If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disney-folk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
The teenage poet in Karen Moncrieff’s Blue Car writes melancholy verse about autumn leaves falling off trees and fathers abandoning their daughters. Predictably, the girl’s floundering mother is too harried and too strapped for cash to pay much attention to her, and her troubled little sister is endlessly needy. In…
Ticket to The Matrix Reloaded: $8.50 Ticket to The Matrix Reloaded to understand the real meaning behind Trinity’s… (oops, can’t tell): $8.50 Your own personal Matrix: Priceless And free. While the rest of the shlubs in town are forking over to see a Dolby sound, flat-screen version of the matrix,…
Burn, baby, burn: Nothing will heat up your impending weekend quicker than a little recreational fire-breathing and poi (that’s Hawaiian fire-spinning, folks), brought to you by Denver’s local experts, the Lumina Performance Troupe. The safety-conscious group, which includes hot, hot, hot choreography, drumming, juggling, gymnastics, stilt-walking and more in its…
Not long before noon in the biting cold of May 29, 1953, a New Zealand beekeeper and a Nepalese Sherpa became the first humans to stand atop the 29,028-foot Mt. Everest. Edmund Hillary snapped a picture of his companion, Tenzing Norgay. (The historic gesture wasn’t returned, Hillary later explained, because…
A classy writer digests food cravings in his new book Calvin Trillin has a self-deprecating, low-key way of describing what is clearly a high-octane passion. Feeding a Yen (Random House, $22.95) is a series of essays, each devoted to a particular foodstuff he craves. He has placed many of these…
Art Against AIDS shows strength in its quest By Susan Froyd AIDS is far from being beat. That’s the message the Colorado AIDS Project, celebrating its twentieth year, hopes to put out there, and it’s the prevailing reason the local nonprofit throws its Art Against AIDS Fine and Decorative Art…
IMAX captures the creepy critters of Oz Big screen. Check. Big continent. Check. The perentie, a monitor lizard that grows up to eight feet in length, has a taste for just about anything that moves, and kills its prey by shaking it viciously, then swallowing the subject whole. Ulp. Beyond…
Clear Creek fest wets appetites Throw a bunch of river rats into roiling spring runoff, tell them there’s a pot of gold for the first one across the finish line, and what have you got? The third annual Clear Creek Adventure Festival, taking place this weekend in Lawson, Idaho Springs…
CSO’s Alsop enters a new role with a mega-show Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor is a formidable monster: It requires a women’s chorus, a children’s chorus and a solo voice, in addition to a large orchestra. It’s long — there are six movements instead of the usual…
Surely among the mega-art trends of the early 21st century is art based on popular culture — which makes quite a bit of sense, because it was also a mega-trend of the late twentieth. It seems that everywhere, there are shows highlighting the different approaches being embraced by artists who…
There’s a remarkable show, Shock/Awe, currently in the back room at the Spark Gallery, 1535 Platte Street, 303-455-4435. This sophisticated exhibit features photos of television coverage of the Iraq war taken by Annalee Schorr, who’s renowned for this kind of work. Though Schorr is serious in her negative appraisal of…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Scapin or the Con Artist is such an intelligent, lively, tasteful production. Nagle Jackson’s translation of Molière zips along: It uses contemporary slang but doesn’t hit you over the head with desperate-to-be-relevant jokes. There are some hilarious rhythmic ping-pong bits and some amazing sequences of…
Terry Dodd’s First Night or Whatever was commissioned to be the first play performed in the Byron Theatre at the University of Denver’s new, multimillion-dollar Newman Center. It’s a fitting debut choice, because the play is all about theater itself. It takes place in a dressing room, where a cast…
A lot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie…
Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” but I can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’s laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’s toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet…
Time was that Dad stuffed the Mercury full of eager children (including, perhaps, one or two secreted in the trunk) and motored off to the drive-in for a double feature and a double order of corn dogs. Alas, the drive-in movie, with a few exceptions, is as dead as James…
Hundreds of trends have materialized and vanished since the birth of the gothic subculture. So why does goth remain in the black well over two decades after its birth? William Tompkins, spokesman for Sunday’s Colorado Dark Arts Festival, which celebrates the scene, has some ideas. “Subcultures usually begin as youth…
Thursday, May 22 Here’s your chance to take a gander at DU’s highly touted, newfangled Gates Concert Hall: The Lamont School of Music’s Opera Theater Department will break the place in with a four-day production of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow, beginning tonight at 7:30 and concluding with a…
I remember my first Blue Man Group encounter vividly: the trek from my East Village walk-up on a snowy evening, the electric darkness as I waited nervously, not knowing what to expect — and then BAM! Sensory overload as three men covered in brilliant blue paint took me on a…
FRI, 5/23 Take down that ratty-edged Ansel Adams print you’ve had since college and banish your Scarface poster to the basement. The organizers of the Colorado Arts Festival want to encourage everyone — from first-timers to high-end collectors — to purchase works by local artists. “People should appreciate the value…
MON, 5/26 For many Coloradans, Memorial Day means three things: honoring those who died for our freedom, starting up barbecue season, and renewing the right to wear white pants without scorn. But for a large number of fitness-oriented residents, today marks an opportunity to run the Bolder Boulder. This ten-kilometer…
