A dance festival in the summer, in Colorado? You’ve gotta wonder what folks are thinking. But the Colorado dance festival manages to pull it off each year by performing annual feats of programming magic, and this year’s prestidigitation outdoes them all: The folks at the CDF are pulling no lesser…
Operatic versions of famous novels and plays are much like their cinematic cousins: Some lend new insight and dimension to the original, others stress one aspect of the story at the expense of others, and a few reaffirm predictions that nothing could beat the book. Mark Adamo’s Little Women, playing…
Forsooth, here we go again. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival opened last weekend with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the Bard’s earliest, and more problematic, comedies. Like most of the CSF’s efforts over the last five seasons, the play quickly falls victim to directorial caprice and, at times, sheer…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her 1991 big-screen debut, The Man in the Moon. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which is roughly equivalent to a U.S. movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks, directed by…well,…
Bob Finch learned to appreciate tools growing up in his father’s Wyoming workshop, where some craftsmanship apparently rubbed off: Finch worked his way through college as a carpenter. Now retired, the Lakewood engineer has renewed his passion for implements as a member of the Rocky Mountain Tool Collectors, and he…
What the hell is Incredibly Strange Wrestling, you ask? “It’s a fusion of a rock show with a really wayward, gone-totally-wrong sporting event,” says spokeswoman Kristin Lemberg. “And performance art.” Actually, it’s much stranger than that. It’s an intoxicating brew of costumes and tortillas and punk rock and crazy fans,…
Some interesting news has just come out of Boulder. Susan Krane, director of the CU Art Galleries at the University of Colorado, is leaving for the greener pastures — or would that be the sunnier skies? — of Arizona. This fall, she’ll take over as director of the Scottsdale Museum…
At the beginning of last week, after forty years in operation, the White Spot, a quintessential 1960s coffee shop and restaurant, closed its doors. The contents were liquidated a few days later. Soon the site will be scrapped to provide a location for a new multi-building complex. It’s a sad…
As the after-dinner crowd files back in to Heritage Square Music Hall, a three-piece band plays several bouncy tunes. Strains of “All of Me” segue into an instrumental hoedown that sounds like it’s from Smokey and the Bandit. The down-home, carnival-like atmosphere, which is part South Dakota Corn Palace, part…
There’s not much reason for the two characters in The Zoo Story to talk to each other for nearly an hour when one of them behaves like a raving lunatic from the very start. Not even the saintliest among us would listen, calmly, to a complete stranger — who looks…
Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
Kiss of the Dragon — the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood — has a little of the best (plus a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong…
Don Ed Hardy has dragons under his skin. The indelible kind, all over his body. But the Bay Area painter, probably best known for his 34-year catalogue of works as a groundbreaking tattoo artist, has now — in the tradition of the great narrative scroll painters of Asia — committed…
If you’re seventeen today, Bob Dylan may be an afterthought: But your boomerish folks? Well, they’re a different story. Like Mizel Arts Center curator (and baby-boomer) Simon Zalkind, who’s put together a multidisciplinary series in celebration of Dylan’s sixtieth year on the planet, many oldsters still get Dylan’s appeal. Check…
The current blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum is an enormous show with the exhaustively informative title of European Masterpieces: Six Centuries of Paintings From the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Filled with compelling pieces, it occupies both the Hamilton and Stanton galleries, which comprise some 18,000 square feet at…
Working Drawings, at the Philip J. Steele Gallery in the design building at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (6875 East Evans Avenue, 303-753-6046), is a charming little show. Steele director Lisa Spivak, who organized the show, invited the faculty and staff of RMCAD to participate, as well…
Opera lovers who trek up Clear Creek Canyon every summer share something other than a yen for great music and a tolerance for winding mountain roads. They make the yearly pilgrimage because the Central City Opera has earned a reputation for producing high-quality shows free of highbrow pretension. Even with…
Elementary school children might appreciate Aladdin and the Glass Slipper for the lessons that each character learns and the dialogue’s in-jokes about familiar fairy tales. But preschoolers will probably get a kick out of the bouncy songs, festive costumes and action scenes that stand in sharp — and welcome –…
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about…
