On a recent sunny afternoon, Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp was standing under the museum’s still-controversial entrance canopy on Acoma Plaza. Not that the canopy provides any shade: Though workers began erecting it last fall, it’s still not finished. The stainless-steel panels intended to provide it with a roof…
Though contemporary theatergoers have long favored the narrowly focused view of dramatists such as Arthur Miller (who’s still writing plays that reflect mostly American concerns), a growing number of contemporary directors are gravitating toward old hands such as Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, who crafted dramas that capture…
Like the mid-life crisis that its central character frequently describes but rarely experiences, local dramatist Coleen Hubbard’s play A Ritual for Returning has all the makings of a cathartic event but never actually becomes one. But though it has yet to realize its dramatic potential, this freewheeling romp through the…
When last we spied Sandra Bullock, the plucky action heroine was clinging to a sea-washed railing aboard Hollywood’s other doomed ocean liner–not the one that hit the major ice cube, but the one that plowed through a Caribbean resort town while audiences hooted with unintended laughter. Speed 2: Cruise Control…
Vyacheslav Krishtofovich’s A Friend of the Deceased provides another eye-opening glimpse of the former Soviet Union in this era of P.T. Barnum capitalism and spiritual confusion. Whatever else may be dense in the film, that’s worth our undivided attention. The place is Kiev, where the joyless hero, a translator named…
Documentary filmmaker Don McGlynn is one of those charmed individuals who do for a living exactly what they like to do most. But in his case, it’s a little more involved. It’s a matter not only of being a filmmaker, but of being an archivist, a film junkie and a…
Next time you run into a group of people dressed all in white, bedecked with brightly colored ribbons and sashes, jingling with bells and wildly waving sticks and hankies at dawn, don’t direct them en masse to the nearest asylum. They’re probably Morris dancers, and it must be spring. This…
Thursday May 21 Budding filmmakers will be in the spotlight when the Denver Public Schools Film/Video Arts Program Student Film Festival screens tonight at the Bug Performance & Media Art Center, 3654 Navajo St. The festival, which includes works written, produced, directed and edited by both high-school students and adult…
As lower downtown’s sidewalks have become crowded with shoppers, tourists and sports fans, the trend among art galleries has been to move out or close up. That’s not just the story in LoDo, but on Broadway and throughout the central business district. The problem? Spiraling rents combined with sluggish art…
Love is pain, pain produces suffering, and suffering is the state of being that leads one to God. But not before one has made the straight and narrow trip to hell, where, according to British playwright Ronald Duncan, no one really suffers anymore–including a handful of romantic writers whose collective…
Long before professional baseball became an event played between teams of ill-mannered millionaires, America’s pastime served as a metaphor for life’s ups and downs. Of course, that’s when the contests were regularly attended by white-shirted, fedora-wearing spectators with a boyish devotion to the game. And it’s that kind of unbridled…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars, could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach and, most important, his understanding…
The “Size Matters” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about this week’s ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
Thrusday May 14 We’re not going to speculate. We’re not even going to cry. But even we have to admit that the last episode of Seinfeld is a cultural event not to be missed. Some will prefer to mourn quietly over tuna sandwiches and Snapple in their own living rooms,…
Nancy Smith is a motion addict. “I had a childhood love for spinning, for getting dizzy and falling down,” she says. “I loved swings and swingsets and motion–repetitive motion that takes you into an altered state.” So when the Boulder choreographer first saw aerial dancer Robert Davidson perform on a…
Only a pilgrim would be caught dead in blue jeans at a mountain-man rendezvous. And depending on whom he met there, the dang flatlander might either get it between the eyes with a tommyhawk or get lucky and find some kind soul who’d lend him a spare pair of buckskins…
The new exhibit at Denver’s Museo de las Americas has an impenetrable title and an equally confusing outlook. 1598, 1848, 1898: Conquest and Consequences is billed as an exploration of the myriad relationships between the United States, Mexico and Spain. Its title suggests a provocative discussion and explanation of the…
In 1963, Robert Redford made his Broadway debut in, of all plays, Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. On the heels of that triumph, the sandy-haired heartthrob launched a successful movie career and used a portion of his Tinseltown megabucks to jump-start the Sundance Institute, a Utah artists’ colony dedicated…
Television’s mutant family of talk shows has effectively bastardized the theater’s long-sacred belief that one person’s emotional odyssey is appropriate subject matter for an audience’s shared catharsis. But not even Jerry Springer’s warped view of the human condition can compare with the shock-value tactics of Canadian playwright Brad Fraser. In…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less “human drama.” In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff–the daughter who reunites with her estranged father,…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office, where in a rare moment of lucidity he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
Not since the death of Diana has there been a pop phenomenon as cataclysmic as the demise of Seinfeld. The surrounding hoopla has reached such proportions that it has turned the series’ saturnine co-creator–balding, bespectacled Larry David–into a cult celebrity. The press has presented David as a mysterious demigod who…
