“Tentacle Piece” squats on angular, black steel legs, spewing prehensile canvas digits that hang in expectant stasis, waiting for motion. In spite of its greasy pulleys and cogwheels, there’s something almost endearing about the thing. But that’s not hard to fathom once you meet its maker. In fact, 23-year-old kinetic…
Two compelling photography exhibits now at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities include nearly 100 works of art–and almost as many different ideas. The first show starts off with a titillating posted proviso: Children will not be admitted unless accompanied by an adult. But don’t get too excited…
When Georges Bizet’s Carmen premiered in 1875, Parisian audiences were outraged that the opera’s title character was a cigarette-smoking, overtly sexual woman who discarded her male lovers like picked flowers. The fact that the story ended with Carmen’s onstage murder only added to patrons’ contempt for the controversial work. Stung…
Environmental-theater designer Jerry Rojo once remarked that he regarded Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as the ultimate personal theatrical experience. Convinced that the play’s two main characters personified the conflicting forces of intellect and emotion, Rojo created a unique design for his production of the play: The maverick designer crafted individual cardboard…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well on screen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
The youngest member of the ubiquitous Wayans clan, 25-year-old Marlon, is emerging on the big screen as an eye- and soul-pleasing amalgam of Jim Carrey’s lunatic elasticity and Eddie Murphy’s faultless comic timing. We can probably expect great things of him. As evidenced by The Sixth Man, a lukewarm basketball…
One of the necessities of screwball comedy–an endangered, if not extinct, species–is that the practitioner be more sophisticated and aware than the batty socialites, pompous academics and blustering snobs he means to deflate. In the golden age of this fragile form, master satirists like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges certainly…
Thursday February 19 Amazing grace: No one these days gets closer to the wellspring of bluegrass than Del McCoury, a veteran of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys whose only professional wish is to keep the Monroe flame burning forever. For McCoury, that’s a family affair: When the guitarist with the high,…
Frank White stands at an overlook on the high road from Taos for a long time, looking out over the clean, cool, sunny New Mexico mountains before shaking his head sadly. He’s thinking about how the native peoples of the Taos Pueblo settled these lands long before Spaniards like Coronado…
The building at the corner of 17th and Wazee Streets, where Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts occupies most of the ground floor, is currently shrouded in a jungle of metal pipes. But the oddly artistic maze isn’t part of the center’s fabulous Contemporary Metals USA exhibit. Instead,…
Have you ever regaled a houseful of your friends with an evening’s worth of your special brand of witty banter? And did their approving laughter tempt you to take your “material” on stage as a stand-up comic? After all, that’s how Tim Allen, Bill Cosby and Roseanne headed down the…
Hoping to recruit the audience members of tomorrow, the Denver Center Theatre Company is increasingly on the lookout for plays that appeal to family audiences. In the latest installment of its Generation Series, the DCTC and director Nagle Jackson have combined theatrical spectacle with great literature in a new adaptation…
The odd Spaniard may choose to transplant film noir to Madrid (see review above), and the French came up with the name in the first place. But it’s essentially a Hollywood invention that has stood the test of time and darkness. Witness Palmetto, a pretty satisfying example of the genre,…
He doesn’t need much. Give the renowned Spanish black-humorist Pedro Almodovar the ex-junkie daughter of an Italian diplomat, a bitter ex-con who served six years for a crime he didn’t commit, a beautiful former dancer, a good cop and a bad cop, and he’ll come up with the most intriguing…
Feb. 12-18,1998 Thursday February 12 Travel light: At the crossroads between jazz, acoustic and new-age music, you’ll find Oregon, a loose and virtuosic group that’s been performing for close to thirty years. The quietly groundbreaking instrumental congress of Paul McCandless, Ralph Towner, Glen Moore and Mark Walker, Oregon gathers music…
A teller of tall tales makes things up as he goes. Bailey Phelps, for instance, piles clause upon clause while he chats about the job, just to make a point: “Stories are the oldest way in which human beings remember history, convey values, enjoy fantasies, imagine what the world is…
For many years, getting real was the chief preoccupation of the world’s painters. The Stone Age artists who decorated all those caves in France and Spain wanted views for their viewless spaces, and they painted what they knew: mainly bison and horses. The idea that painting exists to provide a…
“What can you do with the love that you feel? Where can you take it?” asks an eighteen-year-old girl caught in an emotional tug-of-war in William Inge’s Picnic. When her mother replies, “I never found out,” the young woman makes a gut-wrenching decision that represented the breaking of new theatrical…
Denver legend has it that the great Billy Eckstine performed in several Five Points jazz clubs of yesteryear, bringing his silky-smooth baritone to such venues as the Rainbow Ballroom and the Rossonian. Piqued by the opportunity to make a local connection to Eckstine’s music, members of Denver’s Shadow Theatre Company…
With Zero Effect–an apt title if ever there was one–writer-director Jake Kasdan presumes to turn the hard-boiled detective movie on its head with Gen-X hipness. He winds up looking pretty empty-headed himself. Kasdan, the 22-year-old son of Big Chill/ Accidental Tourist director Lawrence Kasdan, would likely never have gotten his…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back: They visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title made…
