The beginning moments of local dramatist M. Scott Merrifield’s play Desert Air are full of promise. As the Changing Scene’s world-premiere production of this Gulf War-era drama begins, the strains of a popular rock song (“Video Killed the Radio Star”) fade out while the stage lights illuminate a drab olive-green…
In the midst of the ludicrous national episode just past, it became clear that Americans were far more interested in the fictional fate of Jerry Seinfeld and his pals than in their actual friends and loved ones. You can also bet that the sexual politics of Ellen Degeneres, trumpeted on…
Members of the Norwegian tourist board won’t be flipping cartwheels over the dingy, smothering, rain-sodden views of the Oslo slums director Pal Sletaune employs in his new feature Junk Mail. And the film’s scruffy, rat-faced protagonist, Roy (Robert Skj3/4rstad), a furtive postman who takes revenge on his nasty bosses by…
It’s time to get on the bus. Not just any bus, however. This one is Barry Fey’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour of Denver bus, sponsored by the Colorado Historical Society in conjunction with its current picture-perfect ’60s-’70s exhibit. In a way, the tour of former venues where Fey played out…
Thursday May 28 For Pavel Dobrusky, staging a new interpretation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote was a completely possible dream. The inventive Czech writer/director, who’s already left his mark on the Denver Center Theatre Company with the fantastic and surreal Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, is a natural for the material, able to…
Kathryn Bernheimer knows movies. The Boulder film critic’s name has been seen regularly in print for nearly twenty years in such places as the Boulder Daily Camera, and that’s been more than enough time to develop her expertise. But Bernheimer also knows a thing or two about what it means…
On a recent sunny afternoon, Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp was standing under the museum’s still-controversial entrance canopy on Acoma Plaza. Not that the canopy provides any shade: Though workers began erecting it last fall, it’s still not finished. The stainless-steel panels intended to provide it with a roof…
Though contemporary theatergoers have long favored the narrowly focused view of dramatists such as Arthur Miller (who’s still writing plays that reflect mostly American concerns), a growing number of contemporary directors are gravitating toward old hands such as Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, who crafted dramas that capture…
Like the mid-life crisis that its central character frequently describes but rarely experiences, local dramatist Coleen Hubbard’s play A Ritual for Returning has all the makings of a cathartic event but never actually becomes one. But though it has yet to realize its dramatic potential, this freewheeling romp through the…
When last we spied Sandra Bullock, the plucky action heroine was clinging to a sea-washed railing aboard Hollywood’s other doomed ocean liner–not the one that hit the major ice cube, but the one that plowed through a Caribbean resort town while audiences hooted with unintended laughter. Speed 2: Cruise Control…
Vyacheslav Krishtofovich’s A Friend of the Deceased provides another eye-opening glimpse of the former Soviet Union in this era of P.T. Barnum capitalism and spiritual confusion. Whatever else may be dense in the film, that’s worth our undivided attention. The place is Kiev, where the joyless hero, a translator named…
Documentary filmmaker Don McGlynn is one of those charmed individuals who do for a living exactly what they like to do most. But in his case, it’s a little more involved. It’s a matter not only of being a filmmaker, but of being an archivist, a film junkie and a…
Next time you run into a group of people dressed all in white, bedecked with brightly colored ribbons and sashes, jingling with bells and wildly waving sticks and hankies at dawn, don’t direct them en masse to the nearest asylum. They’re probably Morris dancers, and it must be spring. This…
Thursday May 21 Budding filmmakers will be in the spotlight when the Denver Public Schools Film/Video Arts Program Student Film Festival screens tonight at the Bug Performance & Media Art Center, 3654 Navajo St. The festival, which includes works written, produced, directed and edited by both high-school students and adult…
As lower downtown’s sidewalks have become crowded with shoppers, tourists and sports fans, the trend among art galleries has been to move out or close up. That’s not just the story in LoDo, but on Broadway and throughout the central business district. The problem? Spiraling rents combined with sluggish art…
Love is pain, pain produces suffering, and suffering is the state of being that leads one to God. But not before one has made the straight and narrow trip to hell, where, according to British playwright Ronald Duncan, no one really suffers anymore–including a handful of romantic writers whose collective…
Long before professional baseball became an event played between teams of ill-mannered millionaires, America’s pastime served as a metaphor for life’s ups and downs. Of course, that’s when the contests were regularly attended by white-shirted, fedora-wearing spectators with a boyish devotion to the game. And it’s that kind of unbridled…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars, could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach and, most important, his understanding…
The “Size Matters” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about this week’s ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
Thrusday May 14 We’re not going to speculate. We’re not even going to cry. But even we have to admit that the last episode of Seinfeld is a cultural event not to be missed. Some will prefer to mourn quietly over tuna sandwiches and Snapple in their own living rooms,…
Nancy Smith is a motion addict. “I had a childhood love for spinning, for getting dizzy and falling down,” she says. “I loved swings and swingsets and motion–repetitive motion that takes you into an altered state.” So when the Boulder choreographer first saw aerial dancer Robert Davidson perform on a…
Only a pilgrim would be caught dead in blue jeans at a mountain-man rendezvous. And depending on whom he met there, the dang flatlander might either get it between the eyes with a tommyhawk or get lucky and find some kind soul who’d lend him a spare pair of buckskins…
