This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, August 7 Uproots Productions features five young, multitalented actor/dancer/comedians, and that’s only the beginning. The new ensemble’s evening of original sketch comedy, Free Desmond Winkler, promises to take you and your funny bone right over the cliff by unveiling the funnier sides of miniature golf, new-age yoga retreats, modern…

Kink Inc.

“People get intimacy in so many ways, from so many things,” says Christiaan Howard, creative director for Afterdarkkmedia, an interactive fetish-promotion company based in Denver and Los Angeles. “And intimacy intimidates a lot of people. Most women don’t experience true passion. They experience a lot of assholes who just want…

Scot Times

SAT, 8/9 Calling all Scots: Don your family’s tartan kilt for this weekend’s fortieth annual Colorado Scottish Festival. Held today and tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Highland Heritage Park, 9651 South Quebec Street in Highlands Ranch, activities include rugby games, dulcimer music and Highland dance, as well…

Get Rolling

SAT, 8/9 Dust off your spiffy bowling shoes and shine up your glittery bowling ball for the Art Mob Bowling Competition, a fundraiser for the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. “The arts are bonded together in a lot of ways, but we’re also like mobsters vying for territory — in a…

Up With Puppets

Puppets are present in almost every culture, so it is fitting that the mice of Denver Puppet Theatre’s new production, The Mouse Tales, come from China, Persia and Africa. Annie Zook, who does everything from script-writing to puppet-making to puppeteering at the theater, says the little rodents have been a…

Statue Jam

FRI, 8/8 Loveland: the vortex of internationally acclaimed sculpture. Who knew that the unassuming town happens to be a hotbed of artistic expression? Lots of folks. And art aficionados will have a unique chance to get up close and personal with all manner of three-dimensional works at not one but…

Aerial Explosions

FRI, 8/8 Are they dancers? Are they circus performers? Are they bonkers? Nancy Smith, organizer of Boulder’s Aerial Dance Festival, says all of the above assertions are true of her artists. And the unique festival, which opens tonight, has gathered eight soaring groups from across the country and abroad for…

Hip in Hicksville

The Arvada Center is unquestionably one of the most important art venues in the state. A midsized facility with a respectable budget, the institution incorporates several theaters, numerous meeting rooms, various workshops dedicated to diverse pursuits such as ceramics and ballet, and — of greatest interest to those in the…

Artbeat

The two solos at the Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) are installed together as a single show, with the dividing wall pushed to the back. It’s amazing how grand the space is without that wall. It’s not unprecedented to connect the spaces, but it is only rarely seen. Even…

The Play’s the Thing

By and large, when you have a good cast you have a good production of Hamlet, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s cast is very strong. Tony Marble gives an energetic, intelligent rendition of the title role; Hollis McCarthy is an interesting Gertrude. Tony Molina produces a convincingly power-hungry Claudius, and…

Sweet Strains

Pure goodness tends to be less dramatic than evil — or even ordinary human frailty. It’s a truism that Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost is far more interesting than his God. Gabriel’s Daughter tells the story of Clara Brown, a pioneering Colorado figure who endured slavery, was freed, and devoted…

You, Spy

David Wolstencroft moved from London to Los Angeles in November, and not only so he could rise each morning for a game of tennis–though there is that, and that might have been good enough. He made the trip, which is thus far temporary but may well prove permanent, for the…

A Long, Strange Trip

Cremaster 3 is the final installment of Matthew Barney’s five-part Cremaster cycle. If that reads like a typo, be informed that, over the last decade, Barney has been filming and releasing the different episodes out of order, if the numbering has any real meaning — not that viewers are likely…

Heaven Sent

There’s magic in Northfork, both in the movie, by twin brothers Mark and Michael Polish, and in the Montana town soon to be drowned by the opening of the dam keeping the baptismal waters at bay. Northfork is a beguiling and bittersweet fantasy set in a netherworld where the living…

Flick Pick

The fall of Roman Polanski’s career remains one of world cinema’s most tragic stories. By the late ’60s, this visionary was undeniably an American filmmaker, no longer a Pole on loan, who gave young Hollywood’s bold new spirit (Buon giorno, Don Corleone; may the Force be with you, Luke Skywalker)…

Hang On

We use them every day — as closet organizers, drain un-cloggers and accessories for school projects and, at Halloween, for costumes. But how often do you really think about those vital pieces of twisted metal better known as hangers? Art-Gineer/I.D. Studio owner Kef Parker plans to change all that with…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, July 31 Programs providing opportunities for young artists and performers to learn their crafts and create new works are always welcome, but a program that also provides those opportunities to underserved kids does double duty in immeasurable ways. In that vein, Arts Street is the local workhorse, offering paid…

PHAMALy Plays Together

When Don Mauck, who is blind, was cast as the lead in this summer’s The Pajama Game, director Steve Wilson thought it would be compelling to make his character blind, as well. Typically, when the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League (PHAMALy) puts on its annual full-scale musical production, the…

Rhyme Time

FRI, 8/1 The lowly limerick is “the Rodney Dangerfield of poetry,” according to the Limerick o’ the Day Web page. “Limericks proudly broke into what had been the one unbroachable frontier in proper English society: smut.” Smut is in the ear of the beholder, of course — and there was…

Not Doggin’ It

FRI, 8/1 Not every all-American girl dreams of becoming a musher, but for 21-time Iditarod Sled Dog Race competitor DeeDee Jonrowe, it was just a fact of life while growing up in a remote western Alaska backwater. “There are no roads out there,” she explains. “I always loved dogs, so…

All Join In

THURS, 7/31 This weekend in Boulder, a unique kind of theater will hit the stage: The Peanut Butter Players’ new musical farce Bratrace is not exactly children’s theater, but it’s truly family theater, the term used by writer/director Jo Anne Lamun to describe the intergenerational entertainment experiment, a kid-sized satire…

Kicking Asphalt

SAT, 8/2 Slap on your saddle shoes, pile on the pomade, and head directly to LoDo where the sparks are flying at today’s Built for Speed: The Art of Kustom Kulture. The hep cats on 15th and Wazee streets are hooding the meters today and jamming the block with hot…