Ulla was a Swedish sex bomb who longs to be a star. She was almost a cartoon, a flesh-and-blood Jessica Rabbit, and Charley Izabella King was a wonder in the role. Inhumanly gorgeous, wearing clothes that loved her body, she vamped around the stage and spoofed her own exaggerated accent…
As Godot’s Lucky, Dennis Rodriguez was called on to stand for long periods of time with his mouth open, his feet turned out and his knees slightly bent, looking like a clown, a puppet, something inanimate. His silent presence remained infused with feeling nonetheless. Then he began his speech, an…
Brett Aune is one of the finest actors around. He brought both passion and particularity to the role of Hal, the mathematics professor whose flirtation with the moody Catherine was tainted by self-interest in Curious’s Proof. We believed he was brainy, yet he was also nerdily charming. As Vladimir in…
Keith L. Hatten has brought grace and vitality to a number of small roles over the past few years. No matter how little he has to do or say, you can always sense his character’s inner life. Hatten was charming and funny in this year’s Christmas Carol, stalwart as a…
In the past year, Curious Theatre Company has demonstrated its commitment to variety, quality and audience outreach. Under Chip Walton’s direction, the company staged Proof, a well-made contemporary play illustrating the abstract beauty of mathematics; Nickel and Dimed, a piece that evolved from Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé of the plight of…
Where but at Germinal Stage Denver could you suffer through Edward Albee’s truth-saturated Three Tall Women, giggle at the light comedy of Relatively Speaking, puzzle through one of Harold Pinter’s most mysterious offerings, No Man’s Land, and be reintroduced to Arthur Kopit, whose Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You…
Thaddeus Phillips, creator of the Earth’s Sharp Edge, fuses intellect and feeling with an entirely original vision, making theater out of dented desks, toy airplanes, memory, politics and his own voice and body. This piece began with Phillips — playing himself — getting stopped by airport security for carrying the…
In his interesting play Reaching for Comfort, Denverite Josh Hartwell defied stereotype and created Pam Lynch, an abusive wife who was not only vicious, but also complex and human. In a daring, close-to-the-edge performance, actress Cini Bow brought this woman to coruscating life, exploring the character’s self-pity and hair-trigger rage,…
It’s notoriously difficult for playwrights to get their work produced, particularly if the works are full-length rather than one-act plays. Steven Tangedal and Nicholas Sugar, Theatre Group’s executive and artistic directors, are to be applauded for mounting two evening-length plays by Denver writers. Josh Hartwell’s Reaching for Comfort and Melissa…
Suzan-Lori Parks has been a force in the theatrical world since she won an Obie in 1996, following it with a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. But until the LIDA Project produced Fucking A, none of her work had been seen in Denver. Artistic director Brian Freeland…
Mare Trevathan Philpott directed Waiting for Godot with an immediacy and clarity of vision that cleared away the crust of time, fashion, opinion and academic analysis to let us see the play’s bones — and what a solid, extraordinary pattern they made. She brought a sophisticated sensibility to the fifty-year-old…
Donovan Marley has been the artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company for 21 seasons. During that time, he founded the company’s acting school, mounted a thoughtful mix of classic and contemporary dramas — including a ten-hour production of Tantalus staged in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company –…
Cymbeline is rarely mounted these days, but it was performed at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival last summer. It was last seen there in 1975, directed by festival founder Jack Crouch. At the age of 84, and shortly after attending this season’s offerings, Crouch died. His friends say that one of…
Fifty years of paintings filled the entire set of lower galleries at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities this past fall when the epic Frank Sampson Retrospective was installed there. Throughout his career, Sampson was interested in figural abstraction, a taste that has come and gone and come…
Vance Kirkland: A Colorado Painter’s Life — Early Works and Beyond is more than a solo devoted to Colorado’s most famous modernist. It’s a big-picture look at the mid-twentieth-century art world in this state. In addition to Kirkland’s paintings from the ’30s to the ’70s, the show features pieces by…
When George Caulkins wanted to surprise his wife, Eleanor Newman Caulkins, he asked his five children — George, Max, Mary, David and John — and their spouses to pool their money to help with the grand gesture: an opera house named after her. Their combined $7 million is helping to…
Jan and Fred Mayer outdid themselves in 2003. With a gift of $11 million, their foundation established an endowment for the Denver Art Museum’s New World department, which features pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art. Over the past few decades, the Mayers have made many contributions to Denver’s cultural life and…
Frederic C. Hamilton has long been a supporter of the Denver Art Museum. For the past 25 years, he’s served on the board of trustees, sitting as chairman since 1994. Last summer, when funds to maintain and program the under-construction, Daniel Libeskind-designed expansion were needed, he got the trustees to…
Cydney Payton, director of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, has her hands so full that she could be a professional juggler. She administers the institution, raises funds, does programming and even, at times, curates and installs the museum’s exhibits. And as if all of that weren’t enough, she also recently…
Viewers stampeded the Denver Art Museum this past fall and winter to take in the traveling blockbuster El Greco to Picasso From the Phillips Collection. The show was such a big hit that tickets for the last couple weeks sold out in advance. It’s no mystery why: The artists are…
In a cramped old row house near the Denver Art Museum, Hugo Anderson has opened the quirky Emil Nelson Gallery. The inventory ranges from historic pieces, including things from Anderson’s family’s collections, to new works, some of it by his friends. The late Herbert Bayer, Colorado’s most famous artist, was…
The stock-in-trade of Ron Otsuka, the respected curator of Asian art at the Denver Art Museum, is traditional works. However, he was drafted into doing contemporary-art duty when Vail collectors Vicki and Kent Logan made a gift to the museum. Otsuka’s compelling, extremely bold Full Frontal: Contemporary Asian Art From…
