A new theater company has just arrived in Denver with a hot agenda and a cool style: Shadow Theatre Company is intent on bringing more plays by African-American playwrights to the boards. And if its first production, Innocent Thoughts, by William Downs, is any indication, we’re in for some exhilarating…
When Carlisle Floyd wrote the exquisite opera Susannah in the mid-1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was out hunting up commies under every rock and movie studio. It was a bleak, hysterical period–but it was nothing new. Witch-hunts crop up over and over again throughout history, changing form to suit every era…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high-school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his own…
Thursday July 24 Ska’s the limit: What goes around comes around, and when it comes to something as exuberant and danceable as ska, we couldn’t be happier. What began in the ’50s as a full-throttled precursor to the more loping Jamaican reggae music went through its first revival nearly twenty…
This has not been a great year for sculpture in Denver. First, the Solar Fountain by Larry Bell and Eric Orr that had graced the never-landscaped lawn of the Denver Performing Arts Complex was unceremoniously bulldozed off its foundation and tossed into dumpsters. (Would it have killed the Denver Center…
There are moviemakers, and there are people who have access to moviemaking equipment. The neophyte documentarians Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn fall into the latter group. In a benighted attempt to find “the American Dream,” these innocents packed their cameras and their post-adolescent neuroses into a borrowed Saab and hit…
Assorted historians are happily butting heads this week over the speculation that dour Queen Victoria may have had big eyes for the earthy Scotsman who tended her horse. For better or worse, that is the premise of Mrs. Brown, a witty nineteenth-century soap opera that shows no fear of offending…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One–Vietnam War hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his new…
Thursday July 17 Garden party: Next weekend’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem to better fit the occasion, but look at it this way: Kicking off this summer’s Theatre in the Park series in Civic Center Park with James Goldman’s Lion in Winter at least sounds pretty cool…
Poor John Adams. Obnoxious and disliked, the lawyer from Massachusetts who prodded Thomas Jefferson to compose the Declaration of Independence just couldn’t get along with the other founding fathers. But irritating as he may have been, he was an American hero just the same. So Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone…
It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Jackie’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalogue out of…
Talk about tragically hip. The doomed hero of Finn Taylor’s quirky buddy picture Dream With the Fishes is Nick, a surly young thief with a taste for tequila and heroin who just happens to be dying of leukemia. His opposite number is Terry, a straitlaced Peeping Tom whose life is…
Here in unfettered America, where the lamest cowboy insists on doing the Texas two-step and a couple of strawberry daiquiris can transform a retiring housewife into a disco queen, it’s difficult for us to imagine a culture in which middle-class married couples don’t go out in public together and even…
Thursday July 10 How street it is: What better way to kick off this summer’s Colorado Dance Festival than with some exuberant dancing in the street–style, that is. A unique troupe of dancers, Rennie Harris PureMovement uses hip-hop as a springboard, taking the giant choreographic leap from lowbrow to highbrow…
For some reason, all of the important small public art venues in the metro area are located on the northwest side. In Boulder, there’s the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in Arvada the Arvada Center and in Golden the Foothills Art Center. Each of these municipal facilities has come to…
Exuberant musicals are the Country Dinner Playhouse’s stock-in-trade, though sometimes that exuberance can seem forced. The most recent show at the Playhouse, 42nd Street, was a terrific, bouncy re-creation of a 1930s extravaganza and the best thing the CDP had done in a long while. But its newest production, Fiddler…
The frailties of human nature were meat and drink to Moliere. His comedies live on because they so cleverly skewered hypocrisy, pretentiousness and ego-driven stupidity, and his sense of the absurd is just as relevant now as it ever was. This year the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is offering The Would-Be…
The most astonishing actress in France might be one who goes to kindergarten. She is Victoire Thivisol, the traumatized little heroine of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette. Her performance–if that’s what you call it–as a four-year grieving the death of her mother revives thorny questions about the tricky old dance of life…
Because he often seemed less interested in studying the stars than becoming one himself, the late astronomer-author Carl Sagan had his detractors. Real scientists, they said, don’t have booking agents or worry about trading quips with Johnny Carson. Still, this tireless proponent of science for the masses exerted an influence…
Thursday July 3 War zone: The air is warm and soft, summer’s at its peak and it’s the glorious start of a long holiday weekend–perfect conditions for a night of dancing in the street. And few bands lend themselves to that purpose better than ’70s funk ‘n’ rollers War, guests…
Since last year, New York-based conceptual guru Christo and his sidekick Jeanne-Claude have virtually taken up residence on the Front Range. First there was that show of drawings and collages at One/West in Fort Collins in the summer of 1995. Then, in 1996, Denver’s Robischon Gallery unveiled the new “Over…
Capital punishment is on everybody’s mind these days, what with Timothy McVeigh’s conviction and JonBenet’s murderer still on the loose. So the regional premiere of Colorado playwright David Hall’s The Quality of Mercy is timely enough. And CityStage Ensemble’s biting production has much to offer–several fine performances, inventive direction by…
