Best Quietly Intelligent Evening of Theater

Talking Heads was an exquisite production of two monologues by the wryly enigmatic Englishman Alan Bennett. The acting, by Chris Tabb and Ann Rickhoff, was pitch perfect, as was Richard Pegg’s direction. Everything about the production felt right, from the brown leaves drifting into a pile beneath a bus-stop bench…

Best — and Most Missed — Theatrical Inspiration

The Boulder Rep is still vivid in the minds of most Boulder theater aficionados. Founded by Frank and Ernestine Georgianna in 1974, the company mounted challenging, exquisitely staged contemporary plays and acted in a variety of around-town venues through the year 2000. Frank was a visionary theatrical force through all…

Prints and Solids

Periodically in fancy women’s clothing stores, like those in the Cherry Creek area, there are special events called “trunk shows.” They are advertised in the papers, and attendees often appear later in the society pages. In these shows, a representative of some haute designer or maker brings in trunks full…

Artbeat

Last year, the Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-332-5582) had a short-lived branch called the Andenken Annex. Situated in the swanky SteelBridge Lofts, the little spot specialized in the work of young artists. Despite its brief run, it cast a long shadow, and though gone, it lives on in Annex…

Map Happy

The choice of a journey often deserves a writer’s attention quite as much as the journey itself. Travel, like dreaming, is a form of emotional satisfaction, and though you may explain the act of dreaming by the cheese eaten at dinner, you cannot explain so easily the particular images which…

Real Music History

Facing a budget shortfall for the last production of his Shadow Theatre Company’s sixth season, artistic director Jeffrey Nickelson decided to make a virtue of necessity. He ditched expensive plans to stage The Old Settler and teamed with associate artistic director Hugo Jon Sayles to create Sweet Corner Symphony, a…

Lots of Plots

Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King-adaptation genre, currently at 74 — including film and TV — and counting. According to the Internet Movie Database, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38); he’s closing in…

A Tormented Mind

Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…

Flick Pick

The French are about as popular at the Pentagon this week as cat food on a croissant, but even the hawks would admit that the Gauls have made some wonderful movies. Among the most stylish and original is 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s bittersweet charmer about a clerk…

Chimp Champ

Researcher extroardinaire Jane Goodall, who has studied chimpanzees for more than four decades, will distill her expertise this weekend at two events: The Roots & Shoots Discovery stage show for kids and their parents, in Boulder; and the opening of Discovering Chimpanzees: The Remarkable World of Jane Goodall, at the…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, March 20 If your tastes run toward the old, rare and collectible, you won’t want to miss the World Wide Antique Spring Show at the Denver Merchandise Mart, 451 East 58th Avenue, this weekend. A forty-year tradition, the huge event brings together inventory offered by nearly 200 dealers and…

Fiddlin’ Frenzy

When composer Johann Sebastian Bach was penning his Concerto in D Major for the violin in 1719, he probably didn’t expect high-flying musicians to leap, spin and do back flips as they played the masterwork. But when it comes to the violin extravaganza known as Barrage, standing still isn’t an…

Free For All

Two days, sixty bands: The Ultimate Music Xperience is a little bit of everything — talent search, sneak preview, audience-participation event and free-entertainment spectacle. But when the annual Capitol Hill People’s Fair music tryouts are over, musical careers will be cinched — or crushed — as the stage is set…

Author! Author!

Forgive me if my age is showing, but I was just out walking when from out of the pawnshop down the street came blaring Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the song that changed hundreds of rebellious lives back in the moldy ’60s. And it sounded so fresh, Dylan’s urgent…

Small World

Like many circus performers, Gregory Popovich was born into the life: A member of a Russian circus family, the renowned juggler and clown starred in the Moscow Circus and worked with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey before turning to his current shtick, Gregory Popovich’s Comedy and Pet Theatre. His…

At Your Service

In the 1981 movie Arthur, dapper John Gielgud played a quintessential English butler forced to put up with the antics of Dudley Moore’s drunken playboy. But that’s nothing like the day-to-day life of real butlers, swears Mary Louise Starkey of Starkey International, the Denver-based service-professional training institute sponsoring this weekend’s…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, March 13 If you still haven’t checked out Red Reel, Rock Island’s unique monthly independent film screening, here’s your chance to do so: Tonight the LoDo club will screen Last Call, a film by first-time director and Denver native David C. Riley. An acoustic set by Sirens Project will…

Wonderful World

Sandy Skoglund’s installation “Breathing Glass” is a thing of shimmering beauty. Its meticulously hung yet precarious blue-glass panels quiver in a sixteen-square-foot space, embedded with a grid of hundreds of glass dragonflies intermingled with mini-marshmallows that fall like snowflakes amid the sparkling insects. An intricate glass mosaic glitters on the…

Free For All

If you’re looking for shamrocks and leprechauns, follow the rainbow (or maybe just the blaring bagpipes) to LoDo for the 41st annual Denver St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Because of construction around the Golden Triangle neighborhood and changes in the Denver Municipal Code regarding parades, organizers decided to return to their…

Bread and Circuses

Say you were throwing a dinner party for a group of your favorite hobbits. What would you whip up? Marinated goat cheese, maybe, with tangy apple soup, a garden salad and a chicken pot pie? That’s exactly what local storyteller and chef Carol Hampson will be serving this Saturday, March…

Sporting Chance

Think you’ve got skills gnarly enough to hang with the big dogs? On Friday night, forty of Colorado’s best riders will shred, slash and slide at Boulder’s first annual Heavy Metal on the Hill, a rail jam competition sponsored by the 150-member University of Colorado snowboard team. “We’re going to…

Going Up and Coming Down

Daniel Libeskind, an architect with a Denver connection, made a worldwide stir a couple of weeks ago when he was chosen to design the replacement for New York’s World Trade Center. And you saw it predicted here first, weeks before the decision was made — and without the use of…