The best thing about Black Box Theater Ensemble’s trio of one-acts, The Whole Shebang, is that the Boulder-based company has a good time without taking itself too seriously. That’s no mean feat in a drone-prone town that holds meetings about pet-guardianship and garbage-ownership rights. The three plays, presented at the…
A program note gives plenty of notice that A Question of Mercy examines difficult issues, and the first scene certainly sets a somber, thoughtful tone. However, playwright David Rabe’s look at AIDS and assisted suicide doesn’t hit home until the character of Anthony appears on stage for the first time…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on — the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas,…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Most folks in Colorado could only watch with interest when the Westminster Kennel Club met at Madison Square Garden last week for the most elite of canine competitions. Though Westminster’s incredible parade of spit-shined dogs, groomed hair by hair and led around the ring by formally attired professional handlers, was…
Coloradans couldn’t have been pleased by a Benny Goodman anecdote that cropped up in Ken Burns’s epic documentary Jazz, which debuted on PBS last month. The time was the mid-’30s, when Goodman was trying to popularize swing. Then Let’s Dance, his NBC radio show, was canceled, and in an attempt…
There’s only a couple of weeks left to catch the current attractions at the Robischon Gallery: three superlative solos, each devoted to an internationally famous artist. In the pair of spaces bracketing the front doors is Robert Motherwell: Early Drawings, 1963-1976; in the pair of spaces beyond, there’s the smaller…
It could be said that the ILK @ Pirate space (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is a hole in the wall within a hole in the wall — or to put it more elegantly, an alternative space within an alternative space. Despite the limitations of a small, dingy room, more often…
When Another Antigone premiered off-Broadway in 1988, higher education’s radar screen was aglow with a growing number of issues that threatened to crash an already overloaded system. With funding scarce in the post-Reagan years, deans couldn’t motivate tenured professors to change their ways and, at the same time, couldn’t afford…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Much Ado About Nothing boasts some beautifully staged scenes and well-crafted performances, especially actress Robin Moseley’s bravura turn in the role of Beatrice. But while the visually pleasing production engages now and then, it adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts…
Sometimes, usually out on the golf course near his home in upstate New York, Dan DeCarlo feels terrific, far younger than his 81 years. He’ll thwack the ball, reflect upon his 55 years of marriage to the same beautiful woman, and occasionally contemplate a life spent drawing and creating some…
Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weeper Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine. But if you’re usually smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who’s quirky…
That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir, Before Night Falls, is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film-director Julian Schnabel is truly unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. It would appear that…
Jane Goodall is a hero to her fans, who will get a chance to see the beloved “Chimp Lady” as she stops in Denver as part of the Denver Distinguished Lecture Series. For those who have never heard her speak — or make chimp calls — the upcoming talk is…
Valentine’s Day falls just in the nick of time — ’tis the season when our gonads traditionally get fired up for spring, the season of procreation: You know, the birds, the bees, all that good stuff. But in the age when fast cars creep along the highway, bridled and bound…
You can always expect to see some of the best and most interesting contemporary art by local, national and international artists at Ron Judish Fine Arts, because director Ron Judish is relentlessly searching for new material — and he often finds it right in our own backyard. But the three…
There’s a great show being presented right now at the slightly off-the-beaten-path O’Sullivan Arts Center at Regis University (3333 Regis Boulevard, 303-458-3576) — but, then again, there usually is. The current attraction is Dickson: Oils — Monotypes, which presents an in-depth look at well-known Denver artist Mark Dickson’s most recent…
An abundance of stock characters and melodramatic situations might prompt a lesser director to turn Flyin¹ West into a hiss-filled potboiler; but in director Jeffrey Nickelson’s capable hands, Pearl Cleage’s 1992 play becomes an expansive ode to courage, self-determination and the price of freedom. The two-hour-plus drama is being given…
Rehashing a centuries-old debate, an erstwhile film critic (and aspiring moviemaker) declares that the theater has no relevance for his generation. Naturally, that remark doesn’t sit too well with his girlfriend’s mother — an accomplished stage actress who reminds the young man that creating art is a greater calling than…
When the lights finally came up in the Washington, D.C., movie theater, Leonard Nimoy sat still, silent and a bit shaken. He could scarcely believe what he had seen — and what he had not seen. The movie was beautiful, but beneath the surface sheen, there was no heart, no…
Given the horrors of war and scourges of bloody stupidity that have plagued the world in the past three decades, the murder by Palestinian terrorists of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich now seems like a minor episode in the history of our collective folly –…
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly ten years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason…
