Stage

Life is pain. It is also beautiful and awe-inspiring, to be sure, but it’s full of sharp corners and people who would just as soon spit on you as shake your hand. A random act of attempted kindness — say, overlooking someone’s glaring deficiencies rather than ...

Setting one of Shakespeare’s plays in a relatively modern time and place is more the rule than the exception these days. Of the dozens of performances of the Bard’s works I’ve seen, only a small handful has used a “traditional” setting. Instead, directors tend to ...

The first thing I notice when I find my seat for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) is that black-clad stagehands are all over the stage, moving various props and other junk around. In fact, save for a giant pair of ...

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF) opened its 56th season last weekend with one of the Bard’s most beloved plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in addition to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), Macbeth, Richard II and a two-night reprise of Women...

After a winter spent rearranging house, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is ready to defend its position as cultural and educational touchstone. The 2013 edition has sprinted ahead of expectations and appears on tap for a successful start to the season. It may not ...

Claire Patton and Lucia Rich, both wearing all-black clothes for the evening’s rehearsal, are sitting in a studio space in a structure outside a North Boulder home, trying to explain what “physical theater” means...

In the “About the Show” section for Delirium Tremens on the Bump in the Night Entertainment website, the production company — presumably via playwright Rhett Jonke — admits that the classic murder mystery format is, by its very definition, contrived, and challenges ...

After the rather lackluster The Other Place, the usually metronomically reliable Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) comes back strong with Bach at Leipzig. If you enjoyed the movie Amadeus — and if you haven’t seen that film I can’t recommend it enough — you’ll ...

Audience interaction is the bread and butter of any improvisational theater — in comedic shows, even just the mention of the next game of the evening will usually invite an eruption of suggestions from an eager crowd. But for troupes like Playback Theatre West, ...

Even if you are a Dawkins-lovin’, God-mockin’, card-carryin’ atheist, the odds are that during your youth you spent some time in and around a church or synagogue. Be you current or lapsed Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Methodist, Jew or any other God-fearing flavor...

A date takes a wrong turn and ends up in an orgy; someone spontaneously kisses a cab driver with irresistible eyes; McDonald’s serves as the backdrop for a break up; a guy decides he’d rather stay single than fall in love with a girl named Aphrodite...

To quote Public Enemy, “Don’t believe the hype.” To paraphrase the Dead Milkmen, I’m not saying that The Other Place isn’t a good play. It’s a fine play, an all-American play full of good, upstanding people. It’s just that it, like the residents of the trailer park ...