Looking for a Broadway musical that lets the brainwaves relax and the funnybone roam? Have a thing for exuberant dance numbers, exquisite costumes and an old-fashioned love story? Don’t mind overamplified voices, stand-and-sing ballads and a steady barrage of groaners? Then hie thee hither to the Arvada Center’s outdoor amphitheater,…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question–of its…
Festering somewhere between an After School Special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath, by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow,…
Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
A third Jurassic Park movie was, of course, inevitable, given that the second shattered box-office records (it also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting). But when you have one of the hottest…
Crested Butte is notorious for its nude ski days, its invention of the fat-tire bicycle — and its wildflower walks. This weekend, the old mining town is just the place to stop and smell the primroses. And the columbine. And the cinquefoil. Crested Butte is known as the Wildflower Capital…
A dance festival in the summer, in Colorado? You’ve gotta wonder what folks are thinking. But the Colorado dance festival manages to pull it off each year by performing annual feats of programming magic, and this year’s prestidigitation outdoes them all: The folks at the CDF are pulling no lesser…
Operatic versions of famous novels and plays are much like their cinematic cousins: Some lend new insight and dimension to the original, others stress one aspect of the story at the expense of others, and a few reaffirm predictions that nothing could beat the book. Mark Adamo’s Little Women, playing…
Forsooth, here we go again. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival opened last weekend with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the Bard’s earliest, and more problematic, comedies. Like most of the CSF’s efforts over the last five seasons, the play quickly falls victim to directorial caprice and, at times, sheer…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her 1991 big-screen debut, The Man in the Moon. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which is roughly equivalent to a U.S. movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks, directed by…well,…
Bob Finch learned to appreciate tools growing up in his father’s Wyoming workshop, where some craftsmanship apparently rubbed off: Finch worked his way through college as a carpenter. Now retired, the Lakewood engineer has renewed his passion for implements as a member of the Rocky Mountain Tool Collectors, and he…
What the hell is Incredibly Strange Wrestling, you ask? “It’s a fusion of a rock show with a really wayward, gone-totally-wrong sporting event,” says spokeswoman Kristin Lemberg. “And performance art.” Actually, it’s much stranger than that. It’s an intoxicating brew of costumes and tortillas and punk rock and crazy fans,…
Some interesting news has just come out of Boulder. Susan Krane, director of the CU Art Galleries at the University of Colorado, is leaving for the greener pastures — or would that be the sunnier skies? — of Arizona. This fall, she’ll take over as director of the Scottsdale Museum…
At the beginning of last week, after forty years in operation, the White Spot, a quintessential 1960s coffee shop and restaurant, closed its doors. The contents were liquidated a few days later. Soon the site will be scrapped to provide a location for a new multi-building complex. It’s a sad…
As the after-dinner crowd files back in to Heritage Square Music Hall, a three-piece band plays several bouncy tunes. Strains of “All of Me” segue into an instrumental hoedown that sounds like it’s from Smokey and the Bandit. The down-home, carnival-like atmosphere, which is part South Dakota Corn Palace, part…
There’s not much reason for the two characters in The Zoo Story to talk to each other for nearly an hour when one of them behaves like a raving lunatic from the very start. Not even the saintliest among us would listen, calmly, to a complete stranger — who looks…
Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
Kiss of the Dragon — the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood — has a little of the best (plus a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong…
Don Ed Hardy has dragons under his skin. The indelible kind, all over his body. But the Bay Area painter, probably best known for his 34-year catalogue of works as a groundbreaking tattoo artist, has now — in the tradition of the great narrative scroll painters of Asia — committed…
