Objects of Personal Significance is a loosely organized theme show that handsomely fills the recently relocated and expanded Center for the Visual Arts on Wazee Street, the LoDo gallery of Metropolitan State College of Denver. The exhibit, which has a too-short five-week run, comprises a traveling section organized by Exhibits…
Ever since one of the king’s men stepped forward amid a sea of Elizabethan spectators and intoned Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, playwrights have continually asked audience members to join them as silent partners in the commission of existential crime. To be sure, such probing into…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination and heroism. Screenwriter Mark Steven…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen. Someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
Before work even begins on a Tibetan sand mandala, there are chants and music to purify the five-foot-square site where the painting’s intricate patterns will soon emerge. The preparation is an impressive sight in itself: Clad in golden robes, elaborate brocades and awesome fringed hats that rise above their heads…
Thursday September 3 For at least one cross-section of the populace, Big Bird is the absolute bomb, and if any of those pint-sized denizens live in your house, tickets to this weekend’s performances of Sesame Street Live: 1-2-3…Imagine! are a must for the whole family. See Ernie travel the seven…
For the last decade, pulsing lights and droning industrial music have been the lone accoutrements of the subterranean rave scene, a kind of contemporary tribal ritual matching all-night dancing with bare, synthesized rhythms. But it was only a matter of time before visual art joined ravers on the dance floor…
Denver’s collection of art cooperatives–notably, Spark, Pirate, Edge, Core and ILK–are a boon to contemporary art here. Most major cities don’t have anything close. The co-ops’ great cultural value is that they provide opportunities for emerging artists and established talents alike to display their latest work free of commercial constraints;…
In the opening moments of Emma’s Child, a self-described “local nothing” of a teenage mother permits her unborn baby to be adopted at birth by a well-meaning, well-to-do childless couple. This might lead audiences to believe that playwright Kristine Thatcher is gearing up for a probing discussion about, say, class…
Ten years ago, when the only marquee Ragtime graced was the imaginary one glimmering in the eyes of its creators, the musical’s current director, Frank Galati, was earning a well-deserved reputation as one of this country’s most innovative, if enigmatic, showmen. An actor, director and college professor, Galati mesmerized Chicago…
When the history of the republic in this century is written, a New York club owner named Steve Rubell might get his very own footnote. In the late 1970s, after all, this little rat-faced tyrant transformed an abandoned TV studio on West 54th Street into a laboratory for radical social…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday or Otis Redding. But now the late doo-wopper’s got his own movie, too–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is really…
Thursday August 27 Book ’em, Denver: You can take your pick from a whole mountain of inexpensive tomes when the Denver Public Library Friends Annual Used Book Sale opens for business this morning south of the Central Library at 13th Ave. and Acoma St. Inside the sale tents, you’ll find…
Hold it right there, pardner. If you ask Rudy Grant, an Aurora Pro Country Music Hall of Fame makes perfect sense. A longtime local country musician, Grant remembers Aurora’s honky-tonk heyday (when clubs such as the legendary Zanzibar on East Colfax Avenue stacked ’em ten deep at the bar) like…
Put fifty feet of clean white wall in front of Carlos Fresquez and it won’t stay that way for long. The Denver-born artist’s been at work on the wall for only two hours, but already in the background, snow-capped peaks rise and unfold across the flat surface–to remind him, Fresquez…
The art scene in Denver does not shut down during the summer as it does in the big cities on the east and west coasts. Even here, though, there is a point when everyone seems to be taking a break–and that hiatus is currently on. The last of the summer…
Celebrated warbler Sophie Tucker was the most famous of the Prohibition-era “naughty girls” who belted out honky-tonk melodies, jazz tunes and torch songs in vaudeville acts that also sometimes included trained animals, female impersonators and famous criminals holding forth about their checkered pasts. The collective drawing power of speakeasies, talkies…
Is it possible to save another human being from himself? Are the exhortations of politicians, sociologists and religious types the best answers to the problems plaguing the three downtrodden New Yorkers in William Hanley’s play Slow Dance on the Killing Ground? Or is it more likely that, as one character…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a terrific…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason, it has proved a popular element in movie romances, City of Angels and Sliding Doors being…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
