In keeping with the melodrama that permeates Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, Central City Opera’s opening-night performance featured as artist Cavaradossi understudy Chad Shelton, who in the last week of rehearsals replaced a star tenor sidelined by a ruptured blood vessel in one of his vocal cords. (Tenor Adam Klein, who was…
Even though Love’s Labour’s Lost isn’t one of William Shakespeare’s best-known or best-loved plays, the lyrical, ornate story is yet another example of the sentient dramatist’s incomparable ability to capture in verse the timeless truths about life’s great sea changes. And while the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s visually stunning production of…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. Bay has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
Imps, waifs, big-eyed orphans and lovable mischief-makers have been the movies’ stock-in-trade since the first one-reeler cranked, and apparently they still enthrall the popcorn-munching public as completely as they torment the grownups forced to share credits with them. The presence of a braying Shirley Temple or an intractable Macaulay Culkin…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’s gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’s “character” is a military action figure just twelve inches…
Thursday July 2 Fans of Boogie Nights already know that the porn business is both an ugly business and a funny business. In that spirit, Ronnie Larsen’s off-Broadway success story, Making Porn, takes on the phenomenon as it occurs in the gay world, with strong shots of street wit, raunch…
The Cherry Creek Arts Festival tops almost everyone’s list of things to do in Denver over the Fourth of July weekend. The award-winning fest, taking place this weekend on the streets of Cherry Creek North, has been hailed nationwide by artists and buyers alike, and it adds a luster to…
When artistic director and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women launched the troupe in 1984, her vision was for an all-woman dance company that not only performed for but also educated its audience. The members would work together to affect social change while reflecting the culture of…
Sally Perisho, the highly regarded director of Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts, has been at the eye of a whirlwind the past few weeks. Last month her gallery moved from the corner of Wazee and 17th Streets in LoDo to a pair of storefronts next to the…
Time was when an academic wit such as University of Colorado professor Sean Ryan Kelley wouldn’t have thought twice about how to direct the opening production of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Like any other sensible college teacher, Kelley would have begun his creative odyssey by making a dutiful pilgrimage to…
The great English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell was nearly fifty years old when she created the role of Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, Pygmalion. And even though Campbell’s acclaimed swan song marked the beginning of her somewhat ignoble decline (upon visiting the grand dame in New…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new, non-musical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. With all the creative range of…
Dedee Truitt, the smirky sixteen-year-old temptress who narrates and dominates Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex, is a conniving but somehow sympathetic little shrew who’s bailed out on her feelings early in life. A kind of Lolita-without-portfolio, she gets herself pregnant by a Bible-thumping redneck from Louisiana, then sets out…
Here’s welcome news from the Emerald Isle. The obsessions of Ireland’s fledgling movie industry–religion, tragic politics and misty folklore–are nowhere to be found in Paddy Breathnach’s I Went Down. There are no glorious views of the verdant Irish countryside, no half-soused balladeering about the good old days, no impassioned cries…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
Karen Quest does tricks with ropes and whips, wears leather and, yeah, lives in San Francisco, but what she ultimately does is really a family act. Quest, a kind of career graduate student of circus arts, is concentrating these days on Wild West rope tricks and cowgirl humor. She’ll be…
Thursday June 25 A full head of hair and a softer image seem to be doing Sinead O’Connor a world of good. After a few strident public acts derailed her rising career, she’s back to making music again, using only her beautiful Celtic voice. The audience should be dancing on…
They have no visible tattoos or notable piercings, and their clothes are just clothes, unrent by strategic rips or tears. But looks aren’t everything: The members of the Carbon Dioxide Orchestra just like to make noise–actually, a kind of sculptural, engineered noise–and that’s how they distinguish themselves in Denver’s more-avant-garde-than-thou…
donnie l. betts has a dream. Actually, betts, a longtime figure on Denver’s theater scene, has several. He’s setting his sights on future stage productions–such as one jazz-lover’s fantasy about Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Duke Ellington meeting in heaven–and hopes to make inroads on television with a proposed local…
Federico Garcia Lorca, an Andalusian poet and playwright of the early 1920s and 1930s, would have been 100 this month. Students of world literature know, however, that the liberal Garcia Lorca–brilliantly creative, openly homosexual and a champion of Gypsies and other downtrodden peoples–was executed by Fascists during the Spanish Civil…
Thursday June 18 Denver’s notable Greek population loves to share its culture, something it does with more than the average gusto at the annual Greek Festival, this year celebrating its 33rd anniversary. One of the town’s best-planned ethnic fests, this one features a craft marketplace, costumed folk dancers and musicians…
A new piece of public sculpture planned for the Denver Performing Arts Complex may yet displace the goofy entrance canopy at the Denver Art Museum as the most reviled object in the local art world. If the winning entry in a recent competition–Jonathan Borofsky’s as-yet-untitled monumental six-story-tall sculpture of conventionalized…
