Thursday April 9 The Evil Companions Literary Award, presented annually by Colorado State University’s Colorado Review to a poet or writer with ties to the West, goes this year to author Dorothy Allison, whose stark, straightforward style first caught readers right between the eyes in Bastard Out of Carolina, a…
From the late ’20s to the early ’40s, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom was the swing-dance capital of the world. All of the best big bands played there, sometimes competing against one another in wild battles of the bands and always propelled by dancers on the smoky, sweaty floor. The mass of…
Paul Davis takes the mike. He’s wearing loose plaid shorts, he lunges when he walks, and his glasses are smudged. “‘Clocktower Physics!!'” he announces, then continues: “Motion! Emotion! Men and women/are in motion. They are not defining God./They are PIERCE-nosed boys and TATTOOED girls/under the clocktower. They hang out an…
A quick inventory of the Shakespearean actor’s stock-in-trade includes qualities such as an expressive voice and body, a fertile imagination, and a devotion to spiritual truth tempered by a carnival barker’s sense of showmanship. But when it comes to portraying any of the four major Shakespearean tragic roles (Hamlet, Lear,…
At first glance, the Shop’s tiny stage seems a poor choice to house a production of Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. In fact, the cramped confines of the storefront theater appear especially ill-suited to the emotional climax of Friel’s masterpiece, which calls for five unmarried Irish sisters to…
It has been thirty years since compulsive fussbudget Felix Unger began clearing away the moldy bread crusts, stale cigar butts and melted candy bars from the New York apartment of dedicated slob Oscar Madison, thirty years since Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau joined a battle of wills and a farce…
If American movie moguls really thought like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’d probably spend more time blowing up Federal Reserve banks than calculating first-weekend grosses. As it is, instead of buying inflammable fertilizer and fuel oil, the moguls are selling it–in the form of satires about presidential misconduct and…
Thursday April 2 Plenty of musicians work at paring off the layers, inching just that much closer to their inspirational wellspring. But few do it in a purer fashion than slide guitarist/songwriter Chris Whitley, who’s switched from his tortured, dense, feedback-shot sound of a few years ago to the totally…
Suppose you put 100 public figures together in one place, gave them some provocative subjects to expound on and then just set them loose with one another. It’s Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, right? Wrong. Actually, it’s the brainchild and culminating statement of the late Howard Higman, a former CU sociology…
The idea of sustainability in architecture has been kicking around for years. Never mind that most of us haven’t got the slightest idea what it means. For architects, who seem to interact in a subtle, theoretical world that makes perfect sense to them, it’s all in a day’s work. Richard…
Remarkable achievements in craft traditions are on display in two local shows. At Cherry Creek’s Pismo, Lino Tagliapietra, a living legend of Venetian glassmaking, is the subject of a self-titled solo show. Up in Golden, it’s the Colorado Clay Exhibition 1998, this year’s version of the venerable annual showcasing some…
Crying at the top of her lungs, “I’m sick of Negro dreams–all they ever do is break your heart!” a middle-aged woman flails away with her fists at the one man who promises he’ll rescue her from her dead-end existence. For one brief, glorious moment, it appears that Angel will…
No single event stamps its imprint more indelibly on the body politic than the taking of a hostage. In fact, hostage situations involving American soldiers, journalists and businessmen have each proved the point that nothing–not internal racial discord, impending economic disaster or even a presidential sex scandal–strikes a more resonant…
You are likely to take to The Real Blonde, a bittersweet farce about romantic yearning and delusional ambition in Manhattan, in direct proportion to your tolerance for self-absorbed 25-year-olds and the value you put on the advertising and theatrical trades. If, for instance, you can stomach the waiter who believes…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it has subtitles: Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in an…
The great charm of Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys derives from its quartet of matinee idols–Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio–and its unbridled affection for the high-spirited gang of Texas country boys they portray, adventurers who rob banks with such sunny enthusiasm and impeccable yes-ma’am manners that…
When Denver’s own Donna Dewey won an Academy Award last week for her short documentary A Story of Healing, moviegoers here were reminded that not every example of the art cinematic springs full-grown from the city of Los Angeles. The notion arose again on Sunday night, when the Creative Film…
Sixty-six bands have their fingers crossed. Only a few will be lucky. But they’ll all have a chance to strut their stuff Sunday at the annual Capitol Hill People’s Fair Entertainment Auditions, an eleven-hour marathon designed to separate the local music community’s wheat from its chaff. The auditions, which are…
Douglas Coupland doesn’t have time to be anyone’s guru. He’s flown from San Francisco to New York in the middle of a grueling book tour, is waiting for a grilled cheese sandwich from room service, wants the heat turned down in his hotel room and will have to hang up…
Thursday March 26 The only thing better than listening to a Los Lobos record is seeing rock’s best performing band live. It’s no secret why. The bandmembers play with a depth not often found in the slick, overproduced and overhyped world of popular music. Guitarists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas…
The Nazis had a perversely high regard for the arts. As early as 1933, Adolf Hitler’s goons began a campaign against modern art, closing art schools, expelling modernist art teachers from German universities, and arresting and incarcerating scores of artists. Hitler, after all, was a failed artist who, as a…
Playwright August Wilson was at Dartmouth College the other day, spouting off once again about why America needs a separate theater dedicated to the interests of African-Americans. White artists, Wilson has repeatedly argued, are simply ill-equipped to understand and interpret his Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning plays about black life. It takes…
