When her play, Cowboys and East Indians, has its world premiere, playwright Nina McConigley thinks it’s going to be mind-blowing for her mother, who was born in India and lives in Wyoming, to see actors wearing saris onstage at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Growing up in Casper, as “the other kind of […]
In 2016, the original Sweet & Lucky immersive theater experience opened in a 16,000-square-foot RiNo warehouse, commissioned by the DCPA’s Off-Center in collaboration with New York-based Third Rail Projects. No two audience members had exactly the same experience: only 72 people were admitted per night, with 25 cast and crew. Led in small groups […]
Sweet & Lucky, the 360-degree, dream-like dance-theater experience that catapulted Denver, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Off-Center to the forefront of the immersive theater world in 2016, returns with Sweet & Lucky: Echo. Neither sequel nor prequel, Echo has been incubating for years and aims to be similar enough but different enough […]
Little Shop of Horrors, the 80s musical about a lowly flower shop clerk who makes a Faustian bargain with his man-eating plant, was an unexpected success that has now won the adoration of generations. The show has sci-fi roots in an early short story by H.G. Wells. “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” about a […]
The presentation of The Reservoir by the Denver Center Theatre Company marks a full-circle return for a Colorado playwright who grew up at this theatre. Jake Brasch is coming home in multiple ways for the world premiere of The Reservoir, his deeply personal play about addiction, Alzheimer’s, and inter-generational connections, soon to be in production […]
Kimberly Akimbo is one of those magical musicals that makes you wonder, “how did they pull that off?” An intimate, smart, deeply human musical that arrived on Broadway without a big star or a recognizable title, it nevertheless became the talk of the town by winning over audiences and critics alike and by making them […]
Chris Coleman never aspired to direct Hamlet. The artistic director of the DCPA never saw himself in that role. He had played the title character onstage twice — senior year in college at Baylor University and again at Actor’s Express, a theater company he founded in Atlanta — and “literally never wanted to direct it […]
In his 2010 memoir and lyric collection, Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim wrote of his surprise at the reception of Company in 1970: “I had no idea Company would be so unsettling to public and critics alike.” He was “stunned by the polarized reactions of fervent admiration and ferocious rejection” when the somewhat experimental production […]
Do you remember a sexy movie with Lauren Bacall as a glamorous society woman turned wartime spy named Betty, blazing through men and countries, from South America to Europe, seducing her way to crucial information for the Allies in WWII? No? That’s because there was no such movie — although perhaps there should have been. […]
This world premiere work by New Mexico playwright Leonard Madrid drew loud laughs from audiences at the 2022 New Play Summit. The tagline says it all: Three Sisters, four wheels, four hundred miles, and one dead body. From a comedic premise, a heartwarming comedy-drama emerges when three Latina sisters embark on an unexpected drive, Albuquerque […]