Gemini: May 21 to June 20 Brain power. Thanks to Mercury, you can reshape relationships and save some money with a little thinking. Those super-charged synapses can also help you heal old emotional wounds. In July, someone close needs your financial advice. Give. Just don’t sacrifice time you had set…
Well, I’ve decided to make it official and issue a formal statement on the matter: I hate juried shows. They’re the slums among group shows, and it’s hard to believe they’re still being done. I don’t even know why I still go to see them. The problems with juried shows…
There’s an extremely unusual show at Capsule (554 Santa Fe Drive, 303-623-3460) called Justin Beard: Second Hand Smoke. The handsome exhibit represents a very strong early showing for a young emerging artist who’s just out of art school. Capsule director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy describes Beard’s installation as being “very cool…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the form of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Rattlebrain Theater Company consists of a group of highly talented and appealing actors with loads of stage presence. Director Dave Shirley, who also writes much of the material, keeps things buzzing along and utilizes music and video clips to great effect. In It’s Hickenlooper’s World, the troupe’s target is Denver…
Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba is a difficult play to carry off. The plot concerns a group of five daughters confined within the walls of their house for an eight-year mourning period by the iron will of their bitter, violent, widowed mother. Marriage is the only possible…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
The first few minutes of Shrek 2 are cluttered with more references to the movies than David Thomson’s thick, rich history text New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Watching it is like sitting next to an ADD patient with access to a remote control and a hundred premium cable channels; you…
Samurai have never been strangers to film; in fact, an entire genre has sprung from their legend, with plenty of attendant offshoots, cross-pollinators and beneficiaries (Westerns, slasher films, Star Wars). Lately, the feudal Japanese warriors have enjoyed a particular bounty of screen time: Last year brought us The Last Samurai,…
In 2004 A.D., as the five remaining members of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe lie in coffins in a Vanity Fair spread to jeer at their own deaths, it’s really nice to have them back together commanding the big screen. Behold anew their wonderfully wiggy Monty Python’s Life of…
Aspiring filmmakers everywhere — many of them with better access to cameras and computers than to, say, actual talent — still daydream about being Kevin Smith. That’s because Smith’s tale is the ultimate indie success story of the 1990s, a fantasy come true starring a young striver who created a…
There’s a lot more to leading an orchestra than podium skills, so if you think just anyone can wave that little stick around in time to the music, forget about it. That said, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra has had an extended honeymoon with exuberant, multi-faceted conductor Marin Alsop in the…
Thursday, May 20 It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful place to swirl, sniff and sip fine wines than the Denver Botanic Gardens, which is delicately heady, colorful and fragrant near the height of its spring bloom. The urban Eden will be its own best advertisement during tonight’s Wine on…
This past Christmas, I cleaned the LoDo Tattered Cover out of every last paperback copy of Plainsong, Kent Haruf’s lyrical novel about life, loss and love on the Eastern plains in the fictional town of Holt. This wasn’t simply some lame attempt to confine all of my holiday shopping to…
FRI, 5/21 Opera usually brings to mind a grand spectacle with lavish sets and costumes, supertitles and glass-breaking arias. But in these parts, if you take away all the grandeur, you’re left with a rich pool of vocal talent aching to be heard. Colorado boasts far more fine voices, in…
SUN, 5/23 Most Playboy centerfolds don’t list getting the shit kicked out of them as one of their hobbies. But most Playboy centerfolds aren’t Mia St. John. The total knockout is getting ready to lay a TKO on Avalon nightclub tonight as part of an all-women boxing card. She’s scrapping…
SAT, 5/22 As Karl Marx said, revolution is not a fixed, static phenomenon; it’s a perpetual and ever-evolving process. So it makes sense that after seven years of showcasing the progressive and subversive at its current location, Revoluciones Collective Art Space is moving. The award-winning gallery was opened in 1997…
SUN, 5/23 “Nobody ruins my birthday except me,” states Leo Kottke via e-mail. The musician, you see, turned 56 on the same day planes crashed into the Twin Towers. And with each anniversary since, Kottke continues to thank his lucky stars. “It’s great to be alive,” he writes. “One year…
American art in the post-World War II period is generally considered by scholars to represent a high point in recorded history. In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, American modernism dominated the world, and the greatest painters, sculptors, designers and architects were working in this country. This cultural dominance is still…
Though the ordinary fare at Gallery Sink (2301 West 30th Street, 303-455-0185) is photography, work in other media is featured from time to time. Painting is the mode showcased in Jeremiah Coleman Teutsch: Six Married Couples and One Lonely Mountain Man, hung in the formal main gallery, and installations make…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the form of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
As Rose opens, an ailing woman in her eighties sits shiva on a public bench. We don’t know whose death she is mourning, though she tells us early on that her own daughter was killed by the Nazis at age nine. The character, Rose, then takes us on a tour…
