Denver’s collection of art cooperatives–notably, Spark, Pirate, Edge, Core and ILK–are a boon to contemporary art here. Most major cities don’t have anything close. The co-ops’ great cultural value is that they provide opportunities for emerging artists and established talents alike to display their latest work free of commercial constraints;…
In the opening moments of Emma’s Child, a self-described “local nothing” of a teenage mother permits her unborn baby to be adopted at birth by a well-meaning, well-to-do childless couple. This might lead audiences to believe that playwright Kristine Thatcher is gearing up for a probing discussion about, say, class…
Ten years ago, when the only marquee Ragtime graced was the imaginary one glimmering in the eyes of its creators, the musical’s current director, Frank Galati, was earning a well-deserved reputation as one of this country’s most innovative, if enigmatic, showmen. An actor, director and college professor, Galati mesmerized Chicago…
When the history of the republic in this century is written, a New York club owner named Steve Rubell might get his very own footnote. In the late 1970s, after all, this little rat-faced tyrant transformed an abandoned TV studio on West 54th Street into a laboratory for radical social…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday or Otis Redding. But now the late doo-wopper’s got his own movie, too–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is really…
Thursday August 27 Book ’em, Denver: You can take your pick from a whole mountain of inexpensive tomes when the Denver Public Library Friends Annual Used Book Sale opens for business this morning south of the Central Library at 13th Ave. and Acoma St. Inside the sale tents, you’ll find…
Hold it right there, pardner. If you ask Rudy Grant, an Aurora Pro Country Music Hall of Fame makes perfect sense. A longtime local country musician, Grant remembers Aurora’s honky-tonk heyday (when clubs such as the legendary Zanzibar on East Colfax Avenue stacked ’em ten deep at the bar) like…
Put fifty feet of clean white wall in front of Carlos Fresquez and it won’t stay that way for long. The Denver-born artist’s been at work on the wall for only two hours, but already in the background, snow-capped peaks rise and unfold across the flat surface–to remind him, Fresquez…
The art scene in Denver does not shut down during the summer as it does in the big cities on the east and west coasts. Even here, though, there is a point when everyone seems to be taking a break–and that hiatus is currently on. The last of the summer…
Celebrated warbler Sophie Tucker was the most famous of the Prohibition-era “naughty girls” who belted out honky-tonk melodies, jazz tunes and torch songs in vaudeville acts that also sometimes included trained animals, female impersonators and famous criminals holding forth about their checkered pasts. The collective drawing power of speakeasies, talkies…
Is it possible to save another human being from himself? Are the exhortations of politicians, sociologists and religious types the best answers to the problems plaguing the three downtrodden New Yorkers in William Hanley’s play Slow Dance on the Killing Ground? Or is it more likely that, as one character…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a terrific…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason, it has proved a popular element in movie romances, City of Angels and Sliding Doors being…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
LoDo’s been both revered and criticized as the resurrection of a once-depressed urban area and a playground for the rich and sports-minded. But just a few blocks north, the Ballpark Neighborhood is beginning to garner similar accolades without the negative remarks. The newly rejuvenated Burlington Hotel–a fine three-story red-brick building…
Thursday August 20 The Denver Jewish Film Festival explores the full gamut of Jewish issues on the screen, beginning tonight at the Mizel Family Cultural Arts Center at the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center, 350 S. Dahlia St. The festival, now in its third year, offers more than twenty…
It’s hard to pinpoint just what makes a mystery mysterious. But if you hard-boil it down, it’s all about the atmosphere. For Raymond Chandler, it was a Los Angeles full of mooks and wise guys and gorgeous dames; for James Lee Burke, it’s something lurking under the surface of a…
Despite recent events in Jasper, Texas, it’s difficult to imagine a group of modern white men brazen enough to pose for a snapshot as they gather around a black man’s mangled and lynched body swaying from a tree amid the tranquility of a Southern forest. More difficult still is to…
A couple of years ago, playwright Arthur Miller sounded something of a death knell for commercial theater when he remarked, “The theater culture on Broadway is dead. You can’t expect people to pay forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred dollars to sit down for a straight play.” Ironically, the acerbic dramatist…
You have to love the way Terry McMillan does literary research. On a spur-of-the-moment vacation trip to Jamaica, the author of Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale says, she indulged in a mad, revitalizing fling with a man twenty years younger. Despite the rum punches and the hot and heavy,…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute –whose debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made–this comment would…
Seen one way, Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges is a self-consciously artsy examination of teen anxiety and teen violence done up with pretensions and gewgaws that the most self-absorbed auteur might disdain. Seen in another light, it’s a disturbing vision that manages to capture, through bizarre editing, fractured narrative…
