“Marley was dead to begin with.” Charles Dickens opened A Christmas Carol, his greatest ghost story and arguably the best secular Christmas tale ever written, with these strange, portentous words. In 150 years, the incredible success of the novella about old Scrooge and his ghostly redeemers continues to haunt the…
The arts and the sciences came together in the Renaissance in a way they never had before. Aristotle’s limited universe, in which the sun and planets revolved around the Earth, was discarded in favor of Copernicus’s more accurate assessment. And it was clearly seen by educated men and women that…
Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day is a fantasy about family values with an awful case of high blood pressure. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a man-weary single mom and E.R. idol George Clooney as a woman-weary single dad who have kids enrolled at the same school, it spends one frantic weekday…
In the 43 years since The Crucible first saw a footlight, Arthur Miller has steadfastly maintained that his dramatic condemnation of the Salem witch trials was really a veiled outcry against Senator Joseph McCarthy and the political terrorism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Almost no one’s argued with him…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates hurt in order to…
Thursday December 12 Brave new girl: Songbirds no longer wear sequined dresses or stand in the shadows in a chorus line somewhere to the left of the strutting lead singer. Modern songstresses write their own smart material, accompany themselves and belt out the songs forthrightly, without apologies. Singer/songwriter/pianist Paula Cole…
Clay is a material that occupies a special–or should that be peculiar?–place in the world of the visual arts. It is most often employed in the making of utilitarian objects such as cups, mugs and vases and is therefore relegated to the underworld of the decorative arts–the much-maligned craft tradition…
‘Tis the season for gooey sentiments, so you’d better watch out if you’re headed for the New Denver Civic’s gangly rendition of Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. But there’s no need to pout: The real thing is out there in theaterland this holiday season, if you know where to…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the…
If it does nothing else, the election-year comedy My Fellow Americans will probably remind us that most citizens now regard their political leaders with the contempt usually reserved for serial killers, child molesters and news reporters. Hollywood always trails the social mood of the country by a year or two…
Yo, Adrian. Think the Italian Stallion was in tough when he duked it out with Apollo Creed, Mr. T and that huge Russian? Figure Rambo had his hands full on those fiery missions impossible to Cambodia and Afghanistan? Hey, the dialogue alone would have killed anybody else. Ever worry that…
Thursday December 5 Shine on: Why do holidays seem to leave us all with that warm, fuzzy feeling? Maybe it’s just a combination of shopping burnout and too many seasonal toasts, although a prevailing sense of tradition is a better, or at least a more heartwarming, guess. Two local traditions–one…
In the last few years, two groups have emerged in Denver, each intent on establishing a museum of contemporary art as an alternative to the Denver Art Museum. For a long time the two groups were unknown to each other. (If only the Ocean Journey crowd had been so circumspect.)…
Mama Rose is the stage mother from hell. The central character of Gypsy–now in a hardy production at the Arvada Center–might have been written up by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in his classic case studies of evil. Apparently nobody in the late 1950s (when the show premiered) understood child abuse,…
So many words, so few ideas. In his tedious satire Was He Anyone?, playwright N.F. Simpson tries so hard to bite into the red tape surrounding governmental “charity” that he chokes on it. Not even the Hunger Artists Ensemble’s talented cast can do more than give this sociopolitical spoof a…
Kurt Vonnegut’s strengths as a novelist are his rare, dark humor, which can be as bracing as cognac, and his gift for shifting gears from tragedy to absurdity, tenderness to stark horror. His main weakness is probably a taste for cartoon moralism–a kind of flimsy preachiness, drenched in postmodern ambiguity,…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
Two centuries before zillionaire NBA players started talking trash, before Don Rickles ambushed his first tipsy Vegas ringsider, before Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley traded quips at the Algonquin, the decadent court of Louis XVI turned acid wit into coin of the realm. While the nobles blindly sniped at each…
Thursday November 28 Help yourself: Do you consider the calories consumed in your average Thanksgiving feast an on-again, off-again kind of thing? Just remember, tubbo, that kind of timely pound-shedding usually happens only in your dreams. So give thanks: The City of Aurora Recreation Division’s Huff-N-Puff Before You Stuff offers…
Cherry Creek has been in the news lately–and not just because of that dreadful “We have a whole district” advertising campaign. Even more prominent than that awkward attempt at self-promotion has been the hoopla surrounding the destruction of an ancient elm tree to make way for a duplex in Cherry…
Life in Southern California is, yes, phony and flaky. Once in a while a movie or a play celebrates all that peculiar sunny fakery with affectionate parody (Steve Martin’s L.A. Story comes to mind) or abject pessimism (Sam Shepard’s anti-Hollywood plays). And now there’s one more take on the L.A…
Sex is easy; love is hard. That’s the point, no matter how fractured, of Theatre on Broadway’s 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, a story that sets out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to make emotional connections these days. It’s peopled with gay characters,…
