Would I have preferred not to know that John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story was an allegory about the struggle between Israel and Palestine when I sat down to view it? If I hadn’t known, the last line of the first act would have been a complete shock. Up until that…
In putting together their original comedy Macblank, the folks at Buntport relied on the theatrical superstition that there’s a curse on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and that those performing it are in danger of unknown catastrophe. There really are actors who refuse to speak the play’s title in a theater, and it’s…
Angels in America: Part I: Millenium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
The agony and the ecstasy of Ray Charles’s long journey cry out for a grittier, more direct movie than Taylor Hackford’s Ray — a movie that’s less processed and less outwardly opulent than this one. For much of these two hours and forty minutes, there’s almost no stylistic syncopation, aural…
Margo Channing cracked wiser. And her devious protegé cooked up better schemes to steal the limelight. Still, half a century after they lit up the screen, the principals in All About Eve would probably get a charge out of Being Julia. This bittersweet backstage drama skillfully combines — as all…
How does Mike Leigh do it? The years pass; film fashions come and go; Hollywood churns its commercial pap. Careers sparkle; others fizz; whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous. Meanwhile, over in England, Leigh makes his films, tracking the intricacies of the lower-class family with the patience…
It takes mighty big stones to name your horror movie Saw, knowing full well that that’s popular fan-slang for Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie worshiped by gorehounds worldwide. When you take that name for your own, you had damn well better deliver a memorable, worthy contender to the…
The late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski was an artist of sublime gift and burning conscience. His peerless series of meditations on the Ten Commandments, The Decalogue, will endure for as long as we remember movies; the sum of his work is as compelling as that of any director of the…
A surprising number of viewers have witnessed Michael Moore’s jowly pokes at the Bush administration in Fahrenheit 9/11. While the anti-Dubya flick’s more than $100 million gross isn’t awe-inspiring when compared to the box-office tallies of Hollywood blockbusters, it is cinematic shock and awe for a political documentary. But Moore’s…
Thursday, October 28 Traditionally celebrated on November 2, El Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead observed by Hispanic cultures — is actually spread out over a period of days that begins on October 27. Each day represents different categories of the deceased, from ancient Aztec warriors…
T. Jefferson Carey — playwright, actor, artist, set designer, landscape laborer — might be the most unassuming Renaissance man you’ll ever meet. But really, he’s just a regular guy with a good shtick. More to the point, he’s a grown-up boy with a whole lifetime of surreal and scary dreams…
THURS, 10/28 So it’s a Thursday night, and you’ve got some extra green burning a hole in your pocket. What is there to do? Well, if you’re in a culinary frame of mind, you can drop that dough at the Too Many Chefs in the Kitchen dinner and fundraiser for…
Endless winter it’s not, but plenty of snow lovers will be happy to hit the slopes before Halloween. Those seeking a fix can head to Loveland Ski Area, which kicked off the season this year on October 15, or Arapahoe Basin, which was close behind on October 22. It was…
SAT, 10/30 The Billy Nayer Show, a New York City-based band, has created bizarre story-driven rock for more than a decade. But forget trying to describe its unfolding saga or style. Instead, think of a creepy alien spaceship landing tonight in Boulder at the International Order of Odd Fellows Hall,…
FRI, 10/29 To truly appreciate Red Priest, you really must transport yourself to Baroque times — when Handel and Bach were society’s rock stars, creating bold and riveting music that wowed the courtly crowds. The iconoclastic British early-music company, once declared “the Cirque du Soleil of baroque performance ensembles” on…
One of the weirdest twists in contemporary art over the last quarter-century — other than increased interest in boring videos and self-indulgent performances — is the way in which beauty has come to be denigrated. Today’s art world is suspicious of beauty, and to say something is decorative is to…
There’s an elegant little show with the possibly insulting name of Silence Nothingness at Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969). The title is taken from a Samuel Beckett quote, but taken out of context, the words are robbed of their meaning. The exhibit pairs abstracted versions of the…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and The Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited…
Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain’s lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. — from “Autumn Song,” by W. H. Auden So much…
Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was published in 1964 as fiction, but in fact described the author’s own teenage struggle for sanity and the help she received from Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Dr. Fromm-Reichmann had strong theories about the practice of…
The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is angry. He considers the Bush administration a disaster; he condemns its boneheaded policies, its indifference to the plight of the poor, its pre-emptive war on Iraq. But Gurney is a kind-spirited, bourgeois, WASP kind of guy, and in this play, his anger is…
The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi, but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory, Ghost…
