A black-and-white-striped uniform draping his stooped frame, a bespectacled prisoner wavers between capitulation and defiance as he impersonates Shylock in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice that’s being presented before a group of concentration-camp guards. Trembling yet strangely calm, the frail Jewish man turns toward his Nazi captors…
If, like the ancient Greeks who started the world’s first dramatic festivals, you’re a firm believer in the healing power of art, then the musical Blood Brothers might serve as something of a cathartic experience in the aftermath of last week’s calamity at Columbine High School. Still, chances are that…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment powermongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The anti-war and civil-rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance, the…
Just as David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Richard Lewis is dying, but he’s a happy man. For once, something makes sense. “Being in middle age now, the truth of the matter is, you can’t escape that feeling of seeing the end of the line,” Lewis says. “I really live each day now, enjoy my life more now,…
Thursday April 22 Especially on Earth Day, the Lookout Mountain Nature Center, 910 Colorow Row, Golden, is an exhibit in itself. The building, which opened late in 1997, is constructed entirely of earth-sustaining materials, from the recycled boxcar planks used for its shiny hardwood floors to the bathroom tiles made…
When 91-year-old string-band musician Howard Armstrong performs Friday at the Swallow Hill Music Association’s Roots of the Blues Festival, he’ll be something of an anomaly. He doesn’t call himself a bluesman, though he knows how to play the blues. Instead, he plays a little bit of everything: old-time, jazz, blues,…
Over the past twenty years, blockbuster shows have become a necessary evil at museums. When they succeed–and they usually do, at least financially–they increase attendance, and that’s the bottom line in the exhibition business. But while they may attract big numbers economically, such shows can be aesthetically bankrupt. At the…
Playwrights have been turning the tables on their critics ever since Athenian dramatists parodied one another’s efforts 2,500 years ago. Whether being skewered by eighteenth-century British wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Critic), lampooned by contemporary dramatist–and former reviewer himself–Tom Stoppard (The Real Inspector Hound) or indirectly taken to task by…
When Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year debuted on Broadway in 1975, the play about a man and a woman who rendezvous once a year at a California inn was praised for its “genuinely funny” look at how attitudes toward marriage had changed between the Donna Reed era and the…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of standup, sketches and TV sitcom. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too-clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he doesn’t…
Next time you’re getting your axles chromed out at A & M Custom Tire and Wheel, don’t miss one of the metro area’s best and most authentic Mexican lunches–right across the street at a plain-faced red-brick hideaway called Christy’s. Never heard of the place? Of course you haven’t. Unless you…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their own Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme…
The love affair at the heart of Benoit Jacquot’s The School of Flesh has to be the longest shot on the board. Pairing a woman of the world with a boy of the streets, it is fueled by sexual obsession and casual cruelty, by the same huge contrasts in temperament…
When local theater producer/director donnie l. betts decided over a year ago to resurrect Richard Durham’s 1940s radio drama, Destination Freedom, a trailblazing weekly program that told true stories of African-American heroes, he knew he was taking a chance: It was radio, a moldy medium at best, and therefore a…
Thursday April 15 How do you pass tax day and manage to remain perfectly calm? Well, first of all, not everyone waits until the last minute, tearing their hair out over a rat’s nest of receipts as the clock ticks ominously in the background. Some of us are already looking…
Denver’s El Centro Su Teatro has always striven to be more than a theater. It’s a grassroots arts resource, and everyone connected with it seems to extend a metaphorical hand to the neighborhood. When a play premieres there, it’s a fundraising party; when it throws a film festival, as it…
Russell Beardsley emerged on the Denver art scene while still a student. The first shows of his conceptual metal sculptures were presented to both critical and popular acclaim in 1993, a year before he earned his BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver. Back then, his pieces most often…
Far from being just a dirty family secret, incest is the supreme betrayal of familial trust. The unspeakable offense–which often suffocates both victim and perpetrator in a cloak of silent shame and sworn secrecy–invariably rears its ugly head from one generation to another until someone finds the courage, the will…
The problem with producing My Fair Lady is that (a) most audience members harbor fond memories of the 1964 film starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn; (b) most of those same theatergoers have already seen umpteen different stage versions that pale in comparison to their memories of the venerated film;…
Thursday April 8 My how Tommy, Chuckie, Angelica and the rest of the precocious gang from Nickelodeon’s Rugrats have grown! They’re six feet tall, larger than life and every bit as kidlike as the small-screen versions in Rugrats–A Live Adventure, a new touring stage show that captures the Rugrat ethos…
