Arts & Culture

Although Adam Lerner took the reins of MCA Denver last March, most of the exhibits on display since then were booked by his predecessor, Cydney Payton. That changed when Lerner rolled out six shows collectively titled Looking for the Face I Had Before the World Was Made. “I’m excited to…

A gritty dreamscape dominated by rival rock bands. A sizzlingly sexy Diane Lane. A sizzlingly androgynous Willem Defoe. What’s not to love about Walter Hill’s 1984 cult classic Streets of Fire? The director brought his neon-lit yet grimly cartoonish take on urban fantasy — one that he established in The…

If you’ve ever gone to Buttermilk for the Winter X Games, you probably ended up watching them on the JumboTron like everybody else, freezing your butt off and realizing why these are made-for-TV events. This year, save yourself the trip and join 20,000 snow-sports industry insiders at Skyline Park instead,…

Poor Matthew Taylor. When Linda Klein and Barbara Gehring, his mates from the improv comedy group A.C.E., hit the big time with their long-running show Girls Only, Taylor was left twiddling his thumbs, right? Wrong. At Klein’s suggestion, he began to compile a cascade of wonderfully expressed personal stories and…

Confession time: Every time Legally Blonde, the 2001 Reese Witherspoon/Selma Blair/Luke Wilson vehicle airs on television, I settle down with a bowl of popcorn and lose myself in the world of sorority queen Elle Woods, who enrolls in Harvard Law School to win back a boyfriend who doesn’t think she’s…

Fabulous prizes! Ridiculous questions! Even more ridiculous tasks! Why settle for watching a game show on TV when you can watch it — and participate — live and in person? At Sexual Tension, Denver’s own weekly live game-show event, you can join hosts Princess and Fred, pick a team to…

Sniffed at as a mere caricaturist in his own time and buried in a pauper’s grave, the realist artist Honoré Daumier was a keen satirist and sociopolitical observer of Parisian life in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as a prolific master lithographer whose works paint a lively picture of that…

Improv makes us laugh, but real comedy aficionados know there’s a lot more structure holding up what seems to be something so marvelously off-the-cuff. Improv comes in many forms — it’s not all Whose Line Is It Anyway?, wham, bam, thank you ma’am — and in the case of Bovine…

Wanna play beer bong in public? Easy: No fewer than four organizations and two dozen bars make that happen almost any night of the week. Wanna win the $1,100-plus entry into the 2011 World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas? Then you’ll need to join the Gingperial Beer Pong…

“Tea is really the world’s drink,” says Kate Ashley, spokeswoman for the Denver Montclair International School. Hence the popularity of the school’s annual World Tea Fair, which runs from 2 to 5 p.m. today. “It’s a very easy visual of seeing different cultures coming together in the same room in…

The Buntport Theater Company has taken on plenty of literary figures and playwrights over the years, from Shakespeare to Kafka, cross-pollinating the work of the greats with their own quirky brand. The latest is Eugene O’Neill, whom we meet in the hospital, recovering from an appendectomy and formulating the plot…

Examples of portraiture, from the sixteenth-century work of Bernardo Buontalenti through contemporary pieces by Bill Amundson, Richard Phillips and Chuck Close, are on display in a Denver Art Museum exhibit called Face to Face. “Following drawing through four centuries of art, these wonderful examples of the portrait in some cases…

Formerly a sculptor of wild papier-mâché cowboys and bikers, longtime Lakewood resident Al Orahood switched somewhere along the way to painting. But even working in a new medium, Orahood still chose a workingman’s subject: the weathered neon signs of West Colfax Avenue, the ones that announce such run-down and evocative…

When the Denver Center Theatre Company premiered Plainsong last year, they had a hit on their hands with author Kent Haruf’s laid-back look at small-town life on the eastern plains of Colorado. That bodes well for this year’s world-premiere staging of Eventide, Haruf’s second yarn set in the fictitious community…

A culinary red carpet of superstar kitchen magicians will stir the pot in Beaver Creek Village during the Beaver Creek Master Chef Classic, which begins today for a three-day gustatory blowout. “It’s a great showing of national, international and local Beaver Creek chefs that get to share a lot of…