Artbeat

Emotional Distance, the superb photo show at Gallery Sink (2301 West 30th Street, 303-455-0185) combines the work of some of Colorado’s best-known artists with examples by well-known photographers from around the country. In the front space, exhibit organizer Mark Sink has installed a group of wonderful landscape photos by Boulder…

From the Heart

Bertolt Brecht was the last century’s most influential theater director and theorist. Since World War II, his beliefs about political theater have served as the cornerstone of practice for fringe groups and mega-companies alike (most prominently, the early days of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company were marked by many Brecht-inspired productions)…

Love Hurts

Family members and their friends rip each other’s hearts out, pour alcohol on the resulting wounds and then go at it all over again in A Delicate Balance, playwright Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning look at relationships among the well-to-do. Like most of Albee’s family dramas, the 1966 play, being given…

Spies Unlike Us

Talk about an unholy union of souls! The latest project from director John Boorman (Deliverance, The General) seeks to be many things — spy thriller and black comedy among them — but at its core it’s a bizarre buddy movie. Behold Pierce Brosnan as a spy who lit out from…

Northern Exposure

There’s a majesty to Michael Winterbottom’s new film, a majesty and a terrible, icy chill. There’s also a fair bit of invention, as the director of the wrenching Jude — based on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure — has shifted from the locus of that author’s fierce, beloved English west…

Back to the Future

Denver painter and newspaper illustrator Herndon Davis is best remembered in these parts for his “Face on the Barroom Floor,” a dreamy portrait based on a poem by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy that still graces the floorboards at the Teller House in Central City. Davis is said to have painted the…

Love Yourself

Local freelance writers Erin Kindberg and Wendy Burt don’t make any bones about it: Their new book, Oh, Solo Mia! The Hip Chick’s Guide to Fun for One — billed as a collection of things women can do alone, without benefit of male companionship or even a gaggle of gal…

Techno Love

For Urban Guerilla, the lovelorn protagonist in Gregory Walker’s techno-theater piece xy, the search for that special someone is played out as a Doom-like challenge. Against a backdrop of bleeps, beats and animated beasts, our hero navigates the various levels of a romance-themed video game — where he must meet…

Short Story

The Aspen Shortsfest isn’t a Hollywood shmoozefest. Sure, this tenth annual competition is expected to attract a few film producers. But organizers insist that the festival’s purpose remains recognizing achievement. Guests, including bad-boy director John Waters (who will be featured during Saturday’s closing-night celebration at the Wheeler Opera House) and…

The Man Who

Paul McGuinness has never thought of himself as a teacher of life lessons, so it comes as a bit of a surprise for him to hear it relayed that Kelly Curtis considers him an adviser–hell, a mentor. It comes as even more of a shock to discover that Curtis recalls…

Mind and Body

Edgar Britton was Colorado’s most significant and successful sculptor of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He was to modernist sculpture what the late Vance Kirkland was to modernist painting. But unlike Kirkland, whose fame has grown since his death, Britton, who died in 1982, is known only to a smallish…

Artbeat

The idiosyncratic sculptures in Tom Nussbaum, which has been installed in the pair of spaces just inside the front door of the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788), are downright strange.Take, for example, “Head I Man” (left), an acrylic on resin of a bland-looking man holding up a giant, equally…

Family Feud

The number of world premieres produced by the Denver Center Theatre Company over the past few years makes it increasingly hard to think of the city’s flagship theater company as a repertory group dedicated to presenting periodic revivals of classic plays. Earlier this season, more doubt was cast on the…

Strange Musings

Inna Beginning is a two-and-a-half-hour play that would pack a stronger punch if it were two hours shorter. Germs of ideas whiz about like supercharged particles in Gary Leon Hill’s play, which was conceived in collaboration with composer Lee Stametz and Denver Center Theatre Company actor Jamie Horton, who also…

Girl Afraid

Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you,” said Mae West, and, while the sentiment rings true, it does little to explain the mystery of why Helen Fielding’s sliver of literary history managed to keep anyone. Fluffy, shrill and approximately as deep as Cosmo magazine, the book somehow hit…

Road Warriors

One doesn’t watch Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) so much as absorb it — like a body blow. “I wanted to make a movie that smelled of filth,” Alejandro González Inárritu has said about his feature directorial debut. He has succeeded beyond perhaps even his wildest dreams. One of this…

Turn, Turn, Turn

Roger McGuinn seems satisfied. And he should be: After setting musical standards in rock and roll music with fellow Byrds Gene Clark, David Crosby, Gram Parsons and Clarence White, McGuinn — who got his start working with such folk luminaries as the Limeliters and Chad Mitchell Trio — has quietly…

Dreamy Visions

In photographer Jerry Uelsmann’s visionary world, nothing is necessarily where it’s supposed to be: A tree and the earth in which it’s rooted float eerily above a lake, leaving a reflection on the water below. A spectacularly lit carpet of clouds drifts above the four walls of an artist’s studio…

Meet Me in San Luis

Since the first of the year, Denver has seen a number of heavy-duty exhibits devoted to abstraction: There was the gorgeous Jeff Wenzel show at Ron Judish, the sublime Jeffrey Keith solo at Rule and the historic Robert Motherwell and Richard Serra exhibits seen together at Robischon. Now it’s time…

Artbeat

The William Havu Gallery (1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360) is so jam-packed with art right now that you can’t help but experience sensory overload. On the first floor are exhibits devoted to Emilio Lobato (see art column), Gregory Gioiosa, Mark Lunning and Jerry Wingren. Upstairs is the small and kooky Lauri…

Rhyme and Reason

Richard II is as given to high-flown poetry, and King Lear weathers as many cosmic crises, but the role of Hamlet is still considered the supreme account of an actor’s mettle. From Burbage to Bernhardt to Barrymore to Burton to Branagh, performers have always laid everything on the line to…

Body and Soul

Career academic Vivian Bearing is an expert on the works of seventeenth-century poet and preacher John Donne. A fiery intellectual, she knows the depth of Donne’s passion, the beauty of his wordplay, and, thanks to an exacting mentor, the hidden messages that are embedded in the punctuation of his Holy…