SUN, 2/1 The title says it all: Fred Hess’s new quartet CD on the Tapestry label, The Long and the Short of It, displays the entire breadth of the local saxophonist/composer’s musical abilities, which draw simultaneously on the traditions and the broken rules of jazz. As Hess himself has said,…
The Robischon Gallery sets the standard for art exhibitions in Denver. Whatever’s going on there, it’s always as good as — or better than — anything else around. There are two reasons for this: First, the selections are always intriguing, and second, every piece is perfectly situated in Robischon’s chic…
The oldest of the city’s alternative spaces is Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street, 303-455-4435), which is in a charming storefront in the historic Big Chief Block on the western edge of the Platte Valley. Spark has two dozen members but only two small exhibition rooms. That means it’s pretty packed…
I arrived at A Streetcar Named Desire at the Denver Center with high expectations. Israel Hicks has directed almost all of August Wilson’s plays for this theater, mounting layered, pitch-perfect productions and, in the process, creating one of the finest acting ensembles you’ll find anywhere. When he proposed using the…
As Mercy of a Storm opens, an elegantly dressed middle-aged man is moving about a nautical-looking and rather cluttered place that turns out to be the pool house of a country club. Snow falls outside the window. It’s New Year’s Eve 1945, and the man is apparently preparing for a…
Some acts of courage command everyone’s respect: the firefighter’s return to a burning house to rescue a child, the infantryman’s sacrifice of self for a wounded comrade, the weary black woman’s refusal to yield her seat on a segregated bus. Sometimes, though, courage can feel clouded — especially when it’s…
There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real, like the original punk or goth movements or Australia’s…
The new film by Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi (who gave us the superb tale of mountain smuggling and pursuit A Time for Drunken Horses) has a most provocative title — Marooned in Iraq — and addresses a crucial contemporary subject: the slaughter of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s regime and…
Thirty-some years ago, Yale Drama School graduate Lewis Black and several friends drove cross-country to Colorado Springs to reclaim a dilapidated theater. “All of a sudden, we see the mountains,” Black recalls. “It was astonishing. Suddenly, like in a movie, the song ‘Rocky Mountain High’ comes on. We’re fucked, I…
Thursday, January 22 Hey, Elmer Fudd! It’s time to don your plaid shirt, hunting cap and twusty wifle and find out what’s up, Doc, at the Gart Sports International Sportsmen’s Exposition, the be-all and end-all of fishing, hunting, camping, adventure travel and outdoor-sports expos. New to this year’s extravaganza –…
Armchair-travel enthusiasts and hard-core mountain climbers alike should dive into Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor’s Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance, Dr. Kenneth Kamler’s remarkable firsthand tale of practicing medicine under extreme conditions. Kamler, a New York microsurgeon, says he’s wanted to be a mountain climber ever since he…
FRI, 1/23 Everything from bronze wildlife sculptures to intricately beaded jewelry, crafted by more than 300 artists from across the nation, will be on display this weekend at the 23rd annual Colorado Indian Market and Southwest Showcase. “It’s a mixture of Native American, Southwestern, Western and wildlife art,” says spokeswoman…
TUES, 1/27 How hard is it to turn a huge pile of snow into two camels lounging under a canopy of palm trees? Find out this week at Breckenridge’s Budweiser International Snow Sculpture Championships, when five American teams of sculptors — along with fourteen teams from as far away as…
TUES, 1/27 Move over, Squidward: There’s a new squid in town, and he’s 27 feet long and tall enough for a grown man to stand inside him. He’s the larger-than-life creation of Denver’s self-proclaimed “puppet guy” Cory Gilstrap, who built the Bunraku-style cephalopod for the new original children’s musical at…
SAT, 1/24 Head to the land Down Under at today’s screening of In Search of the Tasmanian Devil, with John Nelson, shown as part of the Macky Auditorium Travel Film Series. “Tasmania is a place that a lot of people don’t go to when they visit Australia, but it’s a…
TUES, 1/27 In her closing scene as Crystal in the cinematic version of The Women, Joan Crawford stares through her deliciously darkened diva eyes and growls, “There’s a word for you ladies, but it is seldom used in high society — outside of a kennel.” The manicured claws of bored…
More and more, it seems to me that nearly all current contemporary art can trace its impetus directly back to the 1960s and ’70s. I guess that’s why almost everything today looks like it could have been created back then. This is not a negative appraisal of the current situation;…
There’s an interesting show at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) that expresses some connections between Mexico and the American West. Called shared horizons/horizontes compartidos, it was organized by Ricky Armendariz, a well-known Latino artist living in Boulder. “I leaned that two artists from Mexico, Javier Guadarrama and Claudia Gallegos,…
It isn’t possible to review The Producers as if one hadn’t heard the shrieks of joy emanating from New York at the time of its 2001 Broadway opening. Critics raved about how daring and funny the show was; some proclaimed it had single-handedly revived the musical. The Producers eventually won…
Confession: I spent many years as a ballet mom. This means that when my daughter was thirteen or fourteen, dancing in the corps of some local production or other, I’d be craning my head from side to side for a glimpse of her prettily waving arms, completely ignoring the principals,…
So, have you ever wondered what exactly goes into the painting of a portrait? You may have suspected there was more to it than a painter saying something along the lines of, “Hey baby, can I, uh, paint you?” and then someone else saying, “Yeah, sure, that’d be cool.” You…
Furtive anonymous sex and deep psychological insight don’t usually accompany one another — except in the writings of John Rechy and Irving Rosenthal. But they most certainly do in Porn Theatre, writer-director-actor Jacques Nolot’s uncannily subtle mood piece, helpfully retitled from the French original, La Chatte à Deux Têtes. That’s…
