An abundance of stock characters and melodramatic situations might prompt a lesser director to turn Flyin¹ West into a hiss-filled potboiler; but in director Jeffrey Nickelson’s capable hands, Pearl Cleage’s 1992 play becomes an expansive ode to courage, self-determination and the price of freedom. The two-hour-plus drama is being given…
Rehashing a centuries-old debate, an erstwhile film critic (and aspiring moviemaker) declares that the theater has no relevance for his generation. Naturally, that remark doesn’t sit too well with his girlfriend’s mother — an accomplished stage actress who reminds the young man that creating art is a greater calling than…
When the lights finally came up in the Washington, D.C., movie theater, Leonard Nimoy sat still, silent and a bit shaken. He could scarcely believe what he had seen — and what he had not seen. The movie was beautiful, but beneath the surface sheen, there was no heart, no…
Given the horrors of war and scourges of bloody stupidity that have plagued the world in the past three decades, the murder by Palestinian terrorists of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich now seems like a minor episode in the history of our collective folly –…
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly ten years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason…
Search your memory — if you’re really, really old, you’ll remember him as Ensign Parker, bumbling his way through McHale’s Navy opposite Ernie Borgnine. But if you’re simply old, you know Tim Conway as the idiot savant of sketch comedy, the innocently good-natured goon who walked all over straight man…
Flight and inspiration share common ground: They both begin with the fine art of taking off. For men of color in the segregated ’40s, the two came together with blinding precision at an Army airfield in Tuskegee, Alabama. There, 450 black men trained to be fighter pilots against overwhelming odds,…
By clearly dividing his gallery into three distinct areas and installing the work of a different artist in each one, Bill Havu has finally come up with a successful scheme for laying out shows in his beautiful, custom-built space in the Golden Triangle. True, it’s only slightly different from what…
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-634-5581) is a quintessential artifact of the 1930s. Designed by John Gaw Meem, it is adorned with gorgeous murals and bejeweled with exquisite metalwork. It is one of the finest early-modern buildings, not just in this time zone,…
The performers’ spotty British accents make whole sections of dialogue unintelligible, and the pacing often lags where it should accelerate, but the Aurora Fox Theatre Company’s production of Communicating Doors proves to be an entertaining comic thriller anyway. On the strength of some strong performances, beautifully realized design elements and…
It’s not surprising that no one disrobes in Closer, British playwright Patrick Marber’s full-frontal look at sexual mores and modern relationships. The play’s four London dwellers seem so comfortable obsessing about sex — and its sometime companion, love — that taking their clothes off hardly seems necessary. The two-hour drama,…
Eddie Izzard knows precisely why he wanted to become a performer, be it an actor or standup comedian or, for that matter, a street performer entertaining passers-by for spare change. When he was 6 years old, Izzard was living in South Wales with his parents and older brother. Before that,…
Watching Malena is like watching a donkey being beaten for ninety minutes, so egregiously is the title character treated and so powerless does she appear against her offenders. That the abuse is treated in a comedic fashion for a good part of the film makes it even more unacceptable. Perhaps…
At last you can take a deep breath and relax, consumers of American cinema, for our trilogy of virtually unrelated cheerleader movies is now complete. Having reappraised youthful sexuality in But I’m a Cheerleader and celebrated ass-kickingness in Bring It On, we now accomplish both, sort of, in Francine McDougall’s…
In front of my house stands a bus bench painted by now-famous artist Tony Ortega as part of a long-gone benefit. In Westword’s entryway hangs a large red painting by Michael Pedziwiatr, who was one of the town’s most prolific — and generous — artists in the ’90s. On walls…
Born Charles Anderson, typeface designer/ font punk Chank Diesel is the ultimate product of his times, right down to his nom de plume: “As a kid, I wanted to be called ‘Chelé,’ because I thought I was a great soccer player. But the mean kids across the street paid more…
Sally Perisho, the director of the Metro Center for the Visual Arts, describes Mexicanidad: Modotti and Weston as the most important show her institution has ever presented. The traveling exhibit, made up of more than sixty photographs by important twentieth-century American photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, chronicles the few…
The Bayeux Gallery (1133 Bannock Street, 720-359-0990), one of the only galleries in the country specializing in art textiles, is showing the luxurious Spotlight on Tapestry, featuring works by Lucia Grigore and her daughter Celina Grigore. Both are Romanians by birth, but Celina lives in Denver while Lucia remains in…
Shortly after bidding adieu to his bustling wife, a Malibu writer settles into a porch chair and begins his work. Seated at one side of a sparely appointed stage, the wiry figure peers at the audience with a gaze that both acknowledges our presence and enlists our imaginations. He rises…
Director Hugo Jon Sayles’s choice to present Ain¹t Misbehavin¹ as a New York City “rent party” lends the collection of Depression-era tunes a laid-back informality that makes the audience feel at home starting with the first note. The Broadway musical revue, now showing at the Nomad Theatre in Boulder (following…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
The doomed are often a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but vampirism covers the full spectrum of ghastliness. This is because the imbalance represents so much to so many…
