It’s hardly unexpected to find art shows at museums–unless the museum is that funky Platte Valley landmark the Forney Transportation Museum. It is this unlikely venue that well-known contemporary artist Stephen Batura chose for his most recent, untitled show. In a sense, the Forney was a natural for this Denver…
By the time the two main characters in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta sit down to confront their nameless fears during the drama’s riveting final scene, most theatergoers are likely to have either forsaken the playwright’s meandering spiritual odyssey or determined that the less-than-fruitful trip wasn’t worth taking…
When Murray Schisgal’s play Luv premiered on the Great White Way 34 years ago, the two-act comedy was an overnight hit with New Yorkers who had little trouble identifying with the Brooklyn-born playwright’s incisive observations about metropolitan living. Oddly enough, the play’s underlying theme that one man’s perceived paradise can…
Artistic collaborators can walk a tricky tightrope. There’s a whole gamut of personality quirks, ego bruises, ability gaps and creative differences to balance in the process, and for many, it doesn’t always work out. But against all odds, choreographers Chris Harris and R. Bryan Meeks seem to have been born…
For Brad Evans, dumpster-diving is more than a hobby. It’s an art–literally–full of everyday life’s deepest and most secret surprises, caught on the rebound. “If you see it and don’t get it, it’s gone…,” Evans says of his roadside finds–greasy oven doors, grimy hardware, old flags, dictionaries, Ed Grimley dolls,…
Thursday September 17 Colorado Poet Laureate Mary Crow is here on a mission–she’ll preside over Words on the Wing: Making Poetry Visible in Denver, a two-day program featuring readings, workshops and a public forum with the state’s high poetess. It all kicks off this afternoon at 3 with a special…
Denver’s Mizel Museum of Judaica occupies only a small gallery and a couple of offices in the recesses of the large BMH-BJ synagogue. Despite these modest facilities, however, the institution often presents highly provocative art shows that easily rise above the Mizel’s sectarian character. Ben-Zion: In Search of Oneself, which…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than anyone…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little warmth? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) who’s making his directorial debut here, isn’t attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class…
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact,…
Thursday September 10 A variety of global art adventures will help greet the new season beginning tonight, with several museum and gallery openings that hop cultures, travel around the planet and journey back in time. At the Norwest Bank Atrium, 1740 Broadway, the Asian Pacific Development Center hosts its first…
The Forney Transportation Museum has always been its own metaphor: The building itself, with its veneer of dilapidation, is the perfect dwelling for the museum’s ancient collection. A jaw-dropping melange of things on wheels–including 170 automobiles of various vintages, 36 bicycles, four steam locomotives, four aircraft and innumerable other oddities–is…
Before the Beach Boys first intoned praises to a “Little Deuce Coupe” and that little old lady from Pasadena revved up the Jan and Dean hit, there was the ‘Vette, a new breed of sports car that embodied the carefree spirit of the road with more zest than any of…
Objects of Personal Significance is a loosely organized theme show that handsomely fills the recently relocated and expanded Center for the Visual Arts on Wazee Street, the LoDo gallery of Metropolitan State College of Denver. The exhibit, which has a too-short five-week run, comprises a traveling section organized by Exhibits…
Ever since one of the king’s men stepped forward amid a sea of Elizabethan spectators and intoned Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, playwrights have continually asked audience members to join them as silent partners in the commission of existential crime. To be sure, such probing into…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination and heroism. Screenwriter Mark Steven…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen. Someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
Before work even begins on a Tibetan sand mandala, there are chants and music to purify the five-foot-square site where the painting’s intricate patterns will soon emerge. The preparation is an impressive sight in itself: Clad in golden robes, elaborate brocades and awesome fringed hats that rise above their heads…
Thursday September 3 For at least one cross-section of the populace, Big Bird is the absolute bomb, and if any of those pint-sized denizens live in your house, tickets to this weekend’s performances of Sesame Street Live: 1-2-3…Imagine! are a must for the whole family. See Ernie travel the seven…
For the last decade, pulsing lights and droning industrial music have been the lone accoutrements of the subterranean rave scene, a kind of contemporary tribal ritual matching all-night dancing with bare, synthesized rhythms. But it was only a matter of time before visual art joined ravers on the dance floor…
