounds:…
The program notes for Nat King Cole & Me include an interview with author and performer Gregory Porter. He describes his mother, who, he says, was dedicated to helping others. One Thanksgiving, she made a sumptuous meal of ham, turkey and sweet-potato pie, and took it to the mission for…
My reaction to a Harold Pinter play often follows a predictable pattern. For the first few minutes, the dialogue strikes me as ordinary, the contradictions and obscurities willful and self-conscious. I find myself questioning whether the playwright is really as brilliant as decades of reviews say he is. Yet by…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
Rattlebrain Theater Company consists of a group of highly talented and appealing actors with loads of stage presence. Director Dave Shirley, who also writes much of the material, keeps things buzzing along and utilizes music and video clips to great effect. In It’s Hickenlooper’s World, the troupe’s target is Denver…
Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba is a difficult play to carry off. The plot concerns a group of five daughters confined within the walls of their house for an eight-year mourning period by the iron will of their bitter, violent, widowed mother. Marriage is the only possible…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
As Rose opens, an ailing woman in her eighties sits shiva on a public bench. We don’t know whose death she is mourning, though she tells us early on that her own daughter was killed by the Nazis at age nine. The character, Rose, then takes us on a tour…
Triple Espresso is like the first few minutes of a dinner-theater production. You know, the part where the emcee comes out and congratulates the people in the audience who are celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, jokes with a pretty girl, gets impudent with an older couple and asks how many people…
