The sound can be murky, the toilets are often dubious, and the neighboring establishments range from simply divey to dangerous. But, hey — no one ever said rock and roll was pretty. The 15th Street Tavern is still the best place to get rocked, both for the quality of its…
Okay, so the pinball machine is poorly maintained. And the music is generally targeted at only the most grizzled eardrums in Denver. But the walls in the men’s bathroom at Seven South offer enough philosophical lunacy (okay, idiocy) to amuse those with even the most television-addled attention span. Some key…
In what might have been the group’s final outing, Negativland — the wildly experimental music-and-art collective from San Francisco — brought its True/False 2000 Tour to a packed house at the Bluebird Theater last spring. At nearly three hours in length, the mind-altering spectacle featured more appropriated sound collage and…
Say what you will about the experimental, sometimes difficult work of longtime Colorado filmmaker Stan Brakhage, but his films have stood the test of time. For four decades, Brakhage has been regarded as one of the most forward-looking of all American filmmakers, for his individuality and refusal to compromise. The…
The Upstart Crow Theatre Company’s version of The Rivals was a gorgeously costumed affair. In addition to providing the comedy with adequate staging, director Joan Kuder Bell took on the assignment of designing the play’s eighteenth-century garb. With the help of four seamstresses, she crafted a splendid wardrobe that would…
February 23, 2001, will live in Colorado history as the day Chex Mix was declared the official snack food of Sterling. The event, the result of an on-air survey of snack preferences conducted by KPMX DJ Jason Murphy, was marked by a parade complete with marching band and float and…
Since arriving from Dallas a few years ago, Randy Moore has played a wide array of memorable parts, including a slimy jewelry salesman (The Comedy of Errors), a slithering witch (Macbeth), a blustering patriarch (Life With Father), a bumbling bumpkin (The Winter’s Tale) and, most recently, a paranoid penny-pincher (The…
Richard Blackwell is best known for the acerbic eye he turns on the fashion faux pas of the rich and famous, a public service that culminates in Mr. Blackwell’s ten-best-dressed and ten-worst-dressed lists released every January. (This year’s worst of the worst: Britney Spears.) But CSU knows a different Blackwell…
That unfunny dramatic theorist, Aristotle, probably would have loathed the idea that the high point of the Central City Opera’s production of Dialogues of the Carmelites occurred in Act One, long before a proper “rising action” developed. Even so, audiences appreciated the fact that mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle marvelously commanded the…
Cafe Cero is hip: It’s cool and casual, it serves gourmet bar food, it attracts big-name local acts to perform acoustic sets and comedy acts, and it hosts All-Star Karaoke every Thursday night at 9. With more than 5,000 songs available, there’s no excuse for you not to make a…
Wesley Willis, a schizophrenic Chicago street artist and Casio accompanist, played fiasco-free last Thanksgiving to a receptive Tavern crowd, rendering timeless (and preprogrammed) such holiday classics as “Eat That Mule Shit,” “Shoot Me in the Ass” and “I’m Sorry That I Got Fat.” The evening’s earth-shattering, Mayflower hell ride –…
Denver’s major cultural institutions offered free admission all day on December 31, but that was just a taste of the big, big fun still to come. By 11:58 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, the 16th Street Mall was one mass of happy, freeloading humanity, eagerly awaiting the fireworks that were…
South of Fairplay, west of Colorado Springs and east of Gunnison, one of America’s “100 Best Small Art Towns” devotes a weekend each year to the visual and performing arts. In 2001, Salida is set to go artsy June 22-24 for the ninth annual Salida Art Walk, with nationally known…
Colorado sculptor John DeAndrea is one of only a handful of local artists to have achieved international renown. But there’s no mystery to his success, as the incredible sculptures in last fall’s John DeAndrea make clear. The spectacular show was a knockout even from the sidewalk on Wazee Street: Through…
You’d have to look pretty hard to find a less pretentious entertainer than Paul Lopez, pianist at Charlie Brown’s Bar & Grill. The perpetually congenial Lopez, a fixture behind the bar’s ivories since the late ’80s, always has a good word for patrons, whether they’re participatory-show-tune types or not. He’s…
Denver ceramics genius Martha Daniels threw everything into Grotto, her outlandish installation in which most elements were made of clay. She painted the walls, created architectural elements and even put in an operable fountain. The resulting atmosphere was dark and heavy, exactly her intention, since the show was meant to…
Besides spinning tunes for KUVO’s Sleepless Nights once a week, Jamie Osborne hosts open-stage gatherings of vast proportions every other Wednesday at the Mercury Cafe — an impromptu offering that launches listeners into twisting orbits of found sound, electronica, spoken word, jazz noodling and beyond. His own ongoing project, dubbed…
For an upstart small business, the Bayeux Gallery scored a major coup by presenting the 3rd American Tapestry Alliance Biennial Exhibition last summer. The two previous biennials had been held in public spaces; this was the first time the show was presented in a commercial gallery. But Bayeux, owned and…
Instrumentalist/bandleader Fred Hess has been among Colorado jazz’s saving graces for a generation. Better yet, the years have dimmed neither his talent nor his musical curiosity. Faith (Cadence Jazz) finds Hess and a collection of impressive collaborators working at yet another creative peak…
Artistic director Nicholas Sugar has returned the Theatre Group to a high level of quality — something the organization, best known for producing plays at Theatre on Broadway, has lacked since it expanded some seasons back. This past year, Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing was a competently acted tale that took…
This up-and-coming honky-tonk band plays the stuff that made Buck Owens, Johnny Cash and their peers famous. Like those artists, the ‘Benders know a sense of humor is a key ingredient in successful classic country. The group’s re-creation of Ozzy Osbourne’s classic “Crazy Train” on its solid debut, Southbound, is…
After his mother and father died, 21-year-old Dave Eggers was left to raise his younger brother — a situation that he turned into a best-selling memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The cutting-edge tome inspired Amy Slothower, a fundraiser for the Webb-Waring Institute for Cancer, Aging and Antioxidant Research,…
