As tyrants of the twentieth century go, it’s hard to top Josef Stalin in the mass-murder department. He was pretty nimble with the Big Lie, too. These facts have not been lost on post-Soviet Russian filmmakers, of course: In the dawn of the free marketplace, it’s open season on Communist…
Thursday July 30 Leave it to the Colorado Dance Festival to go out with a flourish. Wrapping up the fest’s month-long tenure in Boulder is a trio of performances by New York’s David Dorfman Dance, an urbane outfit working under contemporary choreographer Dorfman, who keeps audiences on their toes with…
Pet pundits report that we’re treating our pets more and more like children these days. But rather than worry about it, we might as well accept it and act accordingly by properly socializing pets, just as we hope to do with our children. Author Cindy Hirschfeld, whose new travel guide,…
Many fiction writers don’t choose their profession–it chooses them instead. And some, like jazz critic and novelist Rafi Zabor, are lifelong wanderers who suddenly find themselves traipsing down the right road. But regardless of how a writer becomes one, it must be true that it takes one to know one:…
Oh, the America of the 1950s. In the nostalgic mind’s eye, the era is all poodle-skirts and roller skates, malt shops furnished with chrome dinettes and jukeboxes filled with Elvis. It was a time when, according to the late career civil servant W. Averill Harriman, the whole country “drank Coca-Cola…
Scholars and theatergoers will always argue about the legitimacy of setting William Shakespeare’s plays in periods other than Elizabethan England. Employing the well-worn device sometimes yields rich rewards, as evidenced two summers back by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s rock-and-roll version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and last season’s Civil War-era…
It has taken twenty-six years for some smart aleck to come up with a fullscale parody of The Godfather, so the question now is: Who wants to see it? Many of the 16- to 24-year-olds who flock to movie theaters in the summertime may not know Michael Corleone from Michael…
Can you make a satisfying high-tech thriller for $60,000? You can if you’re 28-year-old Darren Aronofsky, late of Harvard and the American Film Institute’s directing program, and you get everyone you know to chip in a hundred bucks on the prospect that if the picture makes a profit you’ll be…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
Thursday July 23 When a bluesman of Charles Brown’s stature cancels a show due to illness, major disappointment results, along with best wishes for a speedy recovery. But for local roots-music lovers, all is not lost: Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet and Beausoleil will sub for Brown in a return engagement…
Who does a good fan dance these days? The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t days of Sally Rand popped like a bubble decades ago in favor of more hardcore pursuits. But Denver swing kid Michelle Baldwin is so certain the time is right for burlesque to make a comeback that she’s banking on…
Denver puppeteer Annie Zook looks like a laid-back, middle-aged librarian from Kansas. But on closer examination, you’ll see mischief in her eyes, and when she speaks, there’s a hint of a squeak that just might turn into a fairy-tale character’s voice at the slightest provocation. Zook, who plays host this…
Sean Scully occupies a peculiar niche in the history of recent art. An unabashed modernist, he came of artistic age in the 1980s, an era dominated by an anti-modernist zeitgeist. The assault on modernism generally, and on abstract painting in particular, came from both the front and the rear. While…
It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than Christopher Plummer playing the title character in William Luce’s Barrymore. In addition to maintaining his performer’s lock on the role since the play premiered at Canada’s prestigious Stratford Festival in 1996 (a few months later, the production moved to Broadway, where Plummer won…
What happens when a man is forced to choose between the well-being of his children and the sanctity of his good name? Should John Proctor, the main character in Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, preserve his sons’ inheritance by bending to the stiff-necked morality of Salem’s witch-hunters? Or should the…
The first half-hour of Steven Spielberg’s magnificent and terrifying war epic Saving Private Ryan unfolds at bloody Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and is likely the most graphic re-creation of men in battle ever committed to film. Petrified GIs huddling in the wave-bashed landing craft vomit into their…
Hal Hartley’s gallery of troubled eccentrics already features two bickering brothers in search of their lost father (Simple Men), three mix-and-match couples afflicted by identical love woes in three far-flung cities (Flirt) and the unlikely triptych of sexually obsessed virgin, bewildered amnesiac and ex-porn star (Amateur). How do you top…
Don’t ever call the Blue Knights a marching band. Averaging about 126 members, give or take one or two, the Knights are a drum and bugle corps, the cream of the field-performance genre, and nothing but. To call them anything else would border on insult. What’s the difference, exactly? A…
Lisa Lusero’s boyish, austere body is a draftsman’s sketch of curves and angles, plain-faced with round glasses and an eighth of an inch of fuzz covering its scalp. But in the course of her one-woman theater piece Impossible Body, performed without props or costumes (and sometimes even without stage lighting),…
Thursday July 16 It’s summer, so loosen up. Try things on. Kick back. You can do all those things and still take in some culture. At the Changing Scene, 1527 1/2 Champa St., Summerplay, the longstanding downtown theater’s annual showcase of one-acts written by local playwrights, gets under way tonight…
You may want to wash your hands after taking in the trio of oddball (a polite but accurate term) conceptual exhibits that fill the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. While none are visually edifying, all three challenge conventional, and even unconventional, ideas about the nature of art and…
By virtually every account, the 18-to-34 age group is the fastest-growing segment of the opera-going public. Although no one can explain exactly why Baywatching channel-surfers from the MTV generation are hooked on an art form once renowned for its corpulent prima donnas and sleep-inducing histrionics, two local opera companies are…
