The Denver Art Museum has gotten good at attracting crowds. The blockbuster Toulouse-Lautrec, which just closed, brought in more than 100,000 visitors. And last year, the Berger Collection had similar success with a comparable attendance. Thousands of people also visit the various galleries scattered throughout the seven-story museum that feature…
These days, musical blockbusters are marked by their star-studded casts, syrupy storylines and truckloads of extravagant scenery. That’s why a fifty-year-old ensemble piece like Kurt Weill’s Street Scene seems destined to remain mothballed under layers of critical and scholarly acclaim. But in Central City Opera’s version, director Michael Ehrman’s character-driven…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Eager to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
When Denver’s considerable Japanese-American colony decides to throw a party, everyone gets involved. The epitome of community events, the Cherry Blossom Festival–taking place this Saturday and Sunday–has risen and set downtown at Sakura Square for 27 years, but not without the help of a whole network of elders, parents and…
Thursday July 15 While author and former Crusade for Justice member Ernesto Vigil’s first-hand account The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent is a look back at a notable page in Denver history of the 1960s, the book doesn’t linger there: His profile of Crusade…
So you think you know Denver? You’ve toured the Molly Brown House, walked the streets of historic LoDo and ridden the Cultural Connection Trolley to Greek Town and back. Well, you ain’t smelled nothing yet. If you want to know the real story of Denver–not the dusty-cowboy mythology that the…
Unlike their previous efforts, which have blurred the boundaries between the disabled and the rest of society, the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League’s latest endeavor emphasizes those differences to the point of utterly transcending them. In what proves to be a magnificent theatrical achievement, PHAMALy’s regional-premiere production of the…
Consistently mixing amateur fervor with professional polish, the Central City Opera has long championed traditions that are as practical as they are sentimental. This summer marks the return of a trio of former apprentices, who have since performed with such respected companies as the Metropolitan Opera, Washington Opera and Opera…
First the good news: Despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, the title of the high school comedy/Gen-X nostalgia flick The Wood is not a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb best…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters have shot their wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the Nineties–a movie that can take its place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career, but his death in March (just after the movie’s completion) and the…
Come look at the freaks. Come look at the geeks. Come look at God’s mistakes… So opens Side Show, a Tony Award-nominated musical based on the story of conjoined twins and vaudeville stars Daisy and Violet Hilton, whose fifteen minutes of enduring fame came in Tod Browning’s 1932 cult-classic film…
Thursday July 8 Jazz has another phenom of a female vocalist to contend with: Kansas City singer Karrin Allyson is racking up the kudos left and right these days while knocking out great albums on the Concord Jazz label. So why have you never heard of her? Who knows–Allyson’s substantial…
At last year’s party, the strap-on dildo Mary Uzi was wearing snuck out, pushing up her skirt to reveal a pinch too much. Uzi, a local adult-business owner and performer, was feigning a cowgirl-gone-naughty on an elevated stage. Her outfit came complete with boots, a hat, a tiny vest and…
The title of the current exhibit at the Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, Chairs! Chairs! Chairs!, may suggest to some that what we’re in for is a design show–or perhaps a display of artist-made furniture. But it’s neither. Instead, CVA director Sally Perisho has assembled the work of…
There’s not much point in staging a stodgily reverential, doublet-and-hose version of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. The slapstick piece about two sets of twins separated at birth is patterned after a Roman-comedy model that was hackneyed when Shakespeare borrowed it and has been beaten to death ever since…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse–or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High School massacre…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather, he’s softened the hard edges. Universal issues still inspire him, but…
Up in Evergreen, rumors of Trey Parker are exaggerated, but not greatly. The co-creator of South Park grew up here, went to high school here, made home movies here. And now that his demented characters–from a singing “Christmas Poo” to Starvin’ Marvin, the mail-order refugee–have gone mainstream, everyone is sure…
