It sounds like the plot of a made-for-the-holidays TV movie: Cowboys save Christmas for cancer-stricken youngsters. But in this case, it’s a real-life drama, one you can help resolve. Wild West re-enactors The Hole in the Wall Gang are seeking donations for the Candlelighters of Southern Colorado, a Colorado Springs…
In the expansive Hamilton Galleries on the first floor of the Denver Art Museum is a glorious show, Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art, which highlights a dazzling array of American Indian art. The Fred Harvey Company was a hotel and restaurant chain in the…
What, exactly, constitutes our national character? Are we largely the sum of our popularly determined and time-tested beliefs? Or is our collective psyche a more mercurial interfusion of passionate and ephemeral desires? Before you get all centrist-minded and declare in your best chardonnay-sipping, Brie-nibbling way, “Why, a healthy mixture of…
A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering if the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules and dashing expectations on the road…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. Toy Story opened up the secret lives of toys in suburban bedrooms;…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four…or Five…or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse, its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of…
When you’re out holiday shopping this season and they ask, “Would you like that in a box?” say yes. Boxes this time of year can be packed with more than your average magic. Lined up in shop windows in Larimer Square and along the 16th Street Mall will be 47…
Thursday November 19 If you’re one of those insensitive types who thinks feeding the area’s hungry is a laughing matter, tonight you could actually be right. The Comedy Works is hosting another evening in its month-long Dennison’s Chili Stand-Up Comedy series, with a performance by Showtime favorite Robert Schimmel. Bring…
Long before Gene Autry paid tribute to life on the range, a different shade of cowpoke was singing out where the longhorn cattle fed. In post-Civil War America, one of every four trailblazers was African-American, and these generally unsung men and women played a vital role in settling the western…
Ron Judish Fine Arts, which opened just this past spring, has already distinguished itself as one of the city’s finest commercial galleries. But the current Judish show, Andres Serrano: A Survey, which sketches out the career of one of the nation’s most famous photographers, really puts the place on the…
Soon after Tennessee Williams finished writing his last great play, The Night of the Iguana, in 1961, America’s preeminent dramatic poet plunged into a severe decline marked by acute drug and alcohol dependency, extended periods of mental illness for which he was hospitalized, and macabre public appearances where he seemed…
For a touchy-feely play written at the beginning of America’s politically correct modern age, Michael Brady’s To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday is surprisingly humorous, delightfully risque and impishly entertaining. The romantic drama about a strong-willed widower’s long-running bout with mourning sickness is being presented by the Morrison Theatre in…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intra-governmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts and dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion and fame–and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or designer drugs…
Wedged between Mozart and Brahms on the classical-music playbill this weekend is a 400-pound, six-foot-long contraption whose voice is as rich and ancient as the southern cultures that spawned it. Libby Larsen’s Marimba Concerto, to be performed by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, brings together the two most basic human musical…
A few Sundays ago, Julie Imada went to the Heritage Christian Church in Aurora to pass out a bundle of fliers announcing an upcoming visit to Denver by retired South African archbishop Desmond Tutu. The lobby of the large, mixed-race church was lined with glass counters displaying church-related books and…
Thursday November 12 Even though Colorado has no state boxing commission, area promoters continue to book matches for fans of the pugilistic arts. Tonight at 7, the National Western Complex Stadium Arena hosts a full card of world-caliber professional boxing at the Coors Light Night at the Fights. The lineup…
Sure, Denver’s traditional cowtown image hardly seems appropriate in these modern, boomtown days. But a trip to the Buckhorn Exchange Restaurant offers a unique sense of the city’s past and insight into the origin of its bovine brand. This month marks the 105th year since Henry H. “Shorty Scout” Zeitz…
With the grand opening of the much-anticipated Denver Pavilions adjacent to the Adam’s Mark Hotel addition that was completed last year, it’s now official: The three blocks that line the south side of the 16th Street Mall between Court Place and Welton Street now make up what is surely the…
Against the sounds of clicking typewriter keys, a disembodied voice tells us that Voices From the Soul is dedicated to “the brother on the corner who never had a chance.” As the stage lights slowly illuminate several cardboard silhouettes that represent a few of the play’s characters, playwright Hugo Jon…
Given that the potty-mouthed characters in playwright Chay Yew’s Porcelain have little trouble posing a myriad of pointed questions –“Have you ever participated in toilet sex?” is fairly typical of the blunt-force dialogue–you’d think Yew’s one-act play would be overflowing with tough-talking scenes of in-your-face drama. But as the playwright’s…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il Mostro), his most recent film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his…
