Flick Pick

When Howard Hawks directed His Girl Friday back in 1940, he had no idea that his sublime newspaper-world comedy would one day become a treasured relic, lovingly rescued and preserved by the National Film Registry and the Library of Congress. But it has, along with many other great movies from…

Who Is That Masked Man?

There is no stranger subgenre of sci-fi/horror B-movies than Mexican-wrestling-themed sci-fi/horror B-movies, and there was no greater star of these cinematic joyrides than Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata (Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask). Born Rodolfo Guzman Huerta in 1917 in Tulancigo, Hidalgo, Mexico, Santo made his ring debut…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, July 8 For those wondering what, exactly, summer tastes like, the Chaverim have an answer. Tonight, this new group of young leaders at the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center, 350 South Dahlia Street, presents A Taste of Summer, offering the community a chance to get outside and celebrate…

Sketch Artist

Robert E. Evans draws on his legacy to create his present. When the distinguished Five Points resident strolls down the street, people stop to say hello. And though he has plenty of friends, Evans says things haven’t always been so easy: “I felt alone a lot in my childhood because…

Down to Earth Music

FRI, 7/9 The Mars Hill Cafe is not really a cafe, and it doesn’t have much to do with the Red Planet — although the Highland church that hosts it does sit on a hilltop. Instead of the intergalactic eatery its name connotes, Mars Hill is a Friday-evening gathering that…

Wets Up?

The desire to just get wet can be overwhelming in this usually arid state. Yet not everyone wants to swallow a mouthful of chlorine — or worse — at the local pool. And relatively few Coloradans have the chance to grab big water on such world-class rides as the Arkansas…

Bush Bash

WED, 7/14 More often than not, we Americans get our news in increasingly attention-deficit- disorder-friendly ways. Sound bites, Internet-server headlines and bits of information flashed across the bottom of television screens are the means by which most of us learn what is going on in the world today. A Cliff’s…

Dirty Drag

THURS, 7/8 “Vulgar, raunchy, sacrilegious, disrespectful and pornographic,” are just a few of the epithets that playwright David K. Johnson uses to describe his new musical, Lady Sublime & the Fantesticles. “Hopefully, we are going to shock some people,” he says of the comedy, which opens tonight at 7:30 p.m…

Rigsby in the Rearview

There’s a magnificent retrospective at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art devoted to the work of the late John David Rigsby, who was a major powerhouse in Colorado’s art scene. Dots, Blobs and Angels surveys more than forty years’ worth of the remarkable artist’s paintings and sculptures. The year 1993 was…

Artbeat

There’s a great new gallery called weilworks (3611 Chestnut Place, 303-308-9345) that just opened this past spring. It’s located across the street from Ironton, in the industrial neighborhood north of downtown. Unlike most of the businesses around here — including Ironton — weilworks is housed in its own custom-designed structure,…

Now Showing

cadence. Here’s a delicious irony: Many artists who explore the “cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is demonstrated in cadence, at the Space Gallery. The important show begins with…

Unenchanted Evening

South Pacific is so filled with terrific music — beautiful love songs like “Some Enchanted Evening,” “This Nearly Was Mine” and the haunting “Bali Ha’i,” lively comic songs like “A Cockeyed Optimist,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” — that…

Angels We Have Heard

There are a lot of people who wouldn’t dream of attending an opera. They think of operas as outdated, frequented by the old, rich and pretentious, and featuring incomprehensible plots, elaborate costumes and scenery, great washes of sentiment, fat people pouring out endless arias, and dead people who inexplicably get…

Encore

Circe. “Circe” — Chapter Fifteen evokes a stream of ideas and images that flow by faster than they can be absorbed, although on one level they’re very familiar — all that grotesque and hilarious stuff dealing with sex, shame, religion, transsexuality, myth, politics, food, lust, greed, shame, sex, religion, dirt,…

In Stitches

There’s an unusual convergence of related art shows at many of the state’s galleries, particularly those in Denver. Scores of venues have arranged their schedules to feature the topic of weaving (broadly speaking) in conjunction with the sixteenth biennial meeting of the Handweavers Guild of America, taking place at the…

Artbeat

In the front room of Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is the notable solo Telling Fantasies, which features recent paintings and drawings by Denver artist Irene Delka McCray. McCray’s style is realistic, and she’s thoroughly accomplished technically. She revels in accurate renderings of fabric folds and…

Now Showing

cadence. Here’s a delicious irony: Many artists who explore the “cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is demonstrated in cadence, at the Space Gallery. The important show begins with…

Amazing Bloom

My reaction to Germinal Stage’s “Circe” — Chapter Fifteen was a lot like my reaction to James Joyce’s Ulysses in general. It began with impatience and drifting attention. Then I found myself fascinated and riveted as the play evoked a stream of ideas and emotions that flowed by faster than…

Comic Retrospective

George Burns, having just died, finds himself in limbo. To enter heaven and reunite with his professional partner and beloved wife, Gracie Allen, he has to audition for God. The audition is a recounting of his life. Burns was born Nathan Birnbaum on the New York’s Lower East Side. The…

Encore

Born to Be Loud. Born to Be Loud consists of a string of songs from the late ’50s to the ’80s. Some are sung straight, some satirized, some clearly intended as an homage to a particular band or performer; they’re stitched together with all kinds of humor and hokum, and…

Run, Do Not Crawl

All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in loving, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…

A Ransom for Redford

It’s one of the oldest stories in cinema, and possibly in the history of storytelling: A man is kidnapped by a baddie wielding a deadly weapon. His family waits at home to hear word while law-enforcement types try to figure out what’s going on. A plan is developed to deal…