Aria Ready?

Rex Fuller of Opera Colorado loves Brandi Shigley and Fashion Denver. He also loves the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life. Serendipity — and a really cool opera — brought all three together to collaborate on Zandra Rhodes’s Fashion of Desire, an introductory event at the library that highlights local…

Reel Life at Thirteen

From its opening-night film, Noodle, the story of an abandoned Chinese boy who falls into the lap of a widowed El Al stewardess, to the closing-night offering, Lemon Tree, about a Palestinian widow who fights to save her lemon grove from destruction by Israeli security forces on the West Bank,…

It’s a Snap

Hey, Sugar: Valentine’s Day, nine days and counting. What will YOU be presenting your friends with when the celebration of love draws nigh? You’re DIY, but not in that lace-and-cupids kind of way, and you’re on a budget that precludes buying long-stemmed roses and diamonds and shit. But you don’t…

Charting Course

I’m a total map freak, and I suppose that’s been true since the very first time I ever spun my family’s old globe of the world and let my chubby little finger fall on some far-flung nation. Later, my mother the hiker began bringing home those topographical state forest maps…

Patty Ortiz leaves the Museo de las Americas

There’s a major changing of the guard in the art world right now in Colorado. The biggest news came this past fall, when Cydney Payton, the powerhouse director of MCA Denver, announced her departure. Then, two Western art curators at the Denver Art Museum — Ann Daley and Peter Hassrick…

Now Showing

Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…

Now Playing

Doubt. Set in 1964, when the second Vatican Council was convening, John Patrick Shanley’s play follows a priest who may have molested a twelve-year-old boy — who just happens to be the sole black kid in the predominantly Irish and Italian school where the priest teaches — and the nun…

New in Town

She’s too thin. She’s a bobblehead. Her forehead doesn’t move. Where has that Jerry Maguire girl gone, the one we once knew and loved? Did the Oscar from Cold Mountain ruin her forever, or is Kenny Chesney to blame? It’s not easy being America’s Sweetheart. Nor any easier being Lucy…

Sundance Festival

The crowds were thinner, the temperature warmer, and Barack Obama’s name mentioned so many times that you might have thought he had assumed leadership not just of the free world, but the Sundance Institute, too. Otherwise, it was business as relatively usual as the Sundance Film Festival turned 25. If…

Otto at Starz FilmCenter

Even as an ardent, tireless fan of zombie cinema, I’ve never seen anything quite like Otto; or, Up With Dead People. Existing in some heretofore undiscovered common ground between the arthouse and the grindhouse, Otto is a tale of a young gay zombie in a cruel world that’s as dead…

Final Days

When it comes to adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, Will Smith can suck it. The 1964 Last Man on Earth (aka The Damned Walk at Midnight) may not be well known among today’s horror fans, but it’s a seminal classic that stands head and shoulders above the…

Frost Bite

Don’t underestimate the snowmen around Nederland and Eldora. According to local legend, these angry Front Range ice cubes are more bad horror flick than good-natured Frosty. Tales of the Screamin’ Snowman describe a mysterious creature with a Yeti-like shriek that leaves no footprints — just plowed paths leading into the…

Making their Mark

Like millions of Americans, Michael Chavez took a break from work on January 20 to watch the presidential inauguration. The Foothills Art Center curator had already planned an exhibit to reflect what people were thinking about at the turn of an administration, but he was still overcome by the magnitude…

Cash for Cash

One of the ironies of hospital care is how little life there is inside a building that’s all about trying to save lives — or at least make those who are dying more comfortable. Page and Tess Phillips found this out in early 2007, when their infant son, Cash, was…

Yes, We Can!

You may have explored the liquid assets of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the pale lager that’s seen a revival in recent years, but can you make art out of it? The three-year-old PB-Arts Contest is betting that you can, challenging Pabst lovers to incorporate the iconic PBR can into artwork in…

Light Entertainment

First of all, 7dancers spokesman Lee Prosenjak notes, there are actually eight dancers in the cast of Passengers, but that’s not what makes this travel-themed production so different. It won’t be performed on a stage or even in a set area, but will instead trek through the expanses of a…

Suit Up

Who knew wearing pajamas could be so profitable? Denver’s Road Home has already collected more than a half-million dollars in donations through its annual PJ Party, and planners are hoping this year’s incarnation will do well, too. “We know that the economic crisis right now is definitely hitting people hard,”…

Moneky Men

“The Bible is a book. It’s a good book, but it is not the only book.” So said Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character played by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, the film that fictionalized the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, pitting science against religion in a twentieth-century courtroom battle…

Thinking Outside the Ox

The Chinese New Year is the biggest, best and most colorful of the traditional Chinese holidays, celebrated not just by the Chinese, but by many of the cultures they’ve influenced during their long and storied history. Here in Denver, there are plenty of opportunities to celebrate the Year of the…

Well Versed

You just naturally expect Design After Dark, the annual benefit for the Denver Art Museum Design Council, to be a little cooler than other glitzy fundraisers: uptown enough for society bigwigs (or at least the ones with artsy pretensions), downtown enough for the rest of us cutting-edge design groupies. And…

Landmark Play

The final piece of August Wilson’s ten-play chronicle of the twentieth-century African-American experience, Radio Golf is the story of progress and greed versus tradition in the historic Hill District neighborhood of Pittsburgh. It’s set entirely in the office of a development company, where a young African-American developer — who’s also…