Eleanor of Aquitaine was arguably the greatest woman of the late medieval period. She was beautiful and brilliant, a patron of the arts and a cultivator of the chivalric code. She defied the church hierarchy, married a French king and dumped him for an English king, bore six daughters and…
When that broken-down, opera-sized chandelier lying on the stage flies out over the audience and up to the ceiling in The Phantom of the Opera, it’s enough to justify the price of admission. The special effects in the Broadway road show of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extravaganza, now at the Buell…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about Campion’s version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess, Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine, Isabel Archer (Nicole…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
Just when you think Eddie Murphy has pulled off a glorious comeback, he slips up on the banana peel of ego. To wit: Not six months ago, Murphy burst back to the top with his energetic takes on seven different characters–fat, skinny and uniformly hilarious–in the sleeper of 1996, The…
Let’s give Kenneth Branagh credit, shall we, for the breadth of his good sense. At 35, this Irish prodigy is the foremost cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare in a time when everyone just short of Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey seems to be cooking up a new movie version of Macbeth…
thursday january 16 The Doctor is in: In music, there are legends and then there are legends — living, breathing, walking, talking, genre-embodying types. Crescent City music man Dr. John, the reigning witch doc of New Orleans-style R&B, falls securely in the latter category, relying on wry, blusey trademark vocals…
It was a research project with the drama of a detective story. And just as Sherlock Holmes unraveled mysteries–using a method reliant on fanatical attention to detail–so too did the organizers of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, which currently fills the main-floor galleries at the Colorado History Museum. The genesis for this…
Don Becker is a manic-depressive guy “with psychotic features” who writes humorous stuff for a living–first as a stand-up comic, now as one of Denver’s most irreverent playwrights. His first play, Back on a Limb, was a one-man show, an expose of his own mad life. Becker hid nothing of…
It’s always Armageddon for somebody. Don Becker’s dark new comedy, Kurt Cobain Was Right, puts a new spin on modern end-of-the-world themes harking all the way back to the Theater of the Absurd and cinematic spinoffs like Dr. Strangelove. The Lida Project’s outrageous production will offend, stimulate and maybe shake…
When the British critic John Russell Taylor called the Hollywood musical “a city built to music,” he was thinking more of Fred Astaire’s work than of Woody Allen’s. But anyone who remembers how Allen swaddled that beautiful opening montage of Manhattan in “Rhapsody in Blue” knows that when it comes…
It may come as a surprise to some that leukemia, senility and bitterness between parent and child are the stuff of comedy. But therein lies the unlikely miracle of Marvin’s Room, a compelling drama about a shattered family trying to pick up the pieces that draws much of its strength…
Thursday January 9 Western stars: If it’s January, this must be the Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering, celebrating its eighth year of campfire range-rhyming, beginning tonight and continuing through Sunday at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd. Headlining this year’s laconic long weekend are Colorado’s own…
So much of the best musical comedy to favor the region recently has come from Boulder Dinner Theatre that it’s no surprise that BDT’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot is just what it should be–magical. This isn’t Lerner and Loewe’s best work (that distinction belongs to My Fair Lady),…
The central symbol of a long-lasting marriage in Jan de Hartog’s bittersweet The Four Poster is the marriage bed itself. Sexual tension is important in this poignant comedy from the Nomad Players, but the real point is a couple’s attempts to reach each other over 35 years. Well-written and charming,…
Even the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment must reach pretty far down into their belief to come up with Larry Flynt as a poster boy. An unschooled Kentucky hillbilly with a big mouth and a gift for manipulation, he stuffed Hustler magazine, a phenomenon of the Seventies, full of…
In an ideal world, Ghosts of Mississippi would be about how the widow of Medgar Evers and the people of Mississippi finally got justice thirty years after the civil rights leader’s assassination. But Hollywood is not an ideal world–never has been–so Rob Reiner’s well-meaning, hand-wringing movie is really about the…
New Line’s release of Jackie Chan’s First Strike is salvo number three in Chan’s invasion of America. (Miramax’s version of the 1991 Operation Condor, the last film on which the star also took a director’s credit, is due out in May.) Like its predecessors, Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop,…
Thursday January 2 Down and ditty: So it’s the day after the day after. No one ever said you couldn’t continue to inaugurate the fledgling year with something fun–if you’re up to it. If you are, light-on-their-lips pop purveyors They Might Be Giants provide just the ticket for an easy…
Artists have taken many routes to fame. Salvador Dali struck a chord with unforgettable images such as melting clocks. And like Picasso and Andy Warhol, two other truly famous artists, Dali led a flamboyant life that served to enhance his reputation as a cutting-edge artist. Then there’s Christo. To say…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…
