If guitarist Mason Williams hadn’t ventured to Aspen in the winter of 1960, he might never have written the song that made him famous: “Classical Gas.” Williams, then a 21-year-old college student, was playing gigs in Oklahoma City with a folk group called the Wayfarers Trio. Since Aspen was a…
At the close of Sounds of the River, Da Chen’s second memoir set in the tumult of a rapidly changing People’s Republic of China, young Chen is ready to depart for America — a place akin to another planet for the country boy from southeast China, whose hard work and…
If you’re like me, you’re getting pretty tired of all the brown grass, bare trees and snow that’s wearing out its welcome around here. Spring officially starts next week, but the signatures of winter are sure to be around for at least another month. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, then,…
The contemporary craze for backlit translucent photos in wall-hung boxes seems to be moving full speed ahead, and it has been for at least a decade. This type of thing is so popular right now among artists that it has completely transcended its original role as a simple stylistic device…
In choosing to mount Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, the Trouble Clef Theatre Company has taken on a hugely ambitious project and, to a large extent, has succeeded with it. Written in the early 1980s, Sunday in the Park is a musical about art, its place in…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — a likely explanation of why a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale,…
Ice Age poses a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor — from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which seemed to be stolen from Saturday-morning television — feels pilfered and stitched together. There’s not…
It’s the usual sad story in today’s numbers-oriented music business: San Francisco’s Peter Case had a hit in the early ’80s with the power-popping Plimsouls, but like the girl in the song (“A Million Miles Away”), success proved elusive. Since then, Case has continued to do what he really does…
They may wear gorilla masks, but the Guerrilla Girls don’t monkey around. Members of this anonymous group of women artists, formed in 1985 to highlight the lack of women and minorities in the art world, are coming to Denver for the first time to raise a little consciousness. Sporting simian…
Artyard, Denver’s premier sculpture gallery, turns sweet sixteen this year, and director Peggy Mangold is quietly celebrating with Sixteen Years at Artyard, a small show devoted to the gallery’s two biggest attractions over those years: her husband, Bob Mangold, and Chuck Parson. Bob Mangold holds a distinguished position in the…
There are a couple of interesting shows right now at CORE New Art Space (2045 Larimer Street, 303-297-8428). Up front is Doug Craft: Collage and Montage in Golden Ratios, and in the spacious, handsome back gallery is Juhl Wojahn. Though he’s in his late forties and has been dabbling in…
The central joke in the ’40s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace concerns spinster sisters Abby and Martha Brewster, who are pillars of the local church, much loved in their community, and always happy to provide soup for the sick and hospitality to the lonely. They live with their nephew, Teddy,…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, fifty-foot women or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. Within this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct — time — proves…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
Since its inception five years ago, the National Education Association’s Read Across America celebration has fallen on (or around) March 2, the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Best known in the kid-lit realm as Dr. Seuss, in the 1950s Geisel invented a unique literacy-boosting formula by creating attention-grabbing kids’ books…
Sculptor Ann Cunningham’s life is like her works: a touchy-feely gestalt of related things. Tactile art is her forte, but the title doesn’t fully describe her craft’s sensual boundaries. She also teaches art to blind people, trying to get inside their unimaginably different world. Teaching, the Golden resident readily notes,…
It was back in 1990 when the Denver Art Museum hired curator R. Craig Miller to establish a department of architecture, design and graphics. Miller was working at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when he was stolen away by Met alum and longtime friend Lewis Sharp. Sharp has made…
Littleton’s Everyman Theatre Company is mounting a skilled and lovingly detailed production of a play that ultimately may not be worth the actors’ or the director’s time. The beautifully realized set is a young girl’s bedroom, with apple-green walls, shelves full of books and bric-a-brac, an Exercycle, a trio of…
Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure! — from a White Rose leaflet Germany’s White Rose movement served as a small, clear candle shining during a murky, terrifying time. Where did a group of students acquire the courage and independence of thought to…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stench emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount real-life battles that claimed the lives…
For an industry notorious for its test screenings, focus groups and obsession with what will play best in the heartland, the movie business occasionally and spectacularly drops the ball with respect to its mainstream entertainment. Last year, someone decided what the public most wanted to see was America’s Sweethearts, a…
Vagina, vagina, vagina. That’s a word many people don’t like hearing, much less saying, but local theatergoers haven’t been able to escape it lately. The Vagina Monologues, which came through Denver last summer and hit Boulder last fall, is back to expose audiences to the world “down there.” On February…
