Robin Schaefer, at Ironton Studios & Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, 303-297-8626), is an intriguing show spotlighting a group of crisply rendered portraits. Schaefer, who maintains a studio at Ironton, has taken grade-school photos and translated them into oils on canvas. The resulting paintings, which are done in muted colors verging…
Comic Potential, now at the Aurora Fox, takes flight on the performance of Jessica Austgen as robot JCF 31333 — or Jacie Triplethree. Alan Ayckbourn’s play is set in the near future, when the entertainment industry has descended even further into chattering idiocy than it has today. In a third-rate…
What more can go wrong in suburbia? Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) wants us to know, and to that end, she has recruited another army of wounded parents, troubled children and broken dreamers, then marched them all into a whirlpool of dysfunction on the quiet, tree-lined streets just minutes from…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish Holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has…
If you have a taste for really vile, totally degenerate bad guys, the late John Frankenheimer’s neglected crime thriller 52 Pick-up may be the movie for you. Adapted in 1986 from one of Elmore Leonard’s more perverse potboilers, it’s a sleazy tale of sex and revenge in which a Los…
When the people of Nederland say that Grandpa is out back in the shed, they don’t mean he’s out there tinkering around with the snowblower. No, they mean that Bredo “Gramps” Morstel, a Norwegian who passed away in 1989 and was cryogenically frozen by his grandson, Trygve Bauge, is just…
Thursday, March 6 Denverite Terry Rosen grew up in a unique and definitive twentieth-century time and place: Los Alamos, New Mexico, ground zero for the Manhattan Project, where his scientist father Louis helped build the A-bomb in the mid-Forties. A war baby who spent his first twenty years in Los…
Describing Soul Circus, the latest book by George P. Pelecanos, as a crime novel is like dismissing the Mercedes-Benz piloted by one of its seamiest characters as basic transportation. The story intersperses vividly realized action sequences with passionate social commentary — epitomized by its metaphorical title, which is credited to…
Has this buttoned-down new millennium got you down? Need a jolt of that good, old refreshing Front Range bohemian culture? You’ll find it at Wine, Art and Revoluciones, a multimedia evening hosted monthly by Revoluciones Collective Art Space, (719 West Eighth Avenue), a hole-in-the-wall along the Santa Fe Drive corridor…
Hearts were broken when retailer Carolyn Fineran closed her Cherry Creek North store Tapestry three years ago: A sumptuous trove of unique women’s clothing and jewelry handcrafted in a folkloric, gypsy spirit, there’s never been anything quite like it in town before or since. But Fineran didn’t want to be…
Bill Nye the Science Guy’s motto is, “Leave the world better than you found it.” He owns approximately six dozen bow ties, and he advises kids interested in science to “try things, then clean up after yourself.” Nye had a mechanical-engineering degree from Cornell University and a long career in…
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French culture was really something — and there are all those pictures to prove it. There are the Manets, the Monets, the Van Goghs, the Gauguins, the Toulouse-Lautrecs, the Cézannes, the Matisses and the Picassos, as well as others by the all-time…
If you’re crazy about mid-century modernism — and let’s be honest, who isn’t? — then you’ll want to catch Werner Drewes: A Bauhaus Artist at the Lakewood Cultural Center (470 South Allison Parkway, 303-987-7876). Oh, true, it’s installed with no apparent rhyme or reason — I had to restrain myself…
I don’t know about you, but I worry when I read this kind of thing in the notes a theater provides about a playwright — in this case, Caridad Svich, in the program for Alchemy of Desire/Dead-man’s Blues: “Svich sees Alchemy/Blues as an ideal example of her visceral connection to…
I know times are tight, but this won’t do. Watching Saturday Night Fever at the Buell, it was hard to remember that the auditorium had hosted such scintillating musicals as Kiss Me Kate, Swing and The Full Monty in the past couple of years. Saturday Night Fever feels grubby and…
This is a story with a happy ending, because, so far, nothing bad has happened to indicate otherwise. There are no ratings to sweat over, no network executives to fight with, no cancellations to suffer through. The rough territories lie ahead, over the horizon of 8:30 p.m. this Sunday, when…
John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle-rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the spectacle. As Navy SEAL…
Emerging from Till Human Voices Wake Us, it was easy to overhear some male viewers striving adamantly to put the film’s metaphysical themes in their place — to explain them away, as it were. This is a shame. The source of the story’s mystique is fairly simple and may be…
Long before director Jonathan Demme sent the bean counters reeling with box-office hits like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, he made one of the most energetic and engaging rock-concert films ever. Stop Making Sense, from 1984, stars David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and it’s a treat not…
If you look back at hot pants, pet rocks, M*A*S*H* and roller-skating as souvenirs of the good ol’ days, it’s time to dust off that white leisure suit and slap on those platform boots, because Polly Esther’s is calling all vintage hipsters — along with younger club-goers — to get…
Thursday, February 27 In this corner, wearing red-white-and-blue trunks, Mr. Thomas Jefferson! And over here, in black stripes, his opponent, Alexander Hamilton! Now gents, a clean fight! Expect words — but not fists — to fly when the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities American Spirit Series hosts a live Chautauqua…
Because contemporary mural painting has roots in Mexico, where Diego Rivera, José Orozco and David Siqueiros pioneered the medium early in the twentieth century, it’s been a natural carryover in heavily Hispanic Colorado. Big, in-your-face narrative public art has long been making statements in communities across our state. In celebration…
