So many words, so few ideas. In his tedious satire Was He Anyone?, playwright N.F. Simpson tries so hard to bite into the red tape surrounding governmental “charity” that he chokes on it. Not even the Hunger Artists Ensemble’s talented cast can do more than give this sociopolitical spoof a…
Kurt Vonnegut’s strengths as a novelist are his rare, dark humor, which can be as bracing as cognac, and his gift for shifting gears from tragedy to absurdity, tenderness to stark horror. His main weakness is probably a taste for cartoon moralism–a kind of flimsy preachiness, drenched in postmodern ambiguity,…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
Two centuries before zillionaire NBA players started talking trash, before Don Rickles ambushed his first tipsy Vegas ringsider, before Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley traded quips at the Algonquin, the decadent court of Louis XVI turned acid wit into coin of the realm. While the nobles blindly sniped at each…
Thursday November 28 Help yourself: Do you consider the calories consumed in your average Thanksgiving feast an on-again, off-again kind of thing? Just remember, tubbo, that kind of timely pound-shedding usually happens only in your dreams. So give thanks: The City of Aurora Recreation Division’s Huff-N-Puff Before You Stuff offers…
Cherry Creek has been in the news lately–and not just because of that dreadful “We have a whole district” advertising campaign. Even more prominent than that awkward attempt at self-promotion has been the hoopla surrounding the destruction of an ancient elm tree to make way for a duplex in Cherry…
Life in Southern California is, yes, phony and flaky. Once in a while a movie or a play celebrates all that peculiar sunny fakery with affectionate parody (Steve Martin’s L.A. Story comes to mind) or abject pessimism (Sam Shepard’s anti-Hollywood plays). And now there’s one more take on the L.A…
Sex is easy; love is hard. That’s the point, no matter how fractured, of Theatre on Broadway’s 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, a story that sets out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to make emotional connections these days. It’s peopled with gay characters,…
The recession atmosphere of Alan Taylor’s Palookaville is littered with mongrel dogs, old junker cars and busted dreams. Stubborn layers of grime and palpable malaise have settled on worn-out Jersey City, the movie’s unlikely locale, and the downtrodden citizens squeeze scant pleasure from life drinking lousy coffee in the sap-colored…
Bad-boy director Abel Ferrara loves to shock the squares. In his notorious slice of New York street life, Bad Lieutenant, he had corrupt cop Harvey Keitel snort cocaine off his little daughter’s First Communion photo and extort sex from a pair of scared teenage girls from Jersey. Ferrara jived up…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
Thursday November 21 Her A’s are numbered: The fans are getting anxious–alphabetical mystery novelist Sue Grafton is already up to the M’s. But you’ll have the chance to ask Grafton what happens after Z: The author, whose first book in the popular A-to-Z Kinsey Millhone detective series was inspired by…
Since the impressionists invented modernism nearly 150 years ago, relentless innovation has been the buzzword in contemporary painting. Newer has been better since at least the late nineteenth century, at which point new art trends started coming along one after another. Impressionism was eclipsed by post-impressionism, then by neo-impressionism, then…
Vulgar, irreverent and awash in cheap shots, Nunsense may be the silliest show in town. But despite its bad habits, this bit of fluff has one redeeming feature: The music is actually pretty darn good. Of course, it takes enormous energy to sell the songs here, which comment on everything…
Feminists are frequently accused of being humorless: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One–and that isn’t funny.” But at least one troupe in town is proving there are laughs to be had among the little womyn. Unidentified Female Objects II: The Search Continues, at the…
Any filmmaker bold enough to set a romantic epic in the middle of the Sahara with war guns booming in the distance runs a pretty big risk–aside from getting all that sand in the Panaflex. For real movie lovers who’ve seen a few things, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia loom…
Assorted ecologists, armchair philosophers and meddlers have been wringing their hands in recent years over the nature of nature documentaries. Are the lives of various species disturbed by the filmmaking process? Do camera and microphone falsify? Does Homo sapiens have any business peering into the lion’s den or the spider’s…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic Literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
San Francisco isn’t just the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: It’s the movie’s muse. Along with composer Bernard Herrmann, who transforms convoluted psychology into resounding lyricism, and co-star Kim Novak, whose pheromones and otherworldliness give body and soul to tortured romance, San Francisco enables Hitchcock to conjure a netherworld of…
Thursday November 14 Food for thought: A cornucopia of local writers–here, there and everywhere–is slated to take part in tonight’s Share Our Strength’s Writers Harvest: The National Reading, an annual large-scale literary benefit to fight hunger across America. In our area, related events are scheduled at the Tattered Cover LoDo…
Although Mary Mackey announced a couple of months ago that her namesake gallery on the city’s west side would close at the end of the year, it now appears the gallery will remain open at least into 1997. No such uncertainty, however, surrounds the life expectancy of two superb shows…
Think of Edvard Munch’s eerie painting “The Scream” and you get a pretty good idea of how Stephen Mallatratt’s play The Woman in Black affects an audience. Ad Hoc Theatre’s intense, ingenious production of Mallatratt’s ghost story is truly creepy. No monsters leap out at you, but the central figure…
