Gay Caballeros

Jake Brady and Wiley Deluce met in a bar in Alma in the 1880s and became fast friends. In fact, they became partners — and not in the “Hold it right there, partner” sense. The cowboy protagonists in part-time South Park resident Dave Brown’s Golden Feather Series of gay westerns,…

Shop, Shop

Some people are power shoppers. They’re the palm pilot-brains with impeccable budgeting skills and the remarkable ability to remember which store has the lowest price on which item. The most irritating thing about them is this: They’ve finished all their holiday shopping for the year and are preparing their lists…

3-D Glances

World-famous modern and contemporary artists are part of the stock and trade of the Robischon Gallery, which makes the point with Judy Pfaff: An Installation of Drawings. The fairly large show highlights some of the New York legend’s latest creations. It runs until the end of the year. Pfaff first…

Art Beat

Gallery Sink, owned and operated by Mark Sink, is currently hosting a retrospective entitled Ann White: 1950-2000. Sink has a special interest in White, with whom he has had a lifelong relationship: White is Sink’s mother. White has long been associated with “The Nine,” a Denver artist group that’s still…

One-Act Wonders

Anton Chekhov is as famous for writing pause-filled comedies about frustrated dreamers as Eugene O’Neill is for penning dramas with more stage direction than dialogue. Beyond their writerly quirks, however, both men were masters at creating unforgettable characters. And the Shadow Theatre Company’s evening of one-acts pays homage to each…

A True Blockbuster

A product of its time that proved powerful enough to transcend the tumult of ensuing decades, The Fantasticks opened at New York’s Sullivan Street Playhouse on May 3, 1960, and has been running there ever since. Although its universal appeal is unparalleled in musical theater history, some critics continue to…

Heist Society

The grandpere of all jewel-heist movies, Jules Dassin’s Rififi hasn’t lost a thing since its initial release in 1955. Seeing it anew in revival, anyone who knows and loves this cinematic gem will be reminded that its descendants — which include everything from the old Mission Impossible TV series to…

Easy Riders

Every artist has a shtick. For photographer Michael Lichter, it’s the biker lifestyle, a milieu he’s gone with, like the wind, for over twenty years — that is, when he’s not designing annual reports or doing other commercial work for large corporations, the bread and butter of his professional life…

Bialy High

Most people, alas, don’t even know what a bialy is, let alone how good a proper one tastes. A rarefied peasant cousin of the bagel, the bialy gets its culinary oomph from what goes where the hole goes in a bagel: a fragrant layer of shredded onion, sometimes accompanied by…

Pilgrims’ Progress

It’s a shame, but it’s true: Only a fraction of the crowds that came out for the Denver Art Museum shows featuring Toulouse-Lautrec, Impressionism and Matisse will bother to see Painters and the American West. And that’s too bad, because the exhibit holds its own in comparison with those popular…

Art Beat

In the main gallery at Pirate right now, Linde Schlumbohm has invited a trio of locally prominent installation artists for 3 Fold, on display through Sunday. Each artist — Gail Wagner, Virginia Folkestad and Susan Meyer Fenton — has been given her own section of the room. Characteristic painted fiber…

Tragedy for the Ages

Antigone’s two brothers, both sons of Oedipus, have died in each other’s arms while fighting for future control of their uncle Creon’s throne. In order to send a message to future revolutionaries, King Creon has decreed that one of the slain will be left to rot outside the walls of…

Strutting Their Stuff

The pacing lags when it should accelerate, and the actors’ delivery never matches the dialogue’s sharp brilliance, but the Upstart Crow Theatre Company’s production of The Rivals is a gorgeously costumed community theater production. In addition to providing Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play with an adequate staging, director Joan Kuder Bell…

Night Moves

You got your Good. You got your Evil. And you got your thirty-year-old multimillionaire moviemaker to explain the difference to you. Look out popcorn vendors. Here comes Unbreakable, the first film written and directed by young M. Night Shyamalan since he lit up the box office last year with a…

The Weakness of the Flesh

Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention, now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know, youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities that director Tonie Marshall dispenses in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic comedy…

Pressed for Time

The passion for antique ironing boards is full of delicious symbolism. “First of all, ironing is drudgery, drudgery, drudgery,” says artist Judy Miranda. “You always have those cliche thoughts, like, ‘If this board could talk…’ And second, the most popular brand, back a hundred years or so, was RIGID. They…

Helping Handwork

Paola Gianturco is a Bay Area marketing and communications consultant and educator. Her friend Toby Tuttle, with whom Gianturco once worked at the nation’s first women-owned advertising agency, shares responsibilities with her husband in their Evergreen-based investment banking company. Together, these high-powered entrepreneurial women seem far-removed from the dirt-poor women…

Outside In

Landscapes have been a popular subject in the fine arts for thousands of years, but in just the last century, they have become even more appealing to Colorado artists because our local scenery is so visually emphatic. Between the mountains and the plains, the West has practically cornered the market…

Art Beat

The works of two installation artists are displayed together in the unusual Fabrication and Fiction, running through November 29 at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton. In half of the gallery, ACC faculty member Mari Blacker has created various vignettes contrasting materials such as…

Just Us Girls

Of the thirty-plus songs that constitute the musical revue Jerry¹s Girls, only one proves to be more than a display of vocal pyrotechnics or choreographic cuteness. Oddly enough, that distinction belongs to a tune that’s performed in drag by an actor whose ambling gait, ill-fitting gown and rouged face drew…

Missed Manners

British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is often regarded as England’s version of Neil Simon. But while both master craftsmen have an affinity for rim-shot-style comedy — Simon started out as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, as did Mel Brooks and Woody Allen — they are careful to…

Family Values

The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…