Everyone loves the Great American Beer Festival, and with good reason. But sometimes I find the sheer magnitude of that event overwhelming. Sure, I love watching people make fools of themselves during the Silent Disco, and you do learn a lot at some of those seminar sessions, but you know…
Back in 1898, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, two young artists fresh from studying in Paris, decided to take a sketching trip through the West. They were headed from Denver to northern New Mexico when the wheel of their surrey broke. Had the accident occurred earlier — in Pueblo, say,…
The work of visual designer (and Resident Wizard at the Museum of Outdoor Arts) Lonnie Hanzon is often fueled by the ephemeral, lost in time and tinged with the brown edge of a daguerreotype. And that’s no accident. Hanzon’s own fascination with the toys and media of a bygone time…
“Bare is a rock opera similar in style to Rent,” explains Mike Scheneman of Broken Leg Productions. “But Rent follows the story of La Bohème, and this sort of follows the story of Romeo and Juliet. But instead of Romeo and Juliet, it’s a little bit more Romeo and Romeo…
If you want to see the world through a different lens — have your preconceived notions about society and reality upended and rearranged — then you need to attend one of Vox Feminista’s fantastic performances. It’s tough to explain a Vox show; suffice it to say that the group will…
Ski season’s almost upon us — which, if you’re anything like me, means that you missed Sniagrab, still haven’t bought a season pass, never did upgrade those boots like you meant to last year and have just looked in the closet to find your old ski pants and puffy jacket…
Charlie Chaplin is best known for his “Tramp” films, but the little-known Monsieur Verdoux is something entirely different for the gifted comedian. Although it’s gone on to become a beloved cult classic (many consider it to be his finest work), at the time of the film’s release, in 1947, Chaplin’s…
In what seems like an entirely different life, a half-dozen of us headed north — in a wood-paneled, gas-guzzling station wagon — from western Pennsylvania to the seemingly deserted peak of Maine for a three-day music festival. A few years later, we headed south for a similar event. In between,…
What do modern-day hip-hop freestyle battles have in common with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? “Nothing,” most people might say, but Baba Brinkman isn’t most people. A native of British Columbia’s tree-planting subculture, Brinkman became enamored with hip-hop at the tender age of eleven. He managed to combine his passion for freestyle…
It’s a wonderful life here in Colorado: With a vibrant urban scene and spectacular nature all around us, we’ve got the best of both worlds. This Saturday, why not indulge in the more natural wonders of our state and take in a bit of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep watching? After…
There has never been an election cycle during which Colorado has been as much in the spotlight as it has this time around. It’s been so exciting. Not only was Denver the site of the Democratic National Convention — when Barack Obama addressed the world from a photogenic neo-mod ern…
There are basically two parallel art worlds out there: the contemporary scene and the traditional one. Some artists, however, are able to work in both realms at once, like the painter being feted in the impressive Daniel Sprick: The Living and the Dead at Gallery 1261 (1261 Delaware Street, 303-571-1261,…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
The gang at Heritage Square Music Hall has invented a form of theater entirely its own — a combination of scripted and improvised lines, audience interactions, clever jokes and silly jokes that repeat in every show, and we’d be disappointed if they didn’t: What would be the point of a…
During intermission at The Glass Menagerie, I encountered a very beautiful girl in the ladies’ room — dark-haired, pale, slender, someone who might well be cast as the ethereal Laura Wingfield herself someday. She wanted to know if I liked the production. Yes, I said. She did, too, she said,…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize that their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words,…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezerish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
The immense popularity of villain Freddy Krueger and the flood of ever-sillier sequels have obscured the fact that the original Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the scariest and best horror movies ever made. Besides its status as one of the most successful and iconic horror films of the…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Milliner Erin Saboe doesn’t mince words about being a hat maker. It’s what she does, and that’s that. It all started because she loved hats but couldn’t find a ready-to-wear one that fit her head, so she learned the trade at the top — at the Fashion Institute of Technology…
“Omigod, I feel like it’s Christmas!” As the entries pour in to her EvB Studio for SolePurpose, a juried group show of shoe-themed clay artworks, Denver ceramicist Marie Gibbons gushes over them, calling every single piece “amazing” and “fabulous” and a few other superlatives women often reserve only for their…
