I’m not much for American rural — slack-tongued accents, flat Coke, screen doors and heat, the heart-numbing sameness of daily life — and I tend to dislike dramas about dysfunctional families, especially when the dysfunction involves addiction or alcohol. I’ve yawned through I don’t know how many productions of Long…
Sure, we have one of the best jobs in the universe, but sometimes theater critics get tired. Tired of gut-wrenchingly deep performances and slick, practiced shallow ones. Of being blasted out of our seats by hyped-up sound systems, enduring pretentiously poetic prose, figuring out symbolism, trying to ignore a stilted…
It’s hard to know what there is left to say about the Holocaust. Or how one begins to evoke its horror on stage. The concentration camps have become iconic as the subject of countless memoirs, histories, artworks, films and television movies; they’re used to justify or condemn all kinds of…
Victor/Victoria, which made its first appearance in 1982 as a movie starring Robert Preston and Julie Andrews, was daring in its day. Set in 1930s Paris, it’s a mixture of sophistication and nostalgia, a gentle, funny exploration of sex roles told in songs and skits and held together by a…
Chekhov’s people are unhappy. Their unhappiness never rises to the level of tragedy, but it isn’t pathos, either. These characters are vague and muddled. They can’t think clearly about their own grief; they blame this and then that, latching onto explanatory catchphrases and repeating them. They complain, bicker and snap…
The music is nice, and the two actors play the piano amazingly well, but in all honesty, the Denver Center Theatre Company production of 2 Pianos, 4 Hands feels like pretty thin gruel. In a series of short, comic vignettes, it details the struggles of two youngsters bent on careers…
I first saw Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in London a few years ago. I remember leaving the theater feeling light-headed and exhilarated by the play of ideas Frayn had started up: ideas about science and human nature, guilt and mutability, and about how, at the most essential level, we know what…
Bovine Metropolis Theater stands where the Changing Scene — whose hallmark was an intense vitality — stood for over three decades, until the turn of the century. The original owners of the Scene were New York dancers Al Brooks and Maxine Munt, who arrived in an almost art-free Denver and…
The choice of a journey often deserves a writer’s attention quite as much as the journey itself. Travel, like dreaming, is a form of emotional satisfaction, and though you may explain the act of dreaming by the cheese eaten at dinner, you cannot explain so easily the particular images which…
Facing a budget shortfall for the last production of his Shadow Theatre Company’s sixth season, artistic director Jeffrey Nickelson decided to make a virtue of necessity. He ditched expensive plans to stage The Old Settler and teamed with associate artistic director Hugo Jon Sayles to create Sweet Corner Symphony, a…
Comic Potential, now at the Aurora Fox, takes flight on the performance of Jessica Austgen as robot JCF 31333 — or Jacie Triplethree. Alan Ayckbourn’s play is set in the near future, when the entertainment industry has descended even further into chattering idiocy than it has today. In a third-rate…
I don’t know about you, but I worry when I read this kind of thing in the notes a theater provides about a playwright — in this case, Caridad Svich, in the program for Alchemy of Desire/Dead-man’s Blues: “Svich sees Alchemy/Blues as an ideal example of her visceral connection to…
I know times are tight, but this won’t do. Watching Saturday Night Fever at the Buell, it was hard to remember that the auditorium had hosted such scintillating musicals as Kiss Me Kate, Swing and The Full Monty in the past couple of years. Saturday Night Fever feels grubby and…
The violence wrought by the Manson family continues to hold our imagination. There’s something about the confluence of evil, pop culture (the best known of the group’s victims was beautiful blond movie star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant) and the politics of the late ’60s that feeds our…
George Orwell’s reputation has been a little clouded of late. For decades after his death, he was seen as a kind of secular saint, a truth teller, a font of wisdom and decency whose writing brought desperately needed clarity to a murky world. But there were always grumblers, and the…
There’s a lot of charm, humor and zest in director Anthony Powell’s production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. It’s an odd play — short on plot and long on punning and wordplay, full of courtship and poetry, but for the most part skirting any deeper conception of love. Ferdinand, King…
Sylvia is about a middle-aged man, mildly depressed by his companionably routine marriage and meaningless job, who finds a stray pup in the park and brings her home. The pup, Sylvia, is enchanting, distracting, puzzling and endearing, and naturally, his wife doesn’t like her at all. The plot concerns the…
Titus Andronicus has always bothered Shakespeare scholars, some of whom simply refused to believe that the great man actually wrote the blood-drenched monstrosity. In his famous Tales From Shakespeare, Charles Lamb noted that Titus was “not acknowledged” by the critics whose assessment of dates he used, “nor indeed by any…
The school auditorium where Su Teatro has staged Roosters is an unprepossessing environment; it resembles a large black box. The sound is flat, and naked bulbs light the stage. But director Phil Luna has made ingenious use of the space, placing the audience on three sides so that the performance…
The year is 1940. A young couple meets on a train traveling east from California. That is, the man sits down next to the clearly reluctant woman, talks to her, jiggles his leg, eats noisily. He tells her he’d intended to be a pilot but has been discharged from the…
For years, writers Jane and Michael Stern have been eating their way across the country, frequenting places with names like Mamie’s, Al’s and the Busy Bee. They’ve described food and given recipes, but most of all, they’ve documented the way small-town eateries take their place at the heart of their…
I expect to be blown away by any August Wilson play. And I’m used to the fact that at the Denver Center, I’ll find skilled and generous-spirited actors, many of whom have held Wilson’s words in their mouths and felt his rhythms in their bodies over several years and through…
