What a review of Love, Janis really needs is a rock critic, not a theater critic. The show at the Denver Center Theatre Company has plenty of hot moments, but works best as a re-creation of Joplin’s music, rather than her life. Nevertheless, Janis lives again. And all of us…
Singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, an enemy of sentimentality in all its forms, built an interesting career thrashing middle-class pretensions and undermining “good taste” wherever it reared its ugly head. His black, satirical songs scorched many a prejudice and failing in American society during the Fifties and Sixties, and while some of…
Ray Liotta does not bullshit, and he has zero tolerance for those who do. As a result, if you persist in asking him bullshit questions, you will be rattled. Not because of the 38-year-old’s spectacularly intense gaze (the dominant image of such diverse films as Something Wild and Dominick &…
Wednesday May 4 Spirit world: Tesuque Indian sculptor Mark Swazo-Hinds creates astounding contemporary stone fetish and effigy figures decorated with feathers, shells, potsherds, deer antlers and buckskin. Examples of his work can be seen at the Heard Museum in Phoenix and at the Smithsonian, but Denverites now have a chance…
Television’s pervasive influence on society and the deconstruction of domestic life provide the major themes for two very different installations at Spark Gallery. Annalee Schorr and Virginia Folkestad fill the Platte Street space with mixed-media paintings, minimal sculpture and topical humor. Schorr’s fascination with the sequential imagery of television flavors…
It’s easy to pity someone dying of a painful disease. In the theater, it’s too easy. When disease is the subject of a play, it almost always becomes a substitute for dramatic structure–a built-in twister of heart-strings and manipulator of our personal and public fears. There are, of course, important…
It’s no surprise that Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights became an instant cult hit when it was released in France in October 1992. This blunt autobiographical portrait of youthful narcissism and recklessness in the age of sexual peril was the first European film to confront the AIDS epidemic head-on. Not only…
Glenn Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist and celebrated hermit, would be a tough nut for any filmmaker to crack. As a child prodigy who could play Bach before he could read, Gould sat next to the radio, transfixed by Toscanini. But later he announced: “I just don’t like the sound…
Wednesday April 27 A walk on the cyber side: Journalist Douglas Rushkoff took a leap off the technological cutting edge and the result was his book Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, a look into the virtual reality world with insightful interviews of William Gibson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna…
Mackey Gallery’s Annual Photo Show grows more popular with each passing year. The current, third edition displays the young artspace’s customarily astute selection of more or less traditional fine-art photos, this time augmented by adventurous photo collages, photograms and 3-D photo constructions, all by local artists. Nostalgia tints Patricia Barry-Levy’s…
Because of dazzling special effects and a funny, bloodcurdling villain called the Trickster (he looks like a Mohawk warrior freaked out on acid but talks like a Phi Beta Kappa), the witty techno-fantasy Brainscan could be the teen hit of the spring. But there’s something else here, too–a distinction between…
At first glimpse, Iain Softley’s Backbeat looks like a gritty trifle aimed at nostalgic Beatles buffs. It dusts off the old story of Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s best friend in Liverpool, who played bass with the group from 1959 to 1961. A halfhearted musician, Sutcliffe found his head turned by…
Wednesday April 20 Riddim method: Reggae queen Judy Mowatt has all the right roots–when Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston left Bob Marley’s Wailers, she stepped in alongside Rita Marley and Marcia Griffiths as one of the I-Threes. Since then, this talented Rasta gal has gone solo, making waves wherever she…
The pungent smell of peeled onions welcomes viewers to a rambunctious exhibit of installation art at Edge Cooperative Gallery. Three artists turn the alternative space into separate and diverse environments, each defined by gallery walls. Since works constructed onsite like this are almost impossible to sell, the dedication and sacrifice…
Daniel is lonely. He misses the barrio, and a distant ‘burb with a goofball name like “Enchanted Acres” is a bleak wasteland in comparison to the warm feel of the old ‘hood. But Daniel is more than lonely: He’s in the midst of a mid-life crisis with cultural overtones. Tired…
John Waters may have grown up, but he hasn’t gone straight. In his days as an enfant terrible, the most notorious moviemaker in Baltimore served up raw sensation, black comedy and low camp to fringe audiences who prided themselves on all manner of deviance. Those raucous midnight screenings of Pink…
If the Manson Family hadn’t stumbled across Sharon Tate, maybe Roman Polanski would be making movies for the Disney Channel. As it is, this once-fascinating artiste of the cinema has turned his personal life into a trashy novel and his mercifully infrequent movies into guided tours of his own sour…
Wednesday April 13 How big was it?: On the subject of fishing, you probably fall into one of two categories–those who do and those who can’t fathom it. Author John Gierach belongs to the former group and his book Dances With Trout, a collection of perceptive fish stories, does everything…
Longtime CU art instructor Luis Eades’s extraordinary paintings at first resemble illustrations in children’s science books. His clean, expert representational style is technically flawless and viewer-friendly. But the paintings on display at Foothills Art Center are far from simplified schematics of difficult subjects. Instead, Eades attempts to portray complicated interconnections…
Love may be hard to find, but trust is even harder. The regional premiere of Trust, a new play by expatriated Denverite Steven Dietz (he now lives in Seattle), dives into the shallows of contemporary lust and longing to prove just how tough trust is to come by. Funny, twisted…
The ironically titled Belle Epoque (“Beautiful Age”), winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a playful Spanish sex farce that unfolds during the brief honeymoon between the bloodless overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 and the rise of the Fascists five years later in the…
The first installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors Trilogy” is called Blue, and the Polish filmmaker says it represents the French ideal of liberty. But before we get to any kind of liberty, we get a powerful dose of imprisonment–the self-imposed, emotional imprisonment of a young woman who has seen…
