Arapahoe HS & CU-Boulder grad. Previous Denver Center Theatre Company house manager. And now? Managing Director of Disney Theatrical Group In a video marking the 30th anniversary of Disney on Broadway, Julie Taymor, the Tony-winning director of The Lion King, offered a vital PSA. “Going to the theater and being in an audience is something […]
Whenever playwright Karen Zacarías and her sister were on the beach as children, they couldn’t help but imitate the opening scene of a favorite telenovela. “My sister and I would do…” Zacarias said and then stopped during a video call to pantomime their slow-motion run in an imaginary surf. Zacarías is not alone in her […]
In the indie movie Once, a girl and a guy sit at a piano in a musical instruments store in Dublin. He’s a busker and vacuum repairman. She’s a talented pianist and Czech immigrant. When these near strangers’ voices find their way to a lovely harmony in writer-director John Carney’s hushed yet rousing film (“Take […]
Delivering guilty pleasures smartly If as many as two billion people watch telenovelas, or a regional version of the episodic melodramas, as some reports suggest, then it can’t come as a surprise that so many of us have a story about, well, our “stories.” “My stories” — that’s how the beauticians on the Kearney Street […]
On a dreary spring morning in St. Louis, actors Adam Grant Morrison and David Fine are talking about their pivotal roles in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s national tour, now in its second year. Morrison mentions a scene in which his and Fine’s characters — Albus Severus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, respectively — have […]
It can’t be easy playing the bad guy opposite a vivacious 17-year-old in a musical about her coming of age. The better your portrayal, the more likely people will give you the cold shoulder at the stage door or cast a sideways glance at the grocery store. Not that the character Davis in Alicia Keys’ […]
Hell’s Kitchen shares a very different west side story A city. A neighborhood. A building. These are the geographies that feed 17-year-old Ali, our guide in Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen, book by Kristoffer Diaz. Hell’s Kitchen is the piquant —and for decades, the rightly earned — name of the West Side Manhattan neighborhood where Ali […]
The Colorado New Play Summit at 20 What follows is an anecdote — “as told to” but hardly apocryphal. During the recently concluded Colorado New Play Summit, a group of theater-fond women, who had walked from their towering apartment building on 15th street to the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, expressed their concern about the annual […]
When Lisa Orzolek first began working as the second scenic assistant at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 1992, the Theatre Company was producing The Grapes of Wrath based on John Steinbeck’s novel about the Joads of Oklahoma, forced to migrate west by a convergence of Depression Era economics and environmentally wrought disaster. […]
“I always loved westerns as a kid — the showdowns, the gunfights, all that,” playwright Terence Anthony said during a video conversation. His own contribution to the genre, Godspeed — a rousing saga about a formerly enslaved woman on a mission in post-Civil War Texas — is having its world premiere at the Denver Center […]