Opera and punk rock — two great tastes that taste great together. In doubt? Then you haven’t experienced Sybil Vane’s Weird Opera. Vane is the alter ego of Molly Zackary, who hosted a riot-grrrl radio show while majoring in opera singing at the University of Northern Colorado. Zackary brings her…
Colorado Quickies is “kind of a smorgasbord for the audience,” says Write Angle Productions playwright and producer Tyler Smith. “They don’t know what’s coming from one play to the next, so it’s always a surprise.” And smorgasbords, as everyone knows, are perfect for people who can’t make up their minds…
This is not George Lazenby making his doomed run at James Bond, or even Mel Gibson presuming to play Hamlet. This is serious heresy, combined with a touch of felonious assault. It has evidently not occurred to Steve Martin that, just as there is only one Eiffel Tower, there is…
It happens so often these days. A comedy opens with clever jokes, endearing characters and an enjoyably brisk pace, all of which put you at ease. This’ll be fun, you think, settling into your chair. Someone trustworthy is driving, so let’s enjoy the ride. And then, just when you thought…
It is often written of Harrison Ford that he’s the most profitable movie star in history, to the tune of some $3.8 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. Of course, once one subtracts from that total the first three Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy and two outings as CIA…
Let’s get right to the point: If you are the type of person who enjoys seeing attractive naked girls meet a hideously graphic demise, there’s a scene in Final Destination 3 that will wear out the “pause” and “rewind” buttons on your DVD remote a few months from now. Mega-stereotype…
That Curious George existed at all — much less as a franchise, an icon enduring some 65 years — was a result of “happy circumstance,” wrote Houghton Mifflin publisher Anita Silvey with some understatement in 1991, upon the fiftieth-anniversary publication of The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Silvey and critic…
The tenth Denver Jewish Film Festival gets under way Thursday, February 9, with a 7:30 p.m. showing of Isn¹t This a Time!, a high-spirited concert documentary honoring legendary music promoter and social activist Harold Leventhal. On-screen performers include Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Theodore Bikel and…
Colorado has never been much of a place for sculpture; the three-dimensional medium has always come in a distant second behind painting in the state’s art history. Anyone interested in the art scene could readily reel off a long list of interesting painters — scores of them, in fact –…
The entire set of Upper Galleries at the Arvada Center (6901 Wadsworth Boulevard, 720-898-7200) are given over to Testify, a solo featuring recent pieces by Colorado artist Riva Sweetrocket. Arvada Center curator and director of exhibitions Jerry Gilmore got to know Sweetrocket when the now-defunct Studio Aiello represented both. I…
Building Outside the Box. With the Denver Art Museum’s outlandish Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind taking shape at West 13th Avenue and Acoma Plaza, there’s a lot going on outside the place. Inside the gorgeous Gio Ponti tower, it’s a different story. Up until the opening of the Hamilton next…
When critics review the work of August Wilson, the same words tend to recur. Rich. Musical. Textured. Multi-layered. And here are a few phrases that apply both to his entire output and specifically to Gem of the Ocean, now playing at the Denver Center: a titanic work; a grand vision,…
Okay, it’s a world premiere of a play by a local writer, but the question remains: Why is a company like Modern Muse, which in the past has demonstrated a certain level of integrity and artistic ambition, presenting a work as weak as The Raft? There’s one slightly original element:…
Bright Room Called Day. Tony Kushner, author of the brilliant Angels in America, clearly wrote A Bright Room Called Day in a state of agitation. Kushner sensed the blot of fascism spreading across America, and he drew an analogy — by no means original — between 1930s Germany and Reagan’s…
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (DreamWorks) Not since Finding Nemo has there been a movie so easy to recommend for all ages and tastes. But despite having crafted a near-perfect film, directors Nick Park and Steve Box second-guess themselves constantly on their audio commentary, as well as…
Maybe it’s because we’re hung up on our past more than ever — riding a wave of giddy, nonstop nostalgia and absorbing anything that will help recapture the bliss of the good ol’ days — but Capcom’s Mega Man X Collection feels more fun than ever. The follow-up to last…
Bambi II (Disney) The Batman: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) The Best of the Electric Company (Shout!) The Best of Youth (Miramax) The Cary Grant Box Set (Sony) Cote D’Azur (Strand) Daltry Calhoun (Miramax) Doom: Unrated Extended Edition (Universal) Elizabethtown (Paramount) Eros (Warner Bros.) Grounded for Life: Season 1…
To be fair, some women do get excited about the Super Bowl. They hunker down in front of the flickering television in the dark den with the menfolk, decked out in team colors, uttering guttural threats to referees when necessary and arguing with their spouses over who’s going to get…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’s period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…
Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. The thing might be a dog, but the actor who brought the gruesome psychopath Hannibal Lecter to life and got deep inside a repressed English butler always gives us something fascinating to behold. The depth and gravity of…
Tommy Lee Jones’s feature directorial debut is probably much as you’d expect: a blast of nostalgia that nonetheless accepts the realities of modernity, which isn’t surprising coming from an actor who’s getting up there in years but has found more fame as an old man than as a young ‘un…
January has earned its reputation as the month in which studios unload all their cheapie horror flicks, but February is the month when we invariably get yet another middle-of-the-road black-urban-professional romantic comedy. (It’s Black History Month, and Valentine’s Day falls in here, hence the logic.) In that regard, Something New…
