Tag Archive for: Denver Center Theatre Company

The Pulitzer Prize – Substance or Shadow?

I have never bought a book, read a poem or seen a play because it was by a Pulitzer winner. — Ben Brantley, Former Theatre Critic, The New York Times As a child of the 60s, I lived through the heyday of Award shows. Family and friends would gather as if for a holiday, dressed […]

Setting the Stage for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Longtime Denver Center Theatre Company patrons are used to being close to the action for shows in the Kilstrom Theatre — from food fights and space orbits to taking a shower and cooking in a kitchen. This 380-seat theatre-in-the-round has only seven rows, creating an intimate connection between actor and audience. In Tennessee Williams’ Cat […]

Discussion Guide: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

If Tennessee Willliams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play had been a book, it would have been a sure-fire best-seller. Instead, it was inspired by his 1952 short story, Three Players of a Summer Game. Raw, turbulent, and riveting from start to finish, this American classic unfolds one sweltering night on the Pollitt family estate, where betrayals and unburied […]

Discussion Guide: The Happiest Man on Earth

Based on The New York Times best-selling memoir by Eddie Jaku, The Happiest Man on Earth tells a remarkable story of survival, revealing a paradox of joy built on a foundation of grief. This Denver Center Theatre Company production is playing September 19 through November 2, 2025 in the Singleton Theatre.     Character and Identity How […]

Robert Petkoff: Murder, Madness, and Moulin Rouge!

  The national tour of Moulin Rouge! The Musical! is a bit of a homecoming for actor Robert Petkoff, or at least that’s what we at the Denver Center like to think. After all, his first play in Denver was the granddaddy of theatre — Tantalus — the 10-part, nine-hour play recounting the Trojan War. […]

A Blueprint for Happiness

With his wavy white hair, his dapper blue-gray suit and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, the nonagenarian did not look a day over 80. Standing at a podium at a 2019 Ted Talk, 99-year-old Eddie Jaku looked out at the audience before he began recounting his experiences of Kristallnacht and the five concentration camps he survived. “My dear […]

Tennessee Williams Looms Large with Cat by a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams might not be the biggest daddy in American theater — there is Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, August Wilson — but the Mississippi-born playwright comes awfully close. His early plays became a string of Broadway hits: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Night […]

A Reading Companion to the DCPA’s 2025/26 Season

This season, no fewer than 16 productions on Denver Center stages are based on or inspired by literature. From children’s books and memoirs to Greek myths and fantasy, here is your reading companion to the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ 2025/26 season alphabetized by show title.   CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (playing […]

Rubicon: Sex, Espionage and a Woman Finding Purpose

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. […]