Don Becker is a manic-depressive guy “with psychotic features” who writes humorous stuff for a living–first as a stand-up comic, now as one of Denver’s most irreverent playwrights. His first play, Back on a Limb, was a one-man show, an expose of his own mad life. Becker hid nothing of…
It’s always Armageddon for somebody. Don Becker’s dark new comedy, Kurt Cobain Was Right, puts a new spin on modern end-of-the-world themes harking all the way back to the Theater of the Absurd and cinematic spinoffs like Dr. Strangelove. The Lida Project’s outrageous production will offend, stimulate and maybe shake…
When the British critic John Russell Taylor called the Hollywood musical “a city built to music,” he was thinking more of Fred Astaire’s work than of Woody Allen’s. But anyone who remembers how Allen swaddled that beautiful opening montage of Manhattan in “Rhapsody in Blue” knows that when it comes…
It may come as a surprise to some that leukemia, senility and bitterness between parent and child are the stuff of comedy. But therein lies the unlikely miracle of Marvin’s Room, a compelling drama about a shattered family trying to pick up the pieces that draws much of its strength…
Thursday January 9 Western stars: If it’s January, this must be the Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering, celebrating its eighth year of campfire range-rhyming, beginning tonight and continuing through Sunday at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd. Headlining this year’s laconic long weekend are Colorado’s own…
So much of the best musical comedy to favor the region recently has come from Boulder Dinner Theatre that it’s no surprise that BDT’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot is just what it should be–magical. This isn’t Lerner and Loewe’s best work (that distinction belongs to My Fair Lady),…
The central symbol of a long-lasting marriage in Jan de Hartog’s bittersweet The Four Poster is the marriage bed itself. Sexual tension is important in this poignant comedy from the Nomad Players, but the real point is a couple’s attempts to reach each other over 35 years. Well-written and charming,…
Even the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment must reach pretty far down into their belief to come up with Larry Flynt as a poster boy. An unschooled Kentucky hillbilly with a big mouth and a gift for manipulation, he stuffed Hustler magazine, a phenomenon of the Seventies, full of…
In an ideal world, Ghosts of Mississippi would be about how the widow of Medgar Evers and the people of Mississippi finally got justice thirty years after the civil rights leader’s assassination. But Hollywood is not an ideal world–never has been–so Rob Reiner’s well-meaning, hand-wringing movie is really about the…
New Line’s release of Jackie Chan’s First Strike is salvo number three in Chan’s invasion of America. (Miramax’s version of the 1991 Operation Condor, the last film on which the star also took a director’s credit, is due out in May.) Like its predecessors, Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop,…
Thursday January 2 Down and ditty: So it’s the day after the day after. No one ever said you couldn’t continue to inaugurate the fledgling year with something fun–if you’re up to it. If you are, light-on-their-lips pop purveyors They Might Be Giants provide just the ticket for an easy…
Artists have taken many routes to fame. Salvador Dali struck a chord with unforgettable images such as melting clocks. And like Picasso and Andy Warhol, two other truly famous artists, Dali led a flamboyant life that served to enhance his reputation as a cutting-edge artist. Then there’s Christo. To say…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…
Thursday December 26 The gifts that go on being given: We all have to deal with these things we found under the tree–the inevitable twelve hand-knit sweaters, eleven Dr. Seuss ties, ten Tickle Me Elmos, nine pairs of earmuffs, etc. The funny thing is, someone out there might love to…
Heritage Square’s Music Hall’s comic melodramas may not appeal to everyone, but their pleasant buffoonery is a hit with audiences willing to put up with a little foolishness. The goony style of these frolics can’t really be confused with acting, but the company has achieved an undeniable polish. And its…
The schizophrenic concert pianist in Scott Hicks’s Shine combines all the qualities that makers of a “major motion picture” about a tormented artist are looking for. Young David is brilliant, of course, but his ruthless backstage father pounds him into a puddle of nerves. When his mind finally snaps and…
After playing a lovable gangster who becomes an instant Hollywood celebrity (in Get Shorty) and a lovable auto mechanic who becomes an instant genius (in Phenomenon), John Travolta has landed a gig as, well, the Archangel Michael–a visitor from the heavens who becomes instant salvation for three burned-out mortals stuck…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally, these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first movie…
Best Ten of 1996 1. Big Night. Art vs. commerce, sibling rivalry and great Italian food at the Jersey shore in the Fifties. 2. Fargo. Yah, hon. Murder meets mirth in the frozen nort’ country, courtesy of the Coen brothers. 3. Secrets & Lies. Britain’s Mike Leigh examines a shattered…
Thursday December 19 Fair to Midler: What’s glitz without a sense of humor? Double-barreled songstress Bette Midler exudes plenty of both, putting on campish, in-your-face concerts that run a torchy gamut from big, mushy production numbers to out-and-out rock and roll. Take a rest from the holiday rat race; Midler…
1993 was a terrible year for the local art world. First the galleries started closing–Joan Robey, Alpha, Hassel Haeseler and Payton-Rule. Then the artists started dying–Wes Kennedy, Edward Marecak and David Rigsby. In the years since, both Kennedy and Marecak have been the subject of several fine surveys and memorial…
