Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that anyone whose name was Jason was also contemplating his twelfth birthday. Apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, they grew up. Now Jason is as common an adult name as — oh, I don’t know — Michael. It was surely this preponderance of Jasons…
Along with The Mikado, Pirates of Penzance is probably one of the silliest, happiest and best of Gilbert and Sullivan’s brilliant oeuvre, full of nonsense and punning, spilling over with gorgeous music. The story concerns a young man named Frederic, who, having been mistakenly apprenticed to a band of pirates…
First performed in 1947, Brigadoon was the earliest major musical hit for Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, the team that went on to create Camelot and My Fair Lady. Though the libretto for Brigadoon is slight and sentimental, the show is filled with wonderful songs — some as…
If you don’t object to the occasional metaphor coming from the barrel of a gun, you’ll probably find Sam Mendes’s quirky period gangster movie Road to Perdition intellectually stimulating, emotionally complex and gorgeous to look at. This is the gifted British stage director’s first film since his startling and provocative…
It’s daunting to hear that John Sayles’s new film, Sunshine State, is almost two and a half hours long and mostly consists of calm conversations. But don’t be deterred, or you’ll miss out on a study of character, class and changing times that puts Robert Altman’s stodgy Gosford Park to…
We may remember this as the summer without sparklers and Black Cats, but that doesn’t mean we can’t indulge in a few cheap thrills. The Boulder Film Alliance is coming to the rescue with firecrackers of another kind, all wrapped up as a summer fling with some of cinema’s darker…
“But no matter, the road is life,” Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road. Taking the classic Beat novel to heart, in 1991 Dori and Joseph DeCamillis, two young, newly married Boulder painters looking for artistic inspiration and a way to avoid a mounting pile of debt, bought a 1970…
They stream in and out, all day and all night, one after the other: band members, producers, business associates, friends, family, strangers, hangers-on who stare at the familiar face made infamous long ago. The tour bus, this parked sanctuary where he can roll his joints and drink his bottled Starbucks…
My eyes have been burning lately, and not just from all the pine-scented forest-fire smoke that’s been in town. Rather, it’s my typical response to the lighter-than-air offerings that fill local venues in the summer. But this silly off season in the art world has its ups as well as…
The beautiful and impressive One Hundred Years of Van Briggle Pottery, at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum (215 South Tejon Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-385-5990), has a somewhat misleading title; it might have been better to call it One Hundred Van Briggle Pots. That’s because the exhibit does not fully survey…
With Macbeth, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival company has accomplished something close to impossible: It has enabled us to see one of the great tragedies afresh. You attend a Shakespeare play with certain expectations. There are scenes that move you every time you see them, such as Shylock leaving the courtroom…
A talented young tapper makes it all the way from Wyoming to New York’s Carnegie Hall, but thanks to the malfeasance of a New York Times critic, his performance is a disaster. (“More stumble than silk,” sneers the reviewer the next day. “More slip than slide.”) From here, Thaddeus Phillips,…
Most summer movies about the pain of growing up emerge from the same primordial ooze — lots of teenage anxiety mixed with two or three unruly hormones in the stickum of comic discontent. What a relief, then, to find a coming-of-age film that avoids the cartoonish cliches and sneering humor…
Like a jawbreaker that changes color every few seconds, MIIB: Men in Black II delivers a quick buzz, lots of stuff to look at and a totally non-nutritious joy that can only be attained with the aid of artificial flavoring and yellow dye #5. In a nutshell, it’s the perfect…
Ornithic connoisseurs, design enthusiasts and devotees of flora and fauna will flock to the Denver Botanic Gardens on June 27 for its eighth annual Birdhaus Bash Garden Party and Auction. The event, which wraps up a two-week showing of avian abodes designed by area artists, celebrities and plain old bird-loving…
His real name is Zebu Recchia, and at the age of nineteen, he left his hog-riding, bricklaying father in Denver behind to become a tramp. Though it’s hardly your usual 21st-century occupation, it seemed like the timing was just right for Zebu, whose stage name is Eddy Joe Cotton, a…
How did the Artisan Center celebrate its 25th anniversary a few weeks ago? By doing absolutely nothing. “We kept talking about it and talking about it, but the days just rolled on and we lost track,” says Ellen Seale, who purchased the store, originally started as a pottery studio, in…
For its production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Roundfish Theatre Company has taken over an art gallery set in the middle of a desolate Denver block, with painted brick walls, odd found objects dangling from the ceiling, and scribbly artworks. The place smells faintly of mouse droppings, and every so often…
It has been eighty years since the adventurous son of a Michigan iron miner trained a silent-movie camera on the everyday life of an “Eskimo” family in the Canadian Arctic and virtually invented documentary filmmaking. Through the decades, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North has attracted its share of criticism…
Naked emotion is a tricky thing to sell in motion pictures, especially in semi-autobiographical ones about confused mama’s boys gradually learning that life exists beyond the control of their lens. Back in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore challenged himself thus with Cinema Paradiso and upped the ante, adding his unabashed sentimentality to…
Think Italian cars — and the ensuing revelry should conjure up a Mediterranean mountainside under blue, sunny skies. A tanned and chiseled Romeo is at the wheel, a carefree dark-eyed Juliet in a sundress at his side; they’re both wearing sunglasses and the top is down. Que bella, no? Unlike…
You can leave your green parkas at home until St. Patrick’s Day. “Put on some shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops,” says Pat McCullough, and you’ll fit right in at Conor O’Neill’s Summer Outdoor Music Fest in Boulder. McCullough’s Celtic Events group is helping Conor O’Neill’s, a Boulder pub, launch…
