Thursday July 17 Garden party: Next weekend’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem to better fit the occasion, but look at it this way: Kicking off this summer’s Theatre in the Park series in Civic Center Park with James Goldman’s Lion in Winter at least sounds pretty cool…
Poor John Adams. Obnoxious and disliked, the lawyer from Massachusetts who prodded Thomas Jefferson to compose the Declaration of Independence just couldn’t get along with the other founding fathers. But irritating as he may have been, he was an American hero just the same. So Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone…
It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Jackie’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalogue out of…
Talk about tragically hip. The doomed hero of Finn Taylor’s quirky buddy picture Dream With the Fishes is Nick, a surly young thief with a taste for tequila and heroin who just happens to be dying of leukemia. His opposite number is Terry, a straitlaced Peeping Tom whose life is…
Here in unfettered America, where the lamest cowboy insists on doing the Texas two-step and a couple of strawberry daiquiris can transform a retiring housewife into a disco queen, it’s difficult for us to imagine a culture in which middle-class married couples don’t go out in public together and even…
Thursday July 10 How street it is: What better way to kick off this summer’s Colorado Dance Festival than with some exuberant dancing in the street–style, that is. A unique troupe of dancers, Rennie Harris PureMovement uses hip-hop as a springboard, taking the giant choreographic leap from lowbrow to highbrow…
For some reason, all of the important small public art venues in the metro area are located on the northwest side. In Boulder, there’s the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in Arvada the Arvada Center and in Golden the Foothills Art Center. Each of these municipal facilities has come to…
Exuberant musicals are the Country Dinner Playhouse’s stock-in-trade, though sometimes that exuberance can seem forced. The most recent show at the Playhouse, 42nd Street, was a terrific, bouncy re-creation of a 1930s extravaganza and the best thing the CDP had done in a long while. But its newest production, Fiddler…
The frailties of human nature were meat and drink to Moliere. His comedies live on because they so cleverly skewered hypocrisy, pretentiousness and ego-driven stupidity, and his sense of the absurd is just as relevant now as it ever was. This year the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is offering The Would-Be…
The most astonishing actress in France might be one who goes to kindergarten. She is Victoire Thivisol, the traumatized little heroine of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette. Her performance–if that’s what you call it–as a four-year grieving the death of her mother revives thorny questions about the tricky old dance of life…
Because he often seemed less interested in studying the stars than becoming one himself, the late astronomer-author Carl Sagan had his detractors. Real scientists, they said, don’t have booking agents or worry about trading quips with Johnny Carson. Still, this tireless proponent of science for the masses exerted an influence…
Thursday July 3 War zone: The air is warm and soft, summer’s at its peak and it’s the glorious start of a long holiday weekend–perfect conditions for a night of dancing in the street. And few bands lend themselves to that purpose better than ’70s funk ‘n’ rollers War, guests…
Since last year, New York-based conceptual guru Christo and his sidekick Jeanne-Claude have virtually taken up residence on the Front Range. First there was that show of drawings and collages at One/West in Fort Collins in the summer of 1995. Then, in 1996, Denver’s Robischon Gallery unveiled the new “Over…
Capital punishment is on everybody’s mind these days, what with Timothy McVeigh’s conviction and JonBenet’s murderer still on the loose. So the regional premiere of Colorado playwright David Hall’s The Quality of Mercy is timely enough. And CityStage Ensemble’s biting production has much to offer–several fine performances, inventive direction by…
Playwright Tony Kushner took on an astounding feat when he wrote Angels in America. The six-and-a-half-hour play consists of two parts–“The Millennium Approaches,” in which everything begins to come undone, and “Perestroika,” in which all of the play’s conflicts are more or less resolved. It is so Big that it…
Colm Meaney, the earthy Irish actor, has the puffy face of an ex-welterweight, the bulky grace of a steamroller and, beneath all his bluster, the blithe spirit of an imp. In the Nineties he’s been the heart and soul of two related art-house hits called The Commitments and The Snapper,…
The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. The trailer for the movie promised a great big Ghostbusters-style…
So far, the only ingenious action movie of this mayhem-stuffed, crash-filled summer is Face/Off, directed by the peerless John Woo. It dispenses enough all-out ass-kicking to satisfy the most hormonal adolescent but manages to balance things up with–are you ready for this?–a bracing little essay on human identity. The high-priced,…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
Thursday June 26 24 carrot gold: Any Jew worth his or her chopped liver knows there’s nothing more priceless than bubbe’s home cookin’. So for ethnic gastronomes, the name of Jewish-music group Tzimmes makes perfect sense. The band’s Yiddish title refers to a chutney-like stew of carrots, raisins, prunes and…
Thursday June 19 Just put your lips together and blow: Folk art is just to look at and enjoy, right? Wrong. The wacky, whimsical works of Iowa carver Connie Roberts have hidden talents, as well: They’re whistles. The outside might look like a tic-tac-toe board festooned with comic cats and…
This weekend Denver will be paralyzed by the Summit of the Eight, this year’s version of the Group of Seven conferences that have been held for years. These meetings bring together the leaders of the richest countries on earth–the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan–and serve mostly…
