Alan Bennett is the most English of English playwrights. Despite a steady output of quietly brilliant scripts and plays, he was for many years the least-known member of the original 1960s Beyond the Fringe group, which included Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. In the early ’90s, Bennett gained…
If Rattlebrain is a fair example, Denver-area comedy clubs have come a long way since the days when shows consisted of a succession of middle-aged guys wearing large turquoise jewelry and performing sexist monologues. The Rattlebrain Theater Company has taken over the basement of the venerable D&F clock tower on…
To the woman who broke Adrian Lyne’s heart all those years ago: Stop what you’re doing right this minute. Drop everything; pick up the phone, and call him. Apologize profusely for cheating on him. Tell him it’s all your fault and you’re a worse person for leaving him. Offer him…
Anybody who takes a second, sorrowful look at the charred rubble in lower Manhattan, the body counts in the West Bank or the brazen denials of Slobodan Milosevic will have to conclude that the brotherhood of man isn’t attracting many good recruits these days. Neither, for that matter, is the…
If you’re living in a LoDo loft, it’s probably been a while since you hung your clothes out to dry. Granted, the practice is more of a modern-day indulgence than a necessity, concede Denver authors Irene Rawlings and Andrea Vansteenhouse. But the two women say they wrote their book, The…
For Denver’s acclaimed Curious Theatre Company, there’s no such thing as winding down a season. If anything, the troupe’s finale at the Acoma Center, José Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics, has artistic director Chip Walton flying sky-high on a wave of the same magic realism that drives Rivera’s lyrical play, a timeless…
The best part of The Lion King is the first five or ten minutes. A solitary singer stands on stage: a brightly patched, wise-woman/jester figure. She turns out to be Rafiki, the baboon. Her song is full-throated and joyous, and it’s soon joined by other voices and rhythmic drumming. Animals…
Ruth Steiner, an author so renowned that she gets called on to testify in front of congressional committees that discuss funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, is yelling from the window of her Greenwich Village apartment to someone on the sidewalk below. We know from her muttering and…
The most compelling element of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s valentine to a crew of footloose Southern California teenagers who set a radical new style in skateboarding in the 1970s, is the documentarian’s heartfelt belief in the lasting importance of the enterprise. As a member of the tribe and an…
Deuces Wild is, like Vulgar and Chelsea Walls, yet another new release that is now inexplicably being distributed theatrically — rather than slinking away to the video/cable market — after having explicably sat on the shelf for more than a year. The film’s age is immediately evident both from how…
Kick a boy enough times and he’ll become a man. The question is, of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids and insightful enough to engage adults, the…
Denver’s had a lackluster National Poetry Month so far: Outside of a few isolated blips, it’s been business as usual for the area’s alive-and-kicking but seriously diffuse poetry community. That could all change when Gary Glazner, the Vibes (the rhythm section of the Jazz Passengers, featuring Bill Ware, Brad Jones…
In Portuguese, “É minha cara means, literally, “That’s my face.” But as filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris notes, the Brazilians use the phrase colloquially: “If you see something that’s your style, say, a shirt that looks like it should be in your closet, you say, ‘É minha cara.’ Also, if you…
Last October, Carol Dickinson, the director of Golden’s Foothills Art Center, had a crisis on her hands: Her big spring exhibition — the one scheduled to be on display right now — was abruptly canceled by its organizers. “I needed to come up with something fast, and last fall was…
Alone among American cities, Denver has a direct relationship with Italian modern master Gio Ponti: The 1971 Denver Art Museum is the architect’s only building in North America. Most of Ponti’s buildings, designed from the 1930s until his death in 1979, are in Italy. How Ponti ended up doing a…
The Taffetas are four singing sisters from Muncie, Indiana, beginning to experience their small level of fame: bus journeys to nearby towns, store openings, an award for “This Year’s Best Copy of a Copy” of a song. When we meet them, they’re in the New York studio of a show…
There’s a lot right about Bourbon at the Border, and it’s given a first-rate production by the Shadow Theatre Company, but ultimately the play is betrayed by didacticism and a weak ending. The evening is introduced by a young girl with a terrifying smile and an even more terrifying message:…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely sixty years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Life or Something Like It is a vain, starlet-like bleached blonde employed by a Seattle TV station. To call her a reporter is to defame reporters. Her hairspray outweighs her brain, and everything in her life — from her obsessive workouts at the health club…
Watch out, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg: A new generation of directors wants your jobs. These aspiring filmmakers will showcase their efforts at The First Look Student Film Festival this weekend at the Starz FilmCenter. Thirty-eight short films from around the globe will be screened during three presentations. “We have…
Docents are the unsung heroes of every museum; primarily volunteers, they go back to school before each new exhibit opens, then lead their quiet little tours and go home. But the five docents at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, fascinated by the museum’s recently refurbished, topsy-turvy Red Grooms sculpture “Brooklyn…
The era of the Dutch masters — many of whom have made their way into modern culture on the lids of cigar boxes — is one of those rare subjects in the art world that have generated interest not just from stodgy old art historians, but from everyone. And there’s…
