Every artist has a shtick. For photographer Michael Lichter, it’s the biker lifestyle, a milieu he’s gone with, like the wind, for over twenty years — that is, when he’s not designing annual reports or doing other commercial work for large corporations, the bread and butter of his professional life…
Most people, alas, don’t even know what a bialy is, let alone how good a proper one tastes. A rarefied peasant cousin of the bagel, the bialy gets its culinary oomph from what goes where the hole goes in a bagel: a fragrant layer of shredded onion, sometimes accompanied by…
It’s a shame, but it’s true: Only a fraction of the crowds that came out for the Denver Art Museum shows featuring Toulouse-Lautrec, Impressionism and Matisse will bother to see Painters and the American West. And that’s too bad, because the exhibit holds its own in comparison with those popular…
In the main gallery at Pirate right now, Linde Schlumbohm has invited a trio of locally prominent installation artists for 3 Fold, on display through Sunday. Each artist — Gail Wagner, Virginia Folkestad and Susan Meyer Fenton — has been given her own section of the room. Characteristic painted fiber…
Antigone’s two brothers, both sons of Oedipus, have died in each other’s arms while fighting for future control of their uncle Creon’s throne. In order to send a message to future revolutionaries, King Creon has decreed that one of the slain will be left to rot outside the walls of…
The pacing lags when it should accelerate, and the actors’ delivery never matches the dialogue’s sharp brilliance, but the Upstart Crow Theatre Company’s production of The Rivals is a gorgeously costumed community theater production. In addition to providing Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play with an adequate staging, director Joan Kuder Bell…
You got your Good. You got your Evil. And you got your thirty-year-old multimillionaire moviemaker to explain the difference to you. Look out popcorn vendors. Here comes Unbreakable, the first film written and directed by young M. Night Shyamalan since he lit up the box office last year with a…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention, now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know, youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities that director Tonie Marshall dispenses in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic comedy…
The passion for antique ironing boards is full of delicious symbolism. “First of all, ironing is drudgery, drudgery, drudgery,” says artist Judy Miranda. “You always have those cliche thoughts, like, ‘If this board could talk…’ And second, the most popular brand, back a hundred years or so, was RIGID. They…
Paola Gianturco is a Bay Area marketing and communications consultant and educator. Her friend Toby Tuttle, with whom Gianturco once worked at the nation’s first women-owned advertising agency, shares responsibilities with her husband in their Evergreen-based investment banking company. Together, these high-powered entrepreneurial women seem far-removed from the dirt-poor women…
Landscapes have been a popular subject in the fine arts for thousands of years, but in just the last century, they have become even more appealing to Colorado artists because our local scenery is so visually emphatic. Between the mountains and the plains, the West has practically cornered the market…
The works of two installation artists are displayed together in the unusual Fabrication and Fiction, running through November 29 at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton. In half of the gallery, ACC faculty member Mari Blacker has created various vignettes contrasting materials such as…
Of the thirty-plus songs that constitute the musical revue Jerry¹s Girls, only one proves to be more than a display of vocal pyrotechnics or choreographic cuteness. Oddly enough, that distinction belongs to a tune that’s performed in drag by an actor whose ambling gait, ill-fitting gown and rouged face drew…
British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is often regarded as England’s version of Neil Simon. But while both master craftsmen have an affinity for rim-shot-style comedy — Simon started out as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, as did Mel Brooks and Woody Allen — they are careful to…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
The biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver. It’s not even that technological advances appear to have added…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witch hunts? Territorial conquest and genocide?…
If you think the instrumentally correct Academy of Ancient Music — an English ensemble formed in 1973 to reproduce, as truly as possible, the voice of early music as it sounded in its day — is a serious and stodgy crew, give it a rest. Orchestra member David Carter –…
From the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the glow-in-the-dark Madonnas that line the counter at your friendly, neighborhood 99-cent store, different cultures have always found ways to express their religious beliefs through art, icons and physical representations of a higher, more ephemeral world. Dr. Martha Narey of the University…
In the capacious lower-level galleries at the Arvada Center, curator and exhibition director Kathy Andrews has installed a pair of large photo displays: Fresh Eyes: Colorado Photographers¹ Views, which looks at recent experimental photography by some of the state’s most interesting artists, and Signs and Relics, a solo show that’s…
Perched atop a high, bare platform and isolated in a pool of bluish-white light, a search-and-rescue pilot talks about why she’s devoted herself to serving the needs of others even as she chooses to reside on life’s perimeter. Surveying the landscape below, the youthful Maxine (Kristin Erickson) quietly says to…
As wrongheaded as it is well-intentioned, CityStage Ensemble’s world-premiere production of Bad Money flounders from the very first scene and never gains much of a foothold thereafter. Ostensibly written in the style of film noir, which uses ambiguity to heighten mystery, cloak clever plot twists and slowly reveal character, David…
