When local theater producer/director donnie l. betts decided over a year ago to resurrect Richard Durham’s 1940s radio drama, Destination Freedom, a trailblazing weekly program that told true stories of African-American heroes, he knew he was taking a chance: It was radio, a moldy medium at best, and therefore a…
Thursday April 15 How do you pass tax day and manage to remain perfectly calm? Well, first of all, not everyone waits until the last minute, tearing their hair out over a rat’s nest of receipts as the clock ticks ominously in the background. Some of us are already looking…
Denver’s El Centro Su Teatro has always striven to be more than a theater. It’s a grassroots arts resource, and everyone connected with it seems to extend a metaphorical hand to the neighborhood. When a play premieres there, it’s a fundraising party; when it throws a film festival, as it…
Russell Beardsley emerged on the Denver art scene while still a student. The first shows of his conceptual metal sculptures were presented to both critical and popular acclaim in 1993, a year before he earned his BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver. Back then, his pieces most often…
Far from being just a dirty family secret, incest is the supreme betrayal of familial trust. The unspeakable offense–which often suffocates both victim and perpetrator in a cloak of silent shame and sworn secrecy–invariably rears its ugly head from one generation to another until someone finds the courage, the will…
The problem with producing My Fair Lady is that (a) most audience members harbor fond memories of the 1964 film starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn; (b) most of those same theatergoers have already seen umpteen different stage versions that pale in comparison to their memories of the venerated film;…
Thursday April 8 My how Tommy, Chuckie, Angelica and the rest of the precocious gang from Nickelodeon’s Rugrats have grown! They’re six feet tall, larger than life and every bit as kidlike as the small-screen versions in Rugrats–A Live Adventure, a new touring stage show that captures the Rugrat ethos…
It’s always been risky to try to convince someone to put their money where your mouth is. And lately, it’s been even more difficult for Denver’s smaller theater groups to balance the demands of the art with the needs of the box office. Local theatergoers’ attention is diverted by a…
They’re the forgotten group, and it’s no surprise so many of them end up on the street: When you’re poor and stuck between the ages of 14 and 24, few service organizations want to deal with your headstrong, uncute and hopelessly unreformed ways. Unless you’re lucky enough, that is, to…
The Colorado History Museum’s major exhibition this season is Spirit of Spider Woman, an intelligent and elegantly presented examination of Navajo weaving that’s been two years in the making. But don’t expect the dry, straightforward approach that is typical of the CHM. Instead, like the exhibit’s catchy title, Spider Woman…
Near the end of Josefina Lopez’s Real Women Have Curves, an aspiring young writer tells us that as she grew up, she wanted to teach her Chicana elders how to live a better, more liberated life. “But in their own way,” Anna says in retrospect of her mother’s friends and…
To dismiss Cervantes’s epic novel about the quintessential dreamer Don Quixote as an insubstantial story about chivalry is like saying that King Lear is just a grumpy old man’s four-hour rant. Or that Chekhov’s four comic masterpieces are simply boring talky dramas in which nothing ever really happens. And even…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last thirty years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late-’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After his…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Local admirers of Franco Piavoli’s Blue Planet, a poetic evocation of earthly harmony, will be heartened to learn that the Italian painter/filmmaker’s latest visual ballad, Voices Through Time (Voci Nel Tempo), opens an indefinite run Friday at the UA Flatirons Theater in Boulder. It was previously shown in Colorado at…
Suppose you hopped into a shiny new Volkswagen Beetle one day and set off for a month-long road trip through the heartland of America. Say that the Beetle was covered with words. And maybe the words were actually magnetic poetry tiles, stuck right there on the side of the Bug,…
Thursday April 1 Ha, ha–you’re no fool. At least you won’t be once you’ve read local author Jamie Grenney’s Pranks 101: The Complete Guide to Practical Jokes from cover to cover. A cheeky tome covering everything from basic short-sheeting to Saran Wrap on the toilet seat, the self-published book is…
Leta McKenzie likes to go the movies, but only if she can read the film. McKenzie, who is profoundly deaf and unable to understand movie-screen conversation, relies on open-caption films to enjoy the big-screen experience. Open-caption films insert text across the bottom of the screen to convey dialogue as well…
When John Hull moved to Denver last year to become the head of the art department at the University of Colorado’s Denver campus, the city didn’t gain just another academic. It also netted itself an important artist, as shown in John Hull Narrative Paintings, Hull’s regional debut exhibit at the…
Despite an encouraging beginning, several refreshing portrayals and a few side-splitting moments, the Mirror Image’s evening of three one-act plays starts to run out of steam after the second offering. That’s understandable, given that two and a half hours is about as long as most people are willing to watch…
Can a performing artist, whether it be legendary opera diva Maria Callas or veteran New York actress Gordana Rashovich, subjugate herself to a writer’s intent while imbuing his work with her own unforgettable charisma? Is it possible to be at once transparent and luminous, reflecting a dramatic composer’s fleeting brilliance…
