To Be or Not to Be

Capital punishment: yes or no? It’s a hot issue that’s not likely to cool down soon. But one important consideration is often missing from all the fiery dialogue, notes local director Chip Walton of the Curious Theatre Company: the human element. “It’s easy on either side to forget that you’re…

It’s a Home Run

After moving three times in only two years, Hyland Mather and Malia Tata appear to have finally found a promising spot for their Andenken Gallery and Design, which combines fine-art sales with a graphics studio. Andenken originally opened in the Raven’s Nest studio complex. But despite a spectacular gallery space…

Artbeat

Preservationists statewide took an interest this past summer in the old Cragmor Sanitorium (seen above in its original condition) in Colorado Springs. And who could blame them? Originally built as a luxurious treatment facility for those who suffered from tuberculosis, the 1914 Spanish Colonial-style building is an important landmark. Designed…

Realty Bites

Glengarry Glen Ross has been hailed as a blistering critique of American business practice, but in fact, it explores a very small segment of the business world, and its principals’ maneuvering takes place far below the sightlines of the genuine corporate fat cats. In contrast to the genial, glossy executives…

Amore the Merrier

The Galleria at the Denver Center is a cabaret space; audience members sip or snack while, on a small stage, charming and energetic young people sing and dance for them. It’s rather like being at an Irish party, where, amid general merriment, one guest after another stands up and performs…

Feel His Pain

The cold-bloodedness of some entertainment journalists is a thing to be admired; they’ve balls for brains, which gets you far in this profession. The Hollywood press corps’ cynicism is the source of its strength, and God bless the famous fool who plays along, answering every crooked question with the straightest…

Rough in the Diamonds

Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it — let’s scoff and grumble. At least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’s Hardball, a degenerate gambler…

Have at You!

After the next apocalypse, hundreds of thousands of years from the moment we clever humans smugly call “now,” the great philosopher-scientists will gather to assemble the remaining traces of our present time and species. In particular, these evolved beings will find fascination in the structure of our crania, which will…

Skyfishing Allowed

If you’ve ever wanted to see an Unidentified Flying Object, the opportunity may be hovering just over your head. Texas-based MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), a group dedicated to the research of flying objects, will sponsor an end-of-summer celebration, the RODS Hunt, during which the public will have the chance to…

Dog’s Best Friend

William Wegman’s life went to the dogs long ago. He’s been turning weimaraners into objects of art since the early ’70s, when he first began to photograph Man Ray, the progenitor of his weimaraner kingdom. But this labor of puppy love isn’t over yet; in fact, the man/dog relationship that’s…

Equine Elegance

In the beginning, there’s a sawdust ring, surrounded by what seems to be a low concrete wall. A group of people in peasant dress enter, walking beside a horse-drawn cart. To measured music, they release a bundle from the cart. It rises slowly toward the ceiling; you see that it’s…

Musical Genius Shines

Carousel is so familiar to most of us that we tend to forget the musical’s true genius. First produced on Broadway in 1945, it represents the melding of two very different sensibilities — that of Ferenc Molnár, the Hungarian novelist and playwright who wrote Liliom, which Carousel is based on,…

Happy and Gay

Julie Davis’s All Over the Guy is yet another entry in the ever-growing genre of gay romantic comedy. Ten years ago, one would have led off by saying, “It’s a romantic comedy, but with a twist: They’re both men!” or “It’s When Harry Met Solly…!” It’s a step in the…

Left Behind

The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets…

Metal Meltdown

A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder and the musicians prettier. The world of…

A-maze-ing Grace

At Chatfield Nature Preserve, the corn is high. Really high, as in nine feet tall, a rise tall enough to cover the pate of the old Corn King Giant. Grown from a special hybrid cornseed planted expressly because of its superior loft, it covers 5.3 acres of land, the sun-kissed…

Mystic Muses

Sixty-two miles south of Tangier, Morocco, lies Jajouka, a tiny village in the foothills of the jagged Rif mountains — an arid, spiritual haven where the Master Musicians of Jajouka have kept sixteenth-century traditions vibrantly alive. Given the blessing of Allah by the Moslem saint Sidi Ahmed Sheik ages ago,…

Stitches in Time

With a few cool evenings in the last couple of weeks, there’s no denying that fall’s on the way. And what better season to check out a couple of shows devoted to that coziest of all art forms — the quilt. The Colorado History Museum is presenting Quiltspeak: Stories in…

Artbeat

With blockbusters sweeping in and out of the main-floor galleries at the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000), it’s easy to forget that there are many fine smaller shows upstairs (see review, previous page). A compelling example can be found on the fifth floor, which is devoted…

Back to School

Judd Apatow tries not to think of what became of Sam and Lindsay Weir, Neal Schweiber, Bill Haverchuck, Daniel Desario, Nick Andopolis and the other freaks and geeks Apatow knew back at McKinley High School. Those kids were his family, the children born when Apatow and writer Paul Feig created…

Dirty Work

Only committed horticulturists and compulsive readers of the New York Times obituaries (this writer falls into the latter category) likely noticed the recent passing of Rosemary Verey, an aristocratic Englishwoman whose sophisticated but egalitarian approach to gardening took some of the stuffiness out of what previously had been a rather…

Geek Love

So why is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? What’s Hollywood trying to tell us? Caucasians have a corner on the market in failing eyesight, office jobs and undernourished physiques? Or is it legitimately a white thing –…