By the early twentieth century, artists from the East Coast, as well as emigres from Europe, were making their way to the handful of art colonies springing up out West. They came to places like Santa Fe, Sedona, even Colorado Springs, for a variety of reasons, ranging from magnificent scenery…
If it’s true that the supreme test of any classic play lies in its adaptability to a modern director’s radical vision, then it’s also true that the playwright’s unique insight into the human condition is what made the play a classic in the first place. In fact, contemporary adaptations of…
When the time comes to pay final respects to a loved one, we’re usually compelled to talk about our loss–which means that in order for the cathartic experience to be complete, someone must listen to what we say. That’s the essential concept underlying Jeffrey Hatcher’s Three Viewings, a collection of…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
In James Moll’s documentary The Last Days, the third film the young producer/director has created for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, five Hungarian Jews who lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps and eventually immigrated to the United States describe their experiences before, during…
How a lad from Seattle became a scholar and virtuoso of the shakuhachi–a five-holed, vertical bamboo flute with a haunting timbre intrinsic to Japanese classic music–is a story in itself, but suffice it to say that David Wheeler, who now lives in Tokyo, is happy to be one. “I planned…
Shaun Landry’s story is completely believable. An actress first, but one with funny pretensions, the native of Chicago’s South Side worked her way up the theatrical comedy ranks–once upon a time–to find herself a waitress at Bennigan’s. “Improv comedy was all done by white guys predominantly from the suburbs,” she…
Thursday February 25 There are damn few throat singers in the world, let alone Tuvans–all of which serves to make an appearance by Huun-Huur Tu: Throat Singers of Tuva even more rare and wonderful than it already is. The Tuvan troupe, Eastern horsemen who hail from a remote area near…
The string of rooms on the ground floor of the funky Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts building that are rather grandly known as the CU Art Galleries have just undergone a makeover that makes them more worthy of the name. The formerly plain-Jane spaces have been dressed up with a fresh coat…
Infused with fantastical characters, references to Freemasonry and enchanting music, Mozart’s The Magic Flute lends itself to far-flung interpretation while embracing audiences of all tastes. You can set the two-act opera on the moon, against a blighted urban landscape or, as is the case with Opera Colorado’s enjoyable production, amid…
You can sense the anticipation building in the audience about fifteen minutes before the Country Dinner Playhouse’s production of Clue the Musical begins. Armed with tally sheets that list the suspects, weapons and rooms familiar to anyone who has played the board game of the musical’s title, most theatergoers seem…
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubblegum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving: It’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume and harmless enough, as long…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Thursday February 18 The funny stuff in Real Women Have Curves, opening tonight at 8 at El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High St., couldn’t be more proletarian, but the vein is super-rich: Josefina Lopez’s comedy about five Chicanas working in an L.A. garment factory who struggle to watch their weight…
A bottle tree in the sunshine is something to see, glittering like spotlit costume jewelry hanging off some giraffe-necked runway model. But a bottle tree has to be just so. When you hang the bottles on the branches, you have to make certain they don’t collect water, or they might…
It’s 11:37 a.m., and students pour out of East High School, making lunch connections and peeling off in bass-thumping station wagons. But in room 222, a different crowd gathers. In Tammy Rhome’s classroom, students pile their school-bought pan pizzas and Mountain Dew bottles on their notebooks as Ms. Rhome enters,…
The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver finally has a somewhat permanent address: Sakura Square. The ground-floor, two-story MoCA/D space fronts a garden done in a handsome Japanese style, with rocks, gravel and several of those tortured miniature Ponderosa pines that are native to our state. It makes an appropriate entrance for…
Everything an artist produces is, to varying degrees, a manifestation of his or her own experience. In the case of playwright Henrik Ibsen, scholars have long speculated that The Master Builder was the great Norwegian’s attempt to channel a few of his personal demons through a series of fascinating characters…
When Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace opened in January 1941, stiff competition from radio and film was fueling talk of the theater’s imminent demise. That idea permeates Kesselring’s only Broadway success. Fifty-eight years and several entertainment conglomerates later, though, the playwright’s old chestnut–filled with antiquated references, stock characters and…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely but true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial and error and error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting…
Stalking the crucial puberty-to-prom-night demographic can be a hazardous business, leading studio bankers and unwary moviemakers into some gruesomely familiar dead ends. That’s just what’s happened in the case of a sleep-inducing teen melodrama called Jawbreaker. Billed as the inevitable result of all the suburban slasher flicks and high-school comedies…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
