It used to be that real estate developers actually had to have plans to build something new before the Denver City Council would let them demolish a historic building. But at the council meeting February 23, Denver developer Bruce Berger didn’t have to come up with even that much. He…
If you’ve always thought it takes an advanced college degree to understand and appreciate a play, El Centro Su Teatro’s charming production of When El Cucui Walks is precisely the play to convince you otherwise. Even though this two-hour-plus drama draws on Mexican myths and is performed in a mix…
The garish glow emanating from movies, television shows and interactive media has effectively dimmed the theater’s jewel in America. But rather than abandoning all hope and selling out to Hollywood, some dramatists are choosing to preserve theatrical traditions by writing plays that manipulate the electronic media. It’s an idea that…
At first glance, Jonathan Darby’s Hush appears to have a couple of things going for it. There’s some high-wattage star power in the persons of Jessica Lange and Emma’s Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s a possibly lethal power struggle between a possessive mother and the pretty daughter-in-law who’s snatched her sonny boy…
The new film Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic…
It won’t be easy for Joel and Ethan Coen to top Fargo anytime soon, because it was the culmination and pinnacle of a personal style they had been refining for years. The small-time greed, hilariously bungled deceptions and startling violence they brought to their tale of kidnapping-gone-wrong in icy Minnesota…
Thursday February 26 Chip off the old Monk: Following in the footsteps of the great pianist and jazz innovator Thelonius Monk isn’t an easy task, but it’s one that his son, T.S. Monk, an accomplished musician in his own right, handles with plenty of poise and style. It was when…
“Tentacle Piece” squats on angular, black steel legs, spewing prehensile canvas digits that hang in expectant stasis, waiting for motion. In spite of its greasy pulleys and cogwheels, there’s something almost endearing about the thing. But that’s not hard to fathom once you meet its maker. In fact, 23-year-old kinetic…
Two compelling photography exhibits now at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities include nearly 100 works of art–and almost as many different ideas. The first show starts off with a titillating posted proviso: Children will not be admitted unless accompanied by an adult. But don’t get too excited…
When Georges Bizet’s Carmen premiered in 1875, Parisian audiences were outraged that the opera’s title character was a cigarette-smoking, overtly sexual woman who discarded her male lovers like picked flowers. The fact that the story ended with Carmen’s onstage murder only added to patrons’ contempt for the controversial work. Stung…
Environmental-theater designer Jerry Rojo once remarked that he regarded Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as the ultimate personal theatrical experience. Convinced that the play’s two main characters personified the conflicting forces of intellect and emotion, Rojo created a unique design for his production of the play: The maverick designer crafted individual cardboard…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well on screen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
The youngest member of the ubiquitous Wayans clan, 25-year-old Marlon, is emerging on the big screen as an eye- and soul-pleasing amalgam of Jim Carrey’s lunatic elasticity and Eddie Murphy’s faultless comic timing. We can probably expect great things of him. As evidenced by The Sixth Man, a lukewarm basketball…
One of the necessities of screwball comedy–an endangered, if not extinct, species–is that the practitioner be more sophisticated and aware than the batty socialites, pompous academics and blustering snobs he means to deflate. In the golden age of this fragile form, master satirists like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges certainly…
Thursday February 19 Amazing grace: No one these days gets closer to the wellspring of bluegrass than Del McCoury, a veteran of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys whose only professional wish is to keep the Monroe flame burning forever. For McCoury, that’s a family affair: When the guitarist with the high,…
Frank White stands at an overlook on the high road from Taos for a long time, looking out over the clean, cool, sunny New Mexico mountains before shaking his head sadly. He’s thinking about how the native peoples of the Taos Pueblo settled these lands long before Spaniards like Coronado…
The building at the corner of 17th and Wazee Streets, where Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts occupies most of the ground floor, is currently shrouded in a jungle of metal pipes. But the oddly artistic maze isn’t part of the center’s fabulous Contemporary Metals USA exhibit. Instead,…
Have you ever regaled a houseful of your friends with an evening’s worth of your special brand of witty banter? And did their approving laughter tempt you to take your “material” on stage as a stand-up comic? After all, that’s how Tim Allen, Bill Cosby and Roseanne headed down the…
Hoping to recruit the audience members of tomorrow, the Denver Center Theatre Company is increasingly on the lookout for plays that appeal to family audiences. In the latest installment of its Generation Series, the DCTC and director Nagle Jackson have combined theatrical spectacle with great literature in a new adaptation…
The odd Spaniard may choose to transplant film noir to Madrid (see review above), and the French came up with the name in the first place. But it’s essentially a Hollywood invention that has stood the test of time and darkness. Witness Palmetto, a pretty satisfying example of the genre,…
He doesn’t need much. Give the renowned Spanish black-humorist Pedro Almodovar the ex-junkie daughter of an Italian diplomat, a bitter ex-con who served six years for a crime he didn’t commit, a beautiful former dancer, a good cop and a bad cop, and he’ll come up with the most intriguing…
