Trying to make sense of everything that happens in the LIDA Project’s Alice is like trying to decipher every line of routing code that appears at the bottom of an e-mail. A few characters and phrases sound and look familiar, but deciphering the whole assemblage seems an impossible task for…
In the first scene of An Experiment With an Air Pump, a scholar asserts that scientists are beatified by their search for truth. A few scenes later, another character asks whether good scientists are, by definition, good human beings as well. As British dramatist Shelagh Stephenson’s play continues, two different…
Heath Ledger, wearing the scowl of the anxious and uneasy, is having trouble standing still. He most certainly would rather be anywhere but here: killing time in a TV studio, waiting to be interviewed during a live afternoon newscast. Waiting to promote his new movie. Waiting to assume the guise…
The crimes Hollywood has committed against the major Russian novelists would themselves fill a pretty hefty tome. While reducing giants like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pasternak to lavish costuming and snappy dialogue over the years, the studio moguls also made some eccentric casting choices — for instance, cover boy George Hamilton…
Let us first in olden verse this critic’s cynical curse disperse: The greet unwashede consummethe crappe, Fro Jerrye Springgere to ganggsta rappe; Bothe yonge and olde, ’tis sore pitee, Doth foule thir hertes with drede teevee, Thus slye produceres, with bisynesse cunning, Devysde a shew to pyne come running, Consummeres…
The spread-out life women lead in the rural West poses unique challenges, not the least of which would be steering through the vagaries of friendship. When complicated by distance and spotty populations, that sterling necessity in any woman’s day often resembles the ubiquitous sage plant that covers the prairie, hanging…
At 73, Mort Sahl has influenced virtually every topical comedian working today — a distinction he neither claims for himself nor appears to take much pride in. He calls Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher “a guy trying to pass himself off as a Libertarian”; he bristles at Dennis Miller’s reliance…
Last spring, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, there was an unprecedented effort by local galleries, art centers and museums to present shows on the broad topic of ceramics. The result was nearly a hundred exhibits all at the same…
August Wilson came to prominence when the first of his cycle of plays about black life, each set in a different twentieth-century decade, graced the Great White Way in 1984. A year earlier, though, another of Wilson’s works had begun playing at theaters in New Haven, Chicago and San Francisco…
Theater companies that produce plays about the evils of censorship are sometimes guilty of committing the very sins they seek to decry — a dilemma that’s brought home in a pair of one-acts billed as The Decency Acts. The joint effort of Promethean Theatre and the Bug Theatre Company is…
Last thing first. At this very moment, Chris Carter sits behind his desk in the Ten Thirteen Production offices, on the 20th Century Fox lot in Studio City, California, finishing the final X-Files episode of this season. The show’s creator has just one scene left to write–the very last–and that…
Just when we culturally deprived, mystery-starved Americans were convinced that the most delicious of movie genres, the French thriller, was dead and buried, a literate and exciting new filmmaker named Dominik Moll has emerged to revive it — and set our nerves exquisitely on edge. It’s a minor miracle that…
Presently sitting in a very peaceful meditational facility. First time here. The location (which shall remain unnamed so as to maintain nondenominational vibe) was selected specifically for the loving creation of this review, as it provides an almost perfect contrast to The Center of the World, the new motion picture…
While much of the world employs violence to solve troubles, the Reverend Andy Carhartt chooses another tactic. “There’s something very powerful about love and forgiveness,” says Carhartt, a minister at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder. This Sunday he’s spreading that message when St. John’s hosts the debut speaker in…
Think of the theater, and you think of a curtain, a proscenium, a rack of lights. Characters enter and exit; a story is told. But how, within that narrow framework, will theater keep up with times so modern that all the action seems to be shifting into newer, more technologically…
There is no good place to begin with Harry Shearer, because he doesn’t sit still long enough to allow one the chance to focus. He is a blur, forever in motion–on his way to the radio station, on his way from the movie studio, on his way to the publisher’s…
It was probably a year or so ago that Molly Dubin, the curator of the Mizel Museum of Judaica, asked me if I knew anything about an artist named Akiba Emanuel. I didn’t, so Dubin explained that Emanuel was a modernist painter and sculptor who had lived in Denver off…
Error & Ingenuity: A Kinetic Sculpture and Robot Exhibit is an ambitious show being presented at the Andenken Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-291-4567). Andenken, the joint effort of Hyland Mather and Malia Tata, originally opened in the Raven’s Nest studio complex but relocated last winter to the GOOG, Patrick…
Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants, so, naturally, he begins unzipping his pants en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then, his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…
Joe Simon doesn’t read comic books anymore, and not because he’s an 87-year-old man with far better ways to spend his time. The former and, perhaps, future comics writer and illustrator simply doesn’t get them anymore; he doesn’t know who they’re for, what they’re about, why most of them even…
The Denver Art Museum has long been on the cutting edge of exhibition design. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing, as is evident right now at the DAM and other major museums around the world, where marketing and demographics are displacing connoisseurship and art history as key components in…
