Dorian, the musical version of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray now playing at the Buell, boasts some of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time. Unfortunately, everything else about the show is mediocre: It features stock characters, a dumb script, a pedestrian plot, some major…
The scene is a flowery, chintzy little apartment; a woman is reading on the couch, a man writing at a desk. Pretty soon they’re bickering. They rehash past relationships and their own history (they seem unable to agree on how they came together), discuss and dismiss the possibility of a…
Ethelyn Friend is a wonderful performer. Working alone in the intimate upstairs theater space of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, she holds her audience spellbound for over an hour as she tells the story of her two grandmothers, both classically trained singers. Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me consists of…
Whatever white America doesn’t know — or refuses to acknowledge — about the grim realities of life on the nation’s Indian reservations has been coming to light through a growing body of Native American writing and the long-overdue emergence of films shot on location in Indian country, using largely indigenous…
Chris Smith’s brief but thoroughly entertaining Home Movie carries on a grand tradition of American documentary: seeking out the eccentrics and contrarians among us. In the space of an hour, Smith provides glimpses of five U.S. houses and their owners, and — thank goodness — his whirlwind tour is less…
Stan Brakhage, a longtime Boulderite acknowledged as one of the great innovators of modern avant-garde cinema, recently retired from his respected berth at the University of Colorado. And even though he packed up his film cans last week and headed for Victoria, British Columbia, his legacy here won’t fade to…
With over eighty titles of Japanese anime currently flooding the TV airwaves in Tokyo every week, the adventures of Sailor Moon, Teknoman and the Waspinator can get lost in the digital shuffle. Stateside, imported series like Voltron and Speedracer gradually became part of the American cartoon mainstream during the late…
Nearly two weeks ago, Studio Aiello Gallery opened its doors with a juried exhibition straightforwardly titled the Grand Opening Group Show. Studio Aiello is the first phase of an ambitious project called the Aiello Center for Contemporary Art. Located in a lightly rehabbed 1940s commercial building in a former industrial…
The Arvada Center’s staging of Neil Simon’s The Dinner Party makes for a pleasant evening of theater: mild, inoffensive, expertly staged and occasionally very funny. Two men appear in the chi-chi private dining room of an expensive French restaurant. The play’s contemporary, but the room, with its Fragonard-style mural, crystal…
For the first twenty minutes, I think I’m feeling alienated from what’s going on because a priest appeared on stage before the play and started to lead us in prayer — a real priest, not an actor in a clerical collar. There’s something disorienting about living in a culture so…
For most of us living west of New Brunswick and south of Saskatchewan, Canadian humor and curling are both acquired tastes. But that hasn’t stopped the Calgary-born actor, writer and director Paul Gross and Artisan Entertainment from releasing an odd duck of a movie called Men With Brooms in such…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles (whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking) was one from the year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye…
They’re the size of baseball cards, but unlike that variety of hit-or-miss collectible, art trading cards are never assigned a monetary value. Within the size limitations of the cards, however, anything goes, and anyone can participate, either through the mail or at ATC centers, where folks get together in person…
Curvy burlesque bombshells on stage might seem like a thing of the past, but a red-hot revival is on the bill at the Ogden Theatre this Friday. Burlesque, the sassily seductive entertainment, is back. “Burlesque has a whole new group of girls that have that cool, hip, alternative edge,” says…
On the first floor of the Denver Art Museum, there always seems to be some kind of blockbuster exhibition. People complain about these shows, but it makes sense that the museum would do them: The DAM needs to crank up its attendance — and not just to collect more money…
One of the new sculptures in the Civic Center has made quite a splash, winding up on the front page of the Denver Post even before it was unveiled. The untitled sculpture, by nationally famous artist Larry Kirkland, is one of several new pieces adorning the new, nearly completed Wellington…
My Children! My Africa! may not be South African playwright Athol Fugard’s strongest and most complex work — it’s single-themed, talky and repetitive — but it fully communicates his largeness of spirit and his humanistic approach to the anti-apartheid cause. Beautifully performed by the Shadow Theatre Company, the play packs…
I don’t think I’d call this a good production of Shakespeare’s high-spirited sexual tease of a play. The problem isn’t that the Theatre Group’s Twelfth Night is staged on a shoestring — a lot of local companies overcome that limitation — or that many of the costumes (with the exception…
For those with any kind of pop-culture memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was, too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions that…
Since average folk can’t often afford to fly to Paris (unless they live, say, in Lyon), 93-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira offers some consolation in the form of I¹m Going Home (Je Rentre à la Maison). Shot more than two years ago, it’s a seemingly sweet and deceptively simple…
Everyone who’s seen it seems to agree that Charles Busch’s newest play, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, is funny. More than funny: “laugh-filled,” “witty” and “hilarious.” It’s a specific kind of funny, too, the kind that centers on New York City and has at its heart a wry, desperate,…
Though there’s no sensible way to fathom the first anniversary of unfathomable events of September 11, we’ll somehow all have to remember how and why things changed in America one year ago. For most, the day will carry with it a weight of reflection that’s distanced from the buy-sell-or-trade mentality…
