Talk about weird cinematic experiences: The German department at Colorado College is presenting a series of ten Third Reich-era films this fall under the rubric “Between Entertainment and Propaganda: Popular German Films of the 1930s.” These largely forgotten works all come from the so-called Gleichschaultung period (1933-39), when Adolf Hitler…
The musical’s name is a shocker: Urinetown. Mark Hollmann, a New York musician, appreciates that. After all, even Hollmann was a wee-wee bit skeptical when Greg Kotis, an actor he’d worked with previously in an offbeat troupe, approached him with a concept he’d come up with on a European backpacking…
Thursday, September 4 Puttin’ on for dogs: Audience members willing to plunk down a few bucks tonight will be treated to an evening of partying down with Denver-area bands, but down-on-their-luck canines will be the main recipients of Music for Mutts, hosted by Camp Bow Wow as a benefit for…
Classical music is a hard sell almost everywhere you go these days, but that hasn’t deterred the Colorado Symphony Orchestra from trying harder. On the brink of a new season, the CSO is also at a crossroads, anticipating the eventual loss of Maestra Marin Alsop and those new directions that…
SAT, 9/6 Ever wonder how to create your own ristra — the strands of dried red chile peppers that are hung near the entrance of a home to symbolize an abundant harvest? Well, this is the weekend to learn, and the place to master the art is the Chile Harvest…
SAT, 9/6 Ten years after being banned from competing in the city’s public facilities by a skittish city council, the ultimate warriors of the World Cage Fighting Championships return to Denver for a “Global Domination” event that goes to the mat tonight at 7 p.m. at the Pepsi Center. Part…
FRI, 9/5 Kurt Zimmerle graduated in 1997 from tiny Principia College in Illinois with a job offer any third-grader would envy: official LEGO MasterBuilder. An art student with a knack for self-promotion, he’d come to the building-block maker’s attention in 1992 after sending them a video of his scale LEGO…
FRI, 9/5 We all encounter borders in our lives — points of friction set off by differences, be they cultural or psychological. But leave it to artists, who straddle such borders all the time, to illuminate them for us visually. While the prevailing metaphor floating throughout Borderlands, a new show…
SUN, 9/7 Robin Jester likes urban tales — real, meaty accounts of life. The Regis University graduate advisor, who moved to Denver two years ago from New York, first experienced the buzz of creating a salon when she was living in Manhattan. And she figured the concept of online city…
Reaching for Comfort is, among other things, a study of dysfunction: dysfunctional birth families, dysfunction within marriage, a dysfunctional society. The play opens in 1980. John Lennon has been shot. Ronald Reagan is about to become president. We’re fully absorbed in the characters’ personal lives, but those lives are also…
Local playwright Melissa Lucero McCarl’s Painted Bread is a mixed bag. It’s full of passionate feeling, but I also found myself bored and restless for long stretches while watching it. Still, the ending was moving, and the patterns and colors of thought evoked by the play stayed with me. Painted…
A respected comedy writer sits over lunch with a man who, in the late 1960s, was very, very famous. This man, slender and balding, was a comedian who, with his younger brother, hosted a network television show that caused quite a ruckus–they talked too much politics, and pot, for prime…
From the beginning, in the 1960s, Sergio Leone’s justly famous “spaghetti Westerns” had about them both a whiff of excitement and an air of folly. Here was an extroverted Italian working in Spain, reinventing American history and American movie mythology with an abandon that bordered on craziness. Leone’s style was…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the eleven-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
Get the lawn chairs folded, the picnic basket stuffed with goodies and the kids firmly in tow. The last film of the summer in the ultra-popular Boulder Outdoor Cinema series will be screened this Saturday night, August 30. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is not just for…
The old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” definitely holds true at this Saturday’s Junk Jam — a concert that features musical instruments made out of “found objects” and played by local kids. “I like the idea of taking things that are ugly, trash to everyone else, and…
Thursday, August 28 Word is, you don’t have to give a hoot about professional wrestling to appreciate Mick Foley (aka Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love), one of the sport’s toughest survivors (he’s missing an ear and most of his teeth) and author of two memoirs so insightful that they’ve…
Imagine it’s 50,000 years ago. You live in France, paint oxen on cave walls, start fires and sharpen arrows, which you, a clever Cro-Magnon, just invented. You’re accustomed to the big, silver circle that lights the sky at night, but one day you see something that blows your prehistoric mind:…
Lauri Lynnxe Murphy is a Denver artist with a mission: to stop the commercialization of America. “You can drive across the entire country, and every place has an Applebee’s and a Chili’s,” she says. “I just felt like local art was getting lost.” So earlier this summer, Murphy opened Pod,…
FRI, 8/29 Speed freaks don’t have a very good reputation these days. But the backers and fans of the Centrix Financial Grand Prix of Denver may be exceptions to that rule. After all, Mayor John “Vespa” Hickenlooper has signed on as grand marshal for the second annual spin on 1.65…
SAT, 8/30 It’s good old country fun with a metropolitan twist: This year’s Chatfield Nature Preserve Corn Maze, created by the Denver Botanic Gardens, will promote the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Every year, DBG staff and volunteers submit design ideas for the maze, and this time around, public-relations…
SAT, 8/30 The Council Tree, once a gathering place for people of the Arapahoe and Cheyenne tribes, has been replaced by a stretch of I-25. But people of all backgrounds are reclaiming northern Colorado as a place to exchange cultures and ideas. “Over 21 different tribes considered northern Colorado their…
