February 2012
25 posts
7 tags
Post 3 - When First We Practice to Deceive: Denver...
Reprinted from Prologue, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s subscriber newsletter
GREAT WALL STORY is a clever playwright’s riff on a daring—some might say foolhardy—event that transpired in Denver on the cusp of the 20th century. Four journalists looking for a story and finding none, conspired over drinks at The Oxford Hotel to concoct a tall tale sure to draw attention. China, they...
5 tags
Post 4 - When First We Practice to Deceive: Denver...
Reprinted from Prologue, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s subscriber newsletter
GREAT WALL STORY is a clever playwright’s riff on a daring—some might say foolhardy—event that transpired in Denver on the cusp of the 20th century. Four journalists looking for a story and finding none, conspired over drinks at The Oxford Hotel to concoct a tall tale sure to draw attention. China, they...
7 tags
Post 2 - When First We Practice to Deceive: Denver...
Reprinted from Prologue, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s subscriber newsletter
GREAT WALL STORY is a clever playwright’s riff on a daring—some might say foolhardy—event that transpired in Denver on the cusp of the 20th century. Four journalists looking for a story and finding none, conspired over drinks at The Oxford Hotel to concoct a tall tale sure to draw attention. China, they...
8 tags
When First We Practice to Deceive: Denver Center...
Reprinted from Prologue, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s subscriber newsletter
GREAT WALL STORY is a clever playwright’s riff on a daring—some might say foolhardy—event that transpired in Denver on the cusp of the 20th century. Four journalists looking for a story and finding none, conspired over drinks at The Oxford Hotel to concoct a tall tale sure to draw attention. China, they...
11 tags
A Tall Tale, A Great Wall and Denver: Great Wall...
by Doug Langworthy, Literary Manager for the Denver Center Theatre Company, for Applause magazine
In 1894 Denver was in the middle of a severe economic depression. The Silver Panic engulfed the city when the bottom fell out of the silver market. Unemployment was high and many banks had failed. Middle class families had to give up newly purchased homes. Angry citizens coalesced around the...
3 tags
Just in time for Valentine's Day: Relationship...
Our return engagement of I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE, playing now through June 24 in the Garner Galleria Theatre, is all about relationships. To coincide with this day that’s all about love, here are some tips from the cast to help you avoid those painful bumps in the road.
Heather Lacy: “My husband proposed to me in grand fashion on Valentine’s Day years ago, and...
8 tags
Day 6: Colorado New Play Summit concludes
A packed house of 500 patrons just saw the final reading at our 2012 COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT. Based on the novel by JANE AUSTEN, with Book & Lyrics by Jeffrey Haddow and Music by Neal Hampton, SENSE & SENSIBILITY THE MUSICAL was a lovely conclusion to our three-day new play festival.
If you haven’t seen the interviews, please tune in to get a glimpse at what happened during...
7 tags
Day 5d: Colorado New Play Summit
Our second day of readings (more if you are in a cast) wrapped up with the world premiere of Samuel D. Hunter’s THE WHALE. Read last year during the COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT, this new, riveting play was recently extended for an additional week.
This moving play about a man who has dealt with adversity by eating his way to the brink of death, had the 250-person crowd riveted. Determined to...
6 tags
Day 5c: Colorado New Play Summit
Michael Mitnick’s multi-media play, ED, DOWNLOADED, just let out at our COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT. Question: if you were able to preserve 10 memories, what would they be?
That’s exactly what Ed’s wife discovers following his death. Set sometime in the future, Ed had the ability to preserve 10 memories that would live in perpetuity. Unfortunately for him, his wife didn’t...
5 tags
Day 5b: Colorado New Play Summit
We’ve just wrapped up our third reading of the COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT. Lisa Loomer’s HOMEFREE was a moving play about three homeless youths. During the course of the play, we gained insight into each of their motivations behind seeking a life on the streets vs. the relative security of their own homes or a shelter.
Consider what “Homefree” means - free of the constraints...
13 tags
Day 4c: Colorado New Play Summit
Following two exciting new play readings, our guests headed into the world premiere of TWO THINGS YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT AT DINNER. One of the most exhilarating aspects of a new play festival is when you can see the play’s development from a reading one year to a full production in a subsequent year.
That’s what we experienced with Lisa Loomer’s play about how the taboo...
6 tags
Day 4b: Colorado New Play Summit
The second reading of the COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT just let out - Richard Dresser’s THE HAND OF GOD. Filled with humor and innuendo, this new play explores what happens when life becomes entertainment.
If you’ve ever wondered what’s more unreal - reality or reality TV - then this biting comedy fits the bill. With his love life and career in disarray, Joe valiantly struggles to...
