We’ve had a lot of little devils hoofing it on the Denver boards recently–Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Lucifer Tonite and the Jerry Lewis rendition of Damn Yankees have come and gone from local theaters since December. Beethoven’s devil was a sophisticated shape-shifter who never succeeded in seducing Beethoven into mediocrity. The…
Movies about parenthood tend to exaggerate the icky-diaper issues. Over the last few years, a new emphasis on Dad’s role in a baby’s life have produced a slew of sentimental foolishness like Look Who’s Talking, Three Men and a Baby, Junior and the insufferable Nine Months. But it’s not as…
For those of us who didn’t grow up black in the segregated rural South, it’s hard to tell how much of Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored is real-life inspiration and how much is nostalgia tinted by wishful thinking. In any event, this is the black feel-good movie of…
The unlikely heroes of our story are a human geek named Mike and two wisecracking robots, all condemned by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, to watching really awful Hollywood movies in outer space. Under the circumstances, you’d talk back to the screen, too–loudly and often. Still, that doesn’t quite…
Thursday April 18 Band of Lincoln: A revolving ensemble made up of some of the world’s finest musicians, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center simply oozes excellence, mixing unexpected instrumentation and eclectic material with stunning showmanship. One such grouping–flutist Ransom Wilson, violinist Ani Kavafian, viola player Kim Kashkashian, guitarist…
A terrific set and wonderful lighting design help set the mood in the Arvada Center’s Jungalbook, a worthy adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling children’s story. In a mysterious green jungle somewhere in India, a little man-cub is born and abandoned only to be retrieved by a stately panther and reared…
Men are incapable of fidelity, integrity or profound affection–and they’re shallow to boot. Frantic for validation, women backstab each other over worthless guys, dump and are dumped over the slightest cause and would be better off learning to make their careers more important than their relationships. Sound familiar? Romantic love…
The confirmed sentimentalist Franco Zeffirelli could probably tenderize a side of horse meat by pointing his camera at it–a gift the political advertisers might envy. But that makes him the wrong man for the job when it comes to a new version of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s oft-filmed high school…
The assumption by conservatives that Hollywood is some kind of decadent liberal underworld has never been supported by the facts. On the contrary, this hidebound old institution has always been fueled by one thing only–sheer profit motive–and it has never hesitated to buckle under pressure from outside powers that be…
Thursday April 11 Freudian slip: Author Robert Boswell didn’t graduate with a double major in psychology and creative writing for nothing. His finely etched portraits of human relationships, the backbone of novels such as Crooked Hearts and the bestselling Mystery Ride, owe something to both disciplines. Boswell, who now teaches…
It’s an unexpected stroke of luck to find three of the most important cultural institutions in the mountain West conveniently lined up in a row along Denver’s Civic Center complex. And you could hardly miss the Colorado History Museum, the Denver Public Library and the Denver Art Museum, housed as…
If only Sam Shepard had never gone to Hollywood. He was such an amazing playwright before fame, fortune and Jessica Lange got ahold of him. Why area theater companies don’t produce his early plays more often is a mystery; they’re beautiful, weird and perceptive, and they offer actors plenty of…
Bertolt Brecht remains one of the few great geniuses of twentieth-century theater. Marxist didacticism notwithstanding, his best plays set up contradictions upon contradictions that shake us awake and require us to think poetically. Because finally, it is Brecht’s poetry more than his politics that penetrates through to truths about the…
When the Republicans bellow for family films, they probably aren’t thinking of David O. Russell’s stuff. But moviegoers wondering if they’ll ever get to laugh again in the yuk-free zone of the Nineties need only catch Russell’s Flirting With Disaster to have their faith restored. Two years ago this bright…
The martyred teenager Anne Frank has been memorialized by playwrights, filmmakers and historians, and her famous diary, perhaps the most extraordinary single document of the Holocaust, has sold 25 million copies since 1947 and has been translated into 54 languages. But Jon Blair’s poignant Anne Frank Remembered, which just won…
Thursday April 4 Sheer poetry: Bet you didn’t know April is National Poetry Month. True, the fragile, sometimes-ridiculed literary genre won’t change the world, but it does, by virtue of its rich, metaphoric language and deep insights, help make our mean old planet a slightly nicer place. That’s reason enough…
The comet Hyakutake has just passed close enough–9 million miles or so–to be seen from the earth without the aid of a telescope. Just over a year ago, the comet was completely unknown, even to the amateur astronomer in Japan who ultimately discovered it and for whom it was named;…
Rootless youth trying to figure it all out, angry young men and women, bright, soulful and lost–it may sound very Rebel Without a Cause, but Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia at the Theatre on Broadway is wholly contemporary. From the marvelous graffiti art decorating the set to the Rollerblades on Buff’s energetic…
The Thirties produced great Hollywood comedies and a few equally dazzling Broadway offerings–sophisticated yet crazed, darkly perceptive about human frailty, and often politically subversive (all the best comedy is subversive in one way or another). The Marx Brothers, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, W.C. Fields, Noel Coward, Ben Hecht and so…
At the beginning of Primal Fear, an alleged courtroom thriller, defense attorney Martin Vail, portrayed by Richard Gere, is unctuous, facile. In conversations with a journalist (Jack Connerman) whose sole purpose in the script is to serve as an excuse for a flood of exposition, Vail–a former Chicago state’s attorney,…
Thursday March 28 Star man: Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo originally was written in response to the rise of Nazi Germany. But it’s as much the story of a famous astronomer as it is an examination of the uneasy relationship between free-thinking scientists and fascist ideology. Brecht, who equated Galileo’s struggle against…
Only a handful of Colorado artists are genuinely famous–unless, of course, we’re talking about artists who work in ceramics. In that field, Colorado can point to a tradition that has produced many important figures, several of whom are known around the world. Think of Nan and Jim McKinnell, Paul Soldner,…
