It was back in 1990 when the Denver Art Museum hired curator R. Craig Miller to establish a department of architecture, design and graphics. Miller was working at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when he was stolen away by Met alum and longtime friend Lewis Sharp. Sharp has made…
Littleton’s Everyman Theatre Company is mounting a skilled and lovingly detailed production of a play that ultimately may not be worth the actors’ or the director’s time. The beautifully realized set is a young girl’s bedroom, with apple-green walls, shelves full of books and bric-a-brac, an Exercycle, a trio of…
Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure! — from a White Rose leaflet Germany’s White Rose movement served as a small, clear candle shining during a murky, terrifying time. Where did a group of students acquire the courage and independence of thought to…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stench emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount real-life battles that claimed the lives…
For an industry notorious for its test screenings, focus groups and obsession with what will play best in the heartland, the movie business occasionally and spectacularly drops the ball with respect to its mainstream entertainment. Last year, someone decided what the public most wanted to see was America’s Sweethearts, a…
Vagina, vagina, vagina. That’s a word many people don’t like hearing, much less saying, but local theatergoers haven’t been able to escape it lately. The Vagina Monologues, which came through Denver last summer and hit Boulder last fall, is back to expose audiences to the world “down there.” On February…
As the Denver Art Museum readies plans for its futuristic new wing, it’s also come up with a sweeping exhibition that will tickle your eyes with a visual taste of things to come — in more ways than one. When it opens this Saturday, US Design 1975-2000 — a major…
It must be hard to make credible political art, because, to be honest, most of it is pretty darned bad. The trouble is that the artist has to try to create a plausible work of art, as well as inform the viewer about a particular cause. And it doesn’t help…
For more than twenty years, Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788) has set the exhibition standard in Denver’s contemporary-art world by presenting only high-quality shows. Judy Pfaff, on display now in the intimate Viewing Room in the gallery, is no exception. The show is made up of a small group…
In Spoon River Anthology, the unquiet dead of a fictional small town come back to speak. They are the characters imagined by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915; his free-verse anthology was later adapted for the stage by Charles Aidman and produced on Broadway in 1962. Today, Spoon River Anthology is…
The kettle had had the last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star. There…
Over the last half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
To call a movie the most accessible film ever made by the Dogme 95 group is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population who might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics,…
It was hour fifty of the Warp, the infamous 72-hour marathon rave and underground-theater festival that takes place every November in a medieval dungeon near the Tower of London. Headlining performance artist Ian Winn was about to take the stage, when a lad who had pupils the size of saucers…
On Valentine’s Day, nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven — especially the oven at Allie’s Cabin. Nestled in an aspen grove halfway up the mountain at Beaver Creek, the ninety-seat restaurant is rife with romance — not just because of its lovely setting, but also because executive chef…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford–which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale…
Dale Chisman: Recent Paintings, now on display at Rule Gallery, is absolutely fabulous — which is not unexpected, considering Chisman’s reputation as a master in the field of abstraction and his status as one of the most important artists in Colorado’s history. As a consequence of Chisman’s accomplishments, his work…
February 14 is Valentine’s Day, and tonight, the Museum of Contemporary Art (1275 19th Street, 303-298-7554) holds its annual fundraiser and auction, Love4Sale, which includes donated paintings and sculptures. Organizers hope to raise a lot of money — no hollow wish considering the high quality of the donated pieces. But…
The Theatre Group’s version of Cabaret is heavily influenced by Sam Mendes, the celebrated English director who revived the musical in New York a few years ago to a chorus of critical praise. That run still continues. It places more emphasis on the seedy viciousness of the milieu than either…
Brother Mine is a well-intentioned play that explores serious topics. Malcolm, the protagonist, is a young black man who was given up for adoption by his jazz-musician father and raised by a loving white family. He struggles with issues of identity and community, while his much-loved older brother, Anthony, has…
After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre, best known for his agreeably nasty The Ploughman’s Lunch in 1982, makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley,…
Hart’s War is little more than a movie about the movies, which is the case with most mediocre films. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, mainly La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The…