5 tags
Day 4a: Colorado New Play Summit
GRACE, OR THE ART OF CLIMBING by Lauren Feldman just completed its first reading during our COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT to an enthusiastic response from the 200+ audience members.
Professional rock climbing serves as a metaphor and catalyst in a young athlete’s life. Much as our own Colorado Rockies have peaks and valleys, so to does Emm’s life in a variety of ways - health, emotions,...
30 tags
Day 3: Colorado New Play Summit
Wow! A combined 125 hours of rehearsal have been put into preparing for our COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT, which begins tomorrow! Plus we are officially SOLD OUT. (If you want to come and don’t have a ticket, you are still encouraged to head down and check for available seats.) But at this point we have DOUBLED the number of “industry” representatives over last year.
PLAYWRIGHTS who...
20 tags
Day 2: Colorado New Play Summit
The second day of the COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT had our 100 artistic team members actively engaged in five hours of rehearsal. The casts and crews of Lisa Loomer’s HOMEFREE and Richard Dresser’s THE HAND OF GOD had an “on stage” rehearsal when they worked in The Jones and The Ricketson theatres respectively.
Meanwhile, the casts and crews of Jeffrey Haddow and Neal...
Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Handle with...
By Dan Sullivan for Applause magazine
What’s in a name? Shakespeare gives his romantic comedies evasive titles (As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing) that set the mood but say nothing about the plot. Perhaps he was still working on it.
But The Taming of the Shrew says it all. There will be a bossy woman, also known as a scold. Somebody—doubtless a man—will put her in her place. And all will...
21 tags
Kent Thompson opens Colorado New Play Summit
And we’re off! More than 100 playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, actors, stage managers and other key staff gathered this morning to kick off the DENVER CENTER THEATRE COMPANY’s seventh COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT.
Five readings of new works in development, plus two full productions of new plays and the ever-popular Playwrights’ Slam will be experienced by theatre industry...
4 tags
Wicked: Facts & Figures
Currently in its 9th year on Broadway, WICKED’s North American and international companies have cumulatively grossed $2.5 billion and have been seen by over 30 million people worldwide.
NORTH AMERICA
The New York Times called WICKED “Broadway’s biggest blockbuster” and, more recently, the Times referred to WICKED as “the defining musical of the decade.”
Over 6 million people have seen WICKED on...
5 tags
Talking About Two Things You Don't Talk About At...
by Sylvie Drake for Applause magazine
The highlight of her film acting career, says Lisa Loomer, was getting to say, “Wanna go out?” on screen to Paul Newman. “I was frustrated by the kinds of roles I got, not so much in the theatre, but certainly on TV and film.
“I played a lot of Latin hookers.”
It’s one of the reasons she became a playwright.
Loomer, who was born and grew up in New York until...
January 2012
8 posts
15 tags
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Looking into the...
By Brendan Lemon
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, now embarked on a lavish and visually re-imagined new tour presented by NETworks, is one of best-loved of all musicals. It’s easy to understand why. Its classic story — of a beautiful village girl, Belle, who is first repelled by, then attracted to a gruff yet big-hearted Beast —is indeed, as one of the show’s numbers has it, “a tale as...
8 tags
His Own Private Idaho: Samuel D. Hunter,...
by Douglas Langworthy for Applause magazine
Weighing in at 600 lbs, Charlie’s health is failing fast. He refuses to go to the hospital because he has no insurance and doesn’t want to lose the substantial nest egg he has squirreled away for Ellie, his daughter, with whom he desperately wants to reconcile. But Ellie’s a bitter, angry girl who blames Charlie for abandoning the family 15 years...
13 tags
Denver Center Theatre Company Artistic Director...
In anticipation of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s upcoming Colorado New Play Summit (Feb 10-12) and to coincide with the world premieres of THE WHALE and TWO THINGS YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT AT DINNER, the DCPA blog talked with Artistic Director Kent Thompson about new plays and new play development.
DCPA: You’ve selected 3 brand new plays to produce this season. What was it about...
6 tags
Shrew-ing it up in the 1950s
The Taming of the Shrew has been a paradox of late.
Despite harsh feminist critiques over the past 40 years (in fact there are many who feel the play is so deeply misogynistic that Kate and Petruchio should be banished from the stage for good), Shrew remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies. How can this be? Artistic Director Kent Thompson, who is directing the play this season,...
10 tags
Some Funny Things about an often Serious Play
Playwright Lisa Loomer describes her Two Things You don’t Talk About At Dinner as “an often funny play about some serious things.” It is an improbably even-handed look at the extremely complex issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian situation—on the ground and in our dining rooms. Funny? Serious? You bet. Loomer’s assessment is on the money. Yes, people do tend to fly off the handle when...
