Kelsie Huff was a mess, a co-dependent drunk from a family of drunks who’d made a shambles of everything in her life. But she’ll tell you that herself — that and a whole lot more about her struggles with alcoholism and her dysfunctional past in Ranch Dressing & Other Coping Mechanisms,…
Global pageantry, dance and history, and a hilarious comedy all have a place on local stages this week, whisking you off to faraway places or taking on all-American pop-culture controversies. Here are the details: Terracotta Warriors 3-D Newman Center for the Performing Arts Through September 6 8 p.m. Tuesdays through…
Pump Boys and Dinettes isn’t so much a play as it is a collection of songs spun around a concept so thin it’s hardly there. The place is a small town on Highway 57 “somewhere between Frog Level and Smyrna,” and the protagonists are four guys who work at a…
Spearheaded by Grafenberg Productions, Camp Atlas is a weekly comedy show at the Atlas Theatre that follows the lives of the fictional camp’s counselors and campers as they navigate their hilarious way through “wacky shenanigans.” The cast features local improvisers Peter Nesbitt, Rachel Walker, JuLee Simmons, Dexter Schiller, Trista Charnas, Castle…
Well before the end of the seemingly endless three hours of vicious invective that is Edge Theater Company’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I’d have been happy to see George strangle Martha or Martha kill George. And given how stellar the acting is in this production, the scene would have…
Curious Theatre Company’s catchphrase is “no guts, no story,” and education director Dee Covington — who also directs and acts — has been helping young writers find and tell their own stories for twelve years through Curious New Voices, a summer playwriting festival. During an intense four-week program, students between…
Cabaret would not be a risky choice for most theater companies. The musical about life in 1930s Berlin has been performed widely on both professional and community stages since its 1966 Broadway premiere. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s writings about a decadent city and a lost young English singer called Sally…
Though most Deverites prefer to while away their hazy August days with poolside day-drinking and late-summer languor, their ventures into the temperate night will reward them with a bounty of belly laughs. Our city’s fine comedy clubs, theaters and breweries have shows to suit every taste and budget. Despite the…
Most comedy nerds are already familiar with Marc Maron’s biography, since he’s perhaps the world’s most renowned podcaster. Maron rose to prominence in the alt-comedy scene of the ’90s before floundering through a few TV and radio gigs that never felt like a perfect fit; despite racking up over forty…
Edith Weiss is giggling. She’s talking about the July 23 opening of The Odd Couple (Female Version) that she’s directing at the historic Barth Hotel downtown, and the cast’s enthusiasm for slapstick acrobatics. “Leslie O’Carroll is doing things I would have never asked her to do,” says Weiss. “She is fearless. She…
Long before Brecht, long before postmodernism, Shakespeare understood the usefulness of self-referential moments in theater — those moments when the audience is reminded that what they’re seeing is a fiction, a construct. At the very beginning of Henry V, the Chorus cautions us that we’re in a theater and apologizes…
Once again, the Colorado Theatre Guild has announced the winners of the Henrys — Colorado’s equivalent of the Tony Awards — and once again the results announced last night are difficult to figure out. As before, there are a lot of wins for the Denver Center Theatre Company and not…
The Biennial of the Americas has already given Denver a marching band continuously walking across the street, Spanish karaoke and orchestral dinosaur calls. Tomorrow members of the Playground Ensemble will team up with young composers to present New Music NOW! The Playground Ensemble is a group of classical musicians who…
It’s not easy to find venues around town that support untested and new forms of expression, and the avenues for experimental and performance art are dwindling. “The art scene was more round in recent years. It’s not so round now,” says Justin Beard, who earned a BFA in sculpture from…
As the final High Plains Comedy Festival draws near and the final lineups are announced, Sexpot Comedy returns to Denver after an exploratory sojourn to Los Angeles, boasting another fine show packed with local talent and a nationally celebrated headliner in Sean White. White, a Chicago based comedian whose album…
The High Plains Comedy Festival will be back for a third round August 20 through August 22, and just released the full lineup. “Our schedule this year is insane — there’s no other way to put it,” said Andy Juett, who co-founded the festival with Adam Cayton-Holland, in announcing the schedule additions…
This is theater as community. It is holy theater not because it exalts something on high, but because for the hour or so onstage, the audience and actor are one, and all those people, though each seeing it slightly differently, are believing — following the same course or going on…
“Summer theater” doesn’t always translate to theater-light: This weekend, you can indulge in the restaging of an award-winning production, a well-rounded learning experience from a novice director and a blockbuster opera for the ages. The Brother/Sister Plays: The Brothers Size Curious Theatre Company Thursday, July 9 through August 1 8…
It’s a good sign when you hear people laughing in the parking lot after a comedy and describing their favorite moments to each other, complete with crazy gestures. In its second week of a now-extended run, The Foreigner was still filling the comfortably worn auditorium of the John Hand Theater…
The plot of The Spitfire Grill, a small-scale musical now at the Vintage Theatre, is in the tradition of those ubiquitous American dramas in which a stranger comes into a small town that’s stuck in time — tradition-bound or dying — and shakes everything up. It’s a story we’ve seen…
July is known for balmy days when the sun lingers in the sky like a drunken barbecue guest. Luckily, comedy fans can retreat to air-conditioned comfort in our city’s fine clubs, bars and theaters while merrily chortling at the rogue’s gallery of stand-ups visiting Denver. The whole month is packed…
This is the second time in two years I’ve watched actor Geoffrey Kent walk away with a production in which he’s not actually the lead. Last year his Hotspur stole every scene of Henry IV, Part One that he entered. Now Kent is playing Iago in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s…
