For the last few years, the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts has hosted exhibits downtown in the lobby of Republic Plaza — a feat that isn’t easy to pull off, since the lobby itself is a work of art. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the lobby is in…
It’s not hard to believe that the Devil has done earthly time as an erstwhile boxing promoter or even a professional critic, but did he really head up a Viennese Masonic lodge for fifty years? And has the same horned creature who’s rumored to frequent the power corridors of the…
The meticulous staging smartly echoes Oscar Wilde’s intellectual choreography, the costumes are resplendent, the setting is tastefully appointed and the actors are eager to relish each epigram and witticism. But even though director Len Kiziuk has paid dutiful attention to the vital elements that prop up The Importance of Being…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than thirty movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the Seventies and carefully described by its maker as…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is, you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared to what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own promotional art. (This package is second only to Kevin Smith’s Dogma for foolishly trotting out…
Gunslingers, Ghosts and Gold: The Spirit of Denver Walking Tour. Daily except Tuesday, weather permitting, leaves from Eighteenth and Wynkoop streets, $15, call for times and reservations, 303-860-8687, http://atlas.csd.net/~deebeaux
The World Cinema Series, 10 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays through December 12 (excluding November 27 and 28) at the Chez Artiste, 4150 East Amherst Avenue. $7. Call 303-757-7161
Voters will have a chance to decide on two proposals during Tuesday’s election that should be of great interest to the art world. The first is a no-brainer. Who would begrudge the Denver Art Museum a lousy $62.5 million — about the price of one good Van Gogh — to…
It’s easy to think of Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art in Cherry Creek as a purveyor of paintings and sculpture from the region’s past, since a typical exhibit at the boutique style gallery showcases the work of deceased artists who were active in the early to mid-twentieth century. But Schlosser also…
A hundred years before terms like “mommy track” and “telecommuting” crept into the common parlance, German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker wrestled with an agonizing dilemma: Would she settle for being a stay-at-home mom who filled her few idle hours by sketching portraits, or would she fulfill her prodigious talent by…
Laden with postmodern gloom and narcissism, The Fastest Clock in the Universe is an offbeat play about “human cannibals” struggling to define themselves in a world bereft of meaning, sense or care. Despite the characters’ attempts to dial back the forces of time, they’re eventually compelled to reckon with the…
All hail. America is the seat of democracy and the world’s most mobile society — the place where a printer’s apprentice named Samuel Clemens can take a new name and remake himself as the country’s greatest satirist, where a geeky college dropout can become a software billionaire and shoeless boys…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To,” from New Sensations), but as has often been…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
In the beginning, there were little people. If you understand that, you can begin to understand Charles Simonds and his work: unfired miniature clay structures that seem to have been left behind by some vanished civilization. Invented by Simonds, the intricately formed pieces first began popping up over twenty years…
The dream of sustaining a repertory company dedicated to producing the classics has intrigued a host of theatrical luminaries — and drained the resources of many more. In 1960, for instance, respected actor and director Ellis Rabb’s company first took up residence at various universities, later merged with New York’s…
The thing about walking into Five Green Boxes is this: You won’t want to leave. You’ll want to move in and walk across the white floor and settle yourself between its clean, cool chartreuse (!) walls, under the high ceilings and unimpeded loft-like expanses. Read the newspaper on a fuzzy…
All this week, the Community College of Denver on the Auraria campus has been hosting a national conference on photography titled “Photography and the Creative Process.” Free and open to the public, the conference was organized by renowned local photographer Ron Wohlauer, who has taught photography at CCD since 1975…
The Edge Gallery is featuring three interesting solo shows right now, and that doesn’t happen very often. In the front space, Carlos Frésquez continues his exploration of personal and ethnic identity in Tiempotrippin en El Meso-Moderno World. Frésquez’s longtime interest is in the three cultures in which local Hispanics live:…
As the three characters in Art discuss the worth of a painting one of them has purchased for an extravagant sum, they argue, rail and bluster until they finally establish the play’s basic premise: When it comes to questions of art or relationships, there’s no accounting for taste. But while…
The prospect of an evening of ghost stories is intriguing, especially this time of year, but there’s no point in dragging it out for two-and-three-quarter hours when only five to ten minutes’ worth of the material is even of passing interest. Director Scott Gibson and company’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, Once Upon…
