Kyle Phipps plans to spend a lot of time on the 16th Street Mall this holiday season. To the eternal irritation of the mall’s overseers, however, he’s not going to be dropping much cash at the Pavilions or the Tabor Center. “I’m going to be doing what I’m doing now…
White Trash Family Reunion at the VFW, 7:30 p.m. Saturdays through February 19 at the VFW Post Number One, 955 Bannock Street, $39 includes dinner, 303-573-5931 (reservations required)
Yogi Berra, the New York Yankee baseball legend who’s known for his hilarious bon mots that seem to be oxymorons, once made an astute observation that would surely characterize the Denver Art Museum during the last few months: “Nobody goes there anymore — it’s too crowded.” The blockbuster exhibit Impressionism…
The Howell-Cole Gallery has been specializing in artist-made ceramics for almost ten years, starting out in Larimer Square in the early ’90s and moving to Tamarac Square in 1995. The gallery, which takes a boutique-style approach, is a partnership between Jack Howell and Susan Cole. The current exhibit, Masters of…
Decades before self-help books, therapy sessions and touchy-feely television shows complicated our understanding of relationships, playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee were crafting absurdist dramas that illuminate the problems of human communication. These days, an absurdist outlook on life isn’t limited to artistic endeavors. In fact, that…
Sleeping Beauty — The Panto begins as five performers clad in medieval costumes flounce through a portal in the Nomad Theatre’s faux-castle setting and sing, “It’s a good day/How could anything go wrong?” Those words prove as prophetic as the merry goodbyes uttered by passengers boarding the Titanic. Indeed, a…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! Although the most avid sports fan is occasionally bored by lackluster games on the field, even a casual spectator can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of slo-mo (preferably highlighted by driving rain),…
At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes, the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others of appropriate age and inclination vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke…
In this season of mad scrambles over the newest Pokémon knickknack or another, it’s easy to forget just exactly what it is we’re all shopping for. It was, after all, the Big Guy’s birth that initiated all of this madness — and in the roughly 2000 years since that day…
Pete Athans says he’s always had an intimate bond with nature. Like many people who grow up in the urban chaos of New York City, Athans had hopes of moving west. He had friends who attended the University of Colorado and, he says, “they would tell me how great Boulder…
Color, Line and Form: Abstraction in Metal, at Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts, is a duet featuring the sculptures of William Vielehr and Doug Wilson. Both have been creating abstract-expressionist sculpture for the last thirty years, but since their studios are in Boulder, they are less well-known in Denver…
The Carol Keller Gallery is extending Dan Ragland: Recent Work through December 18, so there’s still a couple of days to catch this intriguing photography show. Ragland, who lives and works in Denver, specializes in edgy and disturbing pictures, even when his subject is a vase filled with flowers. But…
Ever since Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and his band of Claymated misfits fled the North Pole’s hidebound environs, Santa’s helpers have had a hard time keeping their nonconformist attitudes in check. It’s not unusual, for example, for shopping-mall elves to adorn their ears with tree ornaments, coin suggestive greetings or…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness and violence. So hands up: Who really likes rednecks? The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this embarrassing offshoot of European ancestry continues to this…
I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens, in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…
Jules Feiffer has long been known for the acerbic edge he brings to his theatrical and film writing and, especially, his widely revered syndicated cartoons. But when he’s writing for kids, another Feiffer comes out — one very few people outside of his immediate family knew existed. “There’s a whole…
A front-row seat for the touring version of Phantom of the Opera may be the hottest ticket in Denver this holiday season. But if you can’t get an A-list seat to this hugely popular play — it’s played to over fifty million people during its run of more than thirteen…
I’m going to posit a radical claim, one that flies in the face of standard beliefs. I think Denver was a more sophisticated town twenty or thirty years ago than it is today. And though the city is more crowded and there are a lot more big-box retailers and chain…
Using Your Faculties is a three-part exhibition series at the Emmanuel Gallery that features the work of the art instructors at Auraria’s three institutions of higher learning. Part two of the series, which showcases talent from the University of Colorado at Denver, is on display now and runs through December…
Veteran critic Mel Gussow’s fine biography of Edward Albee reveals that most people who knew the artist as a young man had an inkling of his potential but not a clue about his destiny. Nearly all agreed that Albee, whose streak of hedonism could sometimes turn self-destructive, would pursue some…
