For a while back in the ’80s and early ’90s, it looked like formalism — essentially non-objective abstraction — was on the ropes. Then about five years ago, it rose, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of neo-expressionism, on the one hand, and annoyingly personal conceptualism on the other, re-establishing itself as…
Surplus, at Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166), is the big-tent title connecting three unrelated solos — but just for good measure, each also has its own title. The show starts with Clare Cornell’s Dress Formal, which combines photo-based pieces and sculptures. The sculptures from Cornell’s “Lingual Discharge” series are…
Some aspects of dictatorship — at least of certain kinds of dictatorship — are irresistibly funny. This has to do with what happens when a man possessed of a colossal ego finds himself in a position where that ego goes completely unchecked. Many dictatorships of both the right and the…
avid Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, Proof, has been much discussed and debated, both in the United States and in London, where Gwyneth Paltrow starred in it last year. As Proof opens, we learn that the protagonist, Catherine, interrupted her own life and education when her father, Robert, a mathematical genius, succumbed…
Preston Sturges, probably the wittiest writer and most nimble director of Hollywood’s Golden Age of Comedy, gave us such Depression-era classics as Sullivan’s Travels, The Great McGinty and The Lady Eve. Less well-known but just as uproarious, in its way, 1947’s quirky The Sin of Harold Diddlebock stars an aging…
If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disney-folk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
The teenage poet in Karen Moncrieff’s Blue Car writes melancholy verse about autumn leaves falling off trees and fathers abandoning their daughters. Predictably, the girl’s floundering mother is too harried and too strapped for cash to pay much attention to her, and her troubled little sister is endlessly needy. In…
Ticket to The Matrix Reloaded: $8.50 Ticket to The Matrix Reloaded to understand the real meaning behind Trinity’s… (oops, can’t tell): $8.50 Your own personal Matrix: Priceless And free. While the rest of the shlubs in town are forking over to see a Dolby sound, flat-screen version of the matrix,…
Burn, baby, burn: Nothing will heat up your impending weekend quicker than a little recreational fire-breathing and poi (that’s Hawaiian fire-spinning, folks), brought to you by Denver’s local experts, the Lumina Performance Troupe. The safety-conscious group, which includes hot, hot, hot choreography, drumming, juggling, gymnastics, stilt-walking and more in its…
Not long before noon in the biting cold of May 29, 1953, a New Zealand beekeeper and a Nepalese Sherpa became the first humans to stand atop the 29,028-foot Mt. Everest. Edmund Hillary snapped a picture of his companion, Tenzing Norgay. (The historic gesture wasn’t returned, Hillary later explained, because…
A classy writer digests food cravings in his new book Calvin Trillin has a self-deprecating, low-key way of describing what is clearly a high-octane passion. Feeding a Yen (Random House, $22.95) is a series of essays, each devoted to a particular foodstuff he craves. He has placed many of these…
Art Against AIDS shows strength in its quest By Susan Froyd AIDS is far from being beat. That’s the message the Colorado AIDS Project, celebrating its twentieth year, hopes to put out there, and it’s the prevailing reason the local nonprofit throws its Art Against AIDS Fine and Decorative Art…
IMAX captures the creepy critters of Oz Big screen. Check. Big continent. Check. The perentie, a monitor lizard that grows up to eight feet in length, has a taste for just about anything that moves, and kills its prey by shaking it viciously, then swallowing the subject whole. Ulp. Beyond…
Clear Creek fest wets appetites Throw a bunch of river rats into roiling spring runoff, tell them there’s a pot of gold for the first one across the finish line, and what have you got? The third annual Clear Creek Adventure Festival, taking place this weekend in Lawson, Idaho Springs…
CSO’s Alsop enters a new role with a mega-show Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor is a formidable monster: It requires a women’s chorus, a children’s chorus and a solo voice, in addition to a large orchestra. It’s long — there are six movements instead of the usual…
Surely among the mega-art trends of the early 21st century is art based on popular culture — which makes quite a bit of sense, because it was also a mega-trend of the late twentieth. It seems that everywhere, there are shows highlighting the different approaches being embraced by artists who…
There’s a remarkable show, Shock/Awe, currently in the back room at the Spark Gallery, 1535 Platte Street, 303-455-4435. This sophisticated exhibit features photos of television coverage of the Iraq war taken by Annalee Schorr, who’s renowned for this kind of work. Though Schorr is serious in her negative appraisal of…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Scapin or the Con Artist is such an intelligent, lively, tasteful production. Nagle Jackson’s translation of Molière zips along: It uses contemporary slang but doesn’t hit you over the head with desperate-to-be-relevant jokes. There are some hilarious rhythmic ping-pong bits and some amazing sequences of…
Terry Dodd’s First Night or Whatever was commissioned to be the first play performed in the Byron Theatre at the University of Denver’s new, multimillion-dollar Newman Center. It’s a fitting debut choice, because the play is all about theater itself. It takes place in a dressing room, where a cast…
A lot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie…
Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” but I can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’s laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’s toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet…
Time was that Dad stuffed the Mercury full of eager children (including, perhaps, one or two secreted in the trunk) and motored off to the drive-in for a double feature and a double order of corn dogs. Alas, the drive-in movie, with a few exceptions, is as dead as James…
