Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but its attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3: Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
Denver storyteller Skywalker Payne has a good explanation for her flighty moniker, which she says is her legal name: She’s firmly disconnected from the ground and proud of it. “I’ve been a professional gypsy most of my life,” Payne declares with a worldly smile that practically covers her thin, well-traveled…
What if HBO held a party for the comedy industry and everybody in the whole world came except A.C.E.? The Denver improv comedy trio’s multinational members would rather not find out. Not invited by the bigwigs for the second year in a row, Canadian Barb Gehring, American Linda Klein and…
You could spend your whole life trying to find a novel way of telling the girl in your life — whether she’s two, 22 or 82 — you love her. But the frenzy to prove it — with spontaneity and zest — boils over this week when the telltale heartbeat…
Despite the trends elsewhere, winter in Colorado, as much as fall, is high season in the art world. This may have something to do with the way we handle the colder months. In New York recently, a few inches of snow almost shut down the city. In Denver, on the…
The Edge Gallery is highlighting the work of two artists who couldn’t be more different from one another. In the front space, Gail Wagner features the artist’s sophisticated abstract sculptures; in the back is Wendy Clough: Recent Work, a collection of representational paintings of the landscape. Upon entering Edge, the…
He had already written Othello to explore the jealous impulses that precipitate a great man’s tragic downfall, fashioned As You Like It to teach a few comic lessons about the strangely similar romantic yearnings of courtiers and country types, and penned a historical series about the Wars of the Roses…
Although most people might think of Romeo and Juliet as a lusty, melodramatic love story, Shakespeare’s play is more a tragic tale about the sometimes catastrophic clashes between parents and children. After all, the two lovers aren’t thwarted by bouts of jealousy, sexual incompatibility or even Romeo’s refusal to share…
Beware the shrieking teenagers who saw Titanic ten or twelve times and have been conducting their own shipboard romance fantasies with Leonardo DiCaprio ever since. They will be massed and marching in Bombay-at-rush-hour numbers this week, maybe in Chinese-army numbers, and anyone over the age of seventeen who doesn’t feel…
The heroine of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke is a bold and impressionable Australian girl named Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet), who flees her middle-class suburb with friends for a spiritual adventure in exotic India. Inevitably, she is thunderstruck by a saucer-eyed guru named Baba, who quickly reveals the source of absolute…
We all have a story about the Magic 8 Ball, the enigmatic Tyco toy that’s been answering kids’ questions with inscrutable replies — “Signs Point To Yes,” “Better Not Tell You Now,” “Most Likely” and more — in bedrooms, basements and backyards across the country for more than thirty years…
David Cone, the jock-with-brains New York Yankees pitcher who threw a perfect game last season, floored the beer-bellied reporters surrounding his locker one day when he said — get this — “I grew up wanting to be a sportswriter.” Pssh. Yeah, right. Was he mocking them? Did Cone, man of…
The Mizel Arts Center at the Jewish Community Center is somewhat off the beaten path of the art world, and its fine art division, the Singer Gallery, is just a single room divided into a series of four small spaces. Despite these limitations, however, the Singer is often the place…
Inflections of Style, at the Market Street Gallery at Guiry’s, is a display of small three-dimensional objects created by a wide array of artists, most from around town, a few from across the country, and even a couple from Europe. But it’s primarily a local show — and a very…
If the befuddled characters in Three Men in Search of a Pair of Shoes seem unusually eager to share their endless observations about life, that’s mostly because playwright and director Eric C. Lawrence has yet to compress his freewheeling comedy into a more succinct discussion about the male psyche. The…
Generally regarded as two of the greatest performers of their day, French stage diva Sarah Bernhardt and English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell played opposite each other in a 1904 London production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande. Although they weren’t ideally cast as the pair of young lovers — Mrs…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
We don’t all get to live a fairy-tale existence, but then again, we all differ when it comes to defining what one is. For Eric Paddock, the fairy tale is an endless yarn, stored away plot-twist by plot-twist, in box after box of photographs and negatives — some priceless, some…
Before Gun Show even opened, Brad K. Evans was fielding phone calls from the Colorado anti-gun organization SAFE. He’d heard they were planning to demonstrate outside Pirate, the art gallery where his installation debuted on January 21. “I think it’s ironic that they’re protesting something they don’t know about,” Evans…
In the last 25 years, the visibility of the art world has undergone tremendous changes — upheavals, if you will. For a variety of reasons that range from improvements in mass communication to changes in art education, global artistic innovations are now communicated almost instantaneously. This expedience has led to…
Late last summer, Carla St. Romain opened the Bayeux Gallery in the Golden Triangle. What makes this noteworthy is that the gallery is unique — at least in Denver — because its specialty is contemporary textiles made by local, national and international fiber artists. The name “Bayeux” is a reference…
A few years before Martin Luther King Jr. thundered his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a quartet of black college students stood up for equality by sitting down at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. That singular act of courage,…
