Although most people might think of Romeo and Juliet as a lusty, melodramatic love story, Shakespeare’s play is more a tragic tale about the sometimes catastrophic clashes between parents and children. After all, the two lovers aren’t thwarted by bouts of jealousy, sexual incompatibility or even Romeo’s refusal to share…
Beware the shrieking teenagers who saw Titanic ten or twelve times and have been conducting their own shipboard romance fantasies with Leonardo DiCaprio ever since. They will be massed and marching in Bombay-at-rush-hour numbers this week, maybe in Chinese-army numbers, and anyone over the age of seventeen who doesn’t feel…
The heroine of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke is a bold and impressionable Australian girl named Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet), who flees her middle-class suburb with friends for a spiritual adventure in exotic India. Inevitably, she is thunderstruck by a saucer-eyed guru named Baba, who quickly reveals the source of absolute…
We all have a story about the Magic 8 Ball, the enigmatic Tyco toy that’s been answering kids’ questions with inscrutable replies — “Signs Point To Yes,” “Better Not Tell You Now,” “Most Likely” and more — in bedrooms, basements and backyards across the country for more than thirty years…
David Cone, the jock-with-brains New York Yankees pitcher who threw a perfect game last season, floored the beer-bellied reporters surrounding his locker one day when he said — get this — “I grew up wanting to be a sportswriter.” Pssh. Yeah, right. Was he mocking them? Did Cone, man of…
The Mizel Arts Center at the Jewish Community Center is somewhat off the beaten path of the art world, and its fine art division, the Singer Gallery, is just a single room divided into a series of four small spaces. Despite these limitations, however, the Singer is often the place…
Inflections of Style, at the Market Street Gallery at Guiry’s, is a display of small three-dimensional objects created by a wide array of artists, most from around town, a few from across the country, and even a couple from Europe. But it’s primarily a local show — and a very…
If the befuddled characters in Three Men in Search of a Pair of Shoes seem unusually eager to share their endless observations about life, that’s mostly because playwright and director Eric C. Lawrence has yet to compress his freewheeling comedy into a more succinct discussion about the male psyche. The…
Generally regarded as two of the greatest performers of their day, French stage diva Sarah Bernhardt and English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell played opposite each other in a 1904 London production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande. Although they weren’t ideally cast as the pair of young lovers — Mrs…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
We don’t all get to live a fairy-tale existence, but then again, we all differ when it comes to defining what one is. For Eric Paddock, the fairy tale is an endless yarn, stored away plot-twist by plot-twist, in box after box of photographs and negatives — some priceless, some…
Before Gun Show even opened, Brad K. Evans was fielding phone calls from the Colorado anti-gun organization SAFE. He’d heard they were planning to demonstrate outside Pirate, the art gallery where his installation debuted on January 21. “I think it’s ironic that they’re protesting something they don’t know about,” Evans…
In the last 25 years, the visibility of the art world has undergone tremendous changes — upheavals, if you will. For a variety of reasons that range from improvements in mass communication to changes in art education, global artistic innovations are now communicated almost instantaneously. This expedience has led to…
Late last summer, Carla St. Romain opened the Bayeux Gallery in the Golden Triangle. What makes this noteworthy is that the gallery is unique — at least in Denver — because its specialty is contemporary textiles made by local, national and international fiber artists. The name “Bayeux” is a reference…
A few years before Martin Luther King Jr. thundered his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a quartet of black college students stood up for equality by sitting down at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. That singular act of courage,…
Like the rotting entrails of the butchered animal one of them has dumped in the backyard, a Queens family’s darkest secrets ooze with stultifying frankness as a holiday barbecue unfolds. Knit together by tears as well as blood, the Robinsons and the O’Conners have dutifully gathered for their annual Labor…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best-selling Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon — “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about this woman regaled in her day…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, which was built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six…
Denver was a ghost town on New Year’s Eve, with cops everywhere, revelers in short supply and nary an official firework. Not exactly the things you’d associate with a supposed world-class city. But there was one honest-to-God party in the Mile High City that night. It was over at the…
Most Coloradans are more familiar with Jolly Rancher candies than they are with the Harmsen Western Art Collection, but the two are closely related. Jolly Rancher entrepreneurs Bill and Dorothy Harmsen came to Colorado from Minnesota in 1942 and built an ice-cream factory out on Ward Road that eventually began…
On a recent Saturday afternoon, in the up-and-coming neighborhood around First Avenue and Broadway, a steady stream of visitors found their way through the doors of the Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery. At the same time, a client in the gallery’s back office was making a purchase. At one point,…
The Fine Arts Center Exhibition Space, on the third floor of the fine art building at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, is currently presenting Homeless in Denver, a compilation of disturbing photo-based work by longtime Denver artist Annalee Schorr. Over the years, Schorr has explored the ubiquitous…