8 tags
Profile I: Hal Brooks, director of THE WHALE
Hal Brooks has a highly diverse list of directing credits. Most recently, he staged Will Eno’s Off-Broadway Pulitzer finalist THOM PAIN (based on nothing) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at the Soho Theatre in London, and at the DR2 in NYC. The Whale, a new play written by Idaho native Samuel Hunter and developed at the Colorado New Play Summit in February 2011, presented some major production...
December 2011
3 posts
12 tags
WEST SIDE STORY: The Making of a Classic
It was September 26, 1957, and something great was coming that evening: a Broadway musical unlike any that had come before. “I thought West Side Story was going to be a flop,” says Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of the new show. “I thought maybe it would run for three months. I didn’t care. It was so not what a musical should be.”
That was evident to audiences from the outset. West Side Story...
6 tags
What’s In A Name? Plenty if you’re Dickens
by Douglas Langworthy for Applause magazine
Dickens had a way with names. They were much more than personal identifiers for him; they were expressions of a character’s personality, often served up with a comic twist: Sloppy, Wopsie, Bumble, Polly Toodle, the Squeers, Uriah Heep, Pumblechook—and on and on. In A Christmas Carol, the name Scrooge, with its initial twisted clump of consonants and...
November 2011
8 posts
5 tags
Why do we love A Christmas Carol?
by Teri Downard for Applause magazine
As the Denver Center Theatre Company again celebrates Christmas with its annual presentation of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, this may be a good time to ponder the seemingly endless popularity of Dickens’ “ghostly little book”—what it has to say… and what we never tire of hearing.
Arrogant, condescending, caustic and acquisitive, Ebenezer Scrooge may be the very...
5 tags
The Use of Accent and Dialect in Tom Sawyer
by Kathryn G. Maes, Ph.D.
Voice & Dialect Coach on the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The use of both Accent and Dialect in the theatre has a long and enduring history. The earliest recorded use of Accent and Dialect can be found in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata when he differentiated the speech of the women of Sparta from those of the Athenian...
8 tags
Mischievous Pasts of Tom Sawyer's Cast
Knowing that THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER is all about mischief, we asked the actors in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s upcoming production of the Mark Twain classic to share their most mischievous childhood stories. Let us know who you think was the worst (or some might consider the best). We’d be curious what their parents would say…
NICK ABEEL
Joe Harper and others in The...
5 tags
Bringing Tom Sawyer up on Stage
By Rob Weinert-Kendt for Applause magazine
If you happened to stop by Connecticut’s Hartford Stage in the spring of 2010, you might have witnessed a rare creative idyll, almost too sweet to be true: a playwright nursing not only a newborn play to life but also her six-week-old infant. At the back of the theatre.
“The stage manager was an old friend of mine, and she put a rocking chair and a music...
6 tags
Julie Taymor: Still Queen of THE LION KING
by Sylvie Drake for APPLAUSE magazine
Almost from the moment she was born—in 1952, into a comfortable upper middle class Boston family—Julie Taymor was destined for a wild ride in the theatre she could never have foreseen. This director, choreographer, writer and designer has managed what no one else has in the West (with the possible exception of France’s Ariane Mnouchkine and our own Robert...
4 tags
Fun Facts about Disney's THE LION KING
Around the World
The Lion King has been seen by more than 54 million people in 14 different countries, on five continents.
The Lion King is the seventh longest-running musical in Broadway history and one of only five productions in theatre history to play for ten years or more, both on Broadway and in the West End.
Eight current productions:
Broadway (the flagship)...
October 2011
8 posts
4 tags
The Importance of Costumes
To coordinate with today’s THEATRE THREADS: A COSTUME RUNWAY SHOW, Denver Center Theatre Company Artistic Director KENT THOMPSON explains the importance of costumes.
Costumes at the Denver Center Theatre Company are a vitally important part of theatrical storytelling. At the DCTC, they literally help us create the characters onstage and tell the story better. And what an impression they...
17 tags
Director Sam Woodhouse on American Night: The...
Sam Woodhouse co-founded the San Diego Repertory Theatre with D.W. Jacobs in 1976, the offshoot of an earlier group of street performers (of which he was a part), composed of college students eager to make theatre of protest together. Woodhouse has been the Rep’s producing and artistic director ever since its inception and has worked as a director, producer and actor on more than 150 Rep...
7 tags
Taking Mockingbird Personally (Excerpt)
By Douglas Langworthy, Dramaturg
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has achieved almost mythic status since it first appeared on the scene just over 50 years ago. It is still the most frequently read book in high school (despite being occasionally banned due to the sexual content of the rape trial and use of the n-word). Some have gone so far as to call Mockingbird America’s national novel....
