Wednesday May 10 Left-minded hitter: Radical voice Alexander Cockburn has written a book that hopes to prove that the metamorphosing political left is still kicking in spite of the times. Cockburn will introduce The Golden Age Is in Us: Travels and Encounters 1987-1994, which picks up on the eve of…
Our society has never afforded organized athletics the social status granted to those things ordinarily called culture: music, dance, theater, literature or the visual arts. But that distinction was unknown in the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where team sports were taken as seriously as religion or science. That’s Mexican artist…
Just when you think it’s safe to go to the theater, Christopher Durang shows up somewhere and disturbs all your complacencies. Brilliant, amusing, incisive and ultimately humane, Durang’s caustic assessments of American life and Catholic upbringing manage to undermine even the most insistent optimism. Cattlecall Productions’ appallingly funny The Marriage…
According to the first version of the war in heaven, Michael and his angels fought, and Satan fell like lightning from the sky. God won. Not so in Jose Rivera’s apocalyptic Marisol, in which God loses, in part because he’s already allowed all hell to break loose. Now being presented…
The Indian-born, Harvard-educated director Mira Nair knows a thing or two about culture shock, bigotry and the immigrant’s burdens of adjustment–three of melodrama’s classic subjects. But she is never content with merely yanking at our heartstrings. Unlike more straight-faced, straitlaced filmmakers, this independent thinker also has a healthy grasp of…
The roughhouse political slapstick in Yuri Mamin’s Window to Paris makes for perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of its plea for cross-cultural exchange. The Russian peasant in Mamin is willing to wreck a government phone booth or overturn a snob’s piano to get a laugh, but beyond the mayhem, the…
Wednesday May 3 Step up to the Bar: Today is one day when it won’t be considered poor manners at a party to ask a lawyer for free advice. In recognition of National Law Week, volunteer attorneys from the Denver Bar Association Young Lawyers Division will answer questions at Law…
The power of still photography to inspire deep emotional response was well-demonstrated two weeks ago in Oklahoma City. Adrift in a sea of video, it was the perfectly framed image of a heroic firefighter cradling the body of a dying child that hit the nation in the heart. Photographers interested…
At the end of Hamlet, the stage is littered with bodies. Lee Blessing’s Fortinbras picks up where Shakespeare left off, putting a hilarious new spin on where those bodies are buried. The wit is wry and the characters involving in this lively production at the South Suburban Theatre Company. But…
Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, a breakthrough drama first performed in 1968, is dated in some ways but still packs a punchy–and universal–message. The play has very definite problems, but a strong production now at the Theatre on Broadway underscores its best features. The show takes place in…
Ouch! Four centuries before Lorena Bobbitt fetched her paring knife from the kitchen drawer, the Italians began carving up assorted choirboys in the name of Art. Whether we like it or not, Gerard Corbiau’s Farinelli now tells the bittersweet tale of one Carlo Broschi, supposedly the most renowned of Italy’s…
If you choose to imagine that a woman can get pregnant by dreaming about it, or that the god of good fortune is really Quentin Tarantino and he lives on the bottom of the swimming pool at a fleabag motel in Las Vegas, then Destiny Turns on the Radio may…
Wednesday April 26 The works: Appearing tonight as part of the Creative Music Works’ innovative Wednesday-night music series, the double quartet Index Ensemble will rework a few concepts with the help of two guitarists, two saxophonists, voices, and percussion and vocal samples. Index begins to beat, spin, strum and blow…
The much-talked-about head of the University of Denver’s sculpture department, Lawrence Argent, is paired with Arizona-based ceramic artist Dorothy Rissman in the current exhibit The Figure Re-examined at the Mackey Gallery. What we have here are essentially two single-artist shows, the unifying theme of which becomes evident only upon careful…
Denver artist Linde Schlumbohm can’t stop thinking about food–she’s virtually obsessed with the topic. In What’s Eating Eve?, her fourth annual exhibit at the Pirate co-op gallery, there are references to edibles everywhere: plants and animals, supermarket ads, fruits and vegetables. And there are corpulent women representing the many faces…
What you want from a farce is to laugh at yourself and everyone else whose self-absorption gets them into trouble. And you want the protagonist, however ridiculous he is, to triumph in the end. The lively Lend Me a Tenor at the Aurora Fox is diverting, absurd fun with a…
One of the most marvelous of medieval tales is the story of Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil for either knowledge, wealth, youth or sex, depending on who’s doing the telling. Among the most appealing versions of the cautionary tale is a contemporary African-American treatment–The Trials and Tribulations…
We probably have William S. Burroughs to thank for the unlikely inflation of heroin use into an American literary credential. Drug vogues come and go, but ever since Burroughs sanctified smack in Naked Lunch, the wannabes of tragic hipdom have been quick to embrace anyone who owns a ballpoint pen…
If you’re looking for a spark of life in Team Merchant-Ivory’s fatal collision with American history, Jefferson in Paris, skip right past the hotly disputed moment at which the author of the Declaration of Independence beds a fourteen-year-old slave girl from Old Virginny. That’s this straight-faced movie’s lone comic moment–and…
Wednesday April 19 The write stuff: Author Ana Castillo is a novelist, poet and essayist, and she’s a favorite among her contemporaries, earning glowing reviews from fellow Latina writers Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez. It’s not hard to see why–her 1993 novel So Far From God was described by novelist…
The inaugural show for Pismo Gallery’s new space in Cherry Creek is a splendid survey of recent work by Dale Chihuly, the prominent glass sculptor from Washington state. Chihuly is represented by many examples of his most characteristic work, groups of small blown-glass elements nested in large ones. By assembling…
In a sense, modern art came to the United States because of World War II. Hitler, like some of the more extreme right-wingers of our own time, hated modernism. Among his earliest targets were the artists and architects of the famous Bauhaus school, which was forcibly closed by the Nazis…
