Ron Howard, the child actor turned movie director, has grossed a billion dollars exalting firemen and astronauts. There’s no surprise in that: A guy who spent most of his youth on the make-believe sets of The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days has a better excuse than most people for…
Thursday November 7 Bearing gifts: Billy Bryan, the first tenant at the Denver Zoo, had a luxuriant, cinnamon fur coat and was named after William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate of a hundred years ago. Billy, it seems, was a bear–one in a long line of popular ursines that…
Ignorance is bliss, but in Denver’s art world, it’s much more than that. These days it’s seen as being the best indicator of personal integrity. A good example of this can be found in the city’s approach to public art. In that arena, art disciples are outnumbered more than ten…
The most important thing Bruce Friel does in his latest play, Molly Sweeney, is expose the double-edged nature of so-called medical miracles. If he’d have thought more deeply about the subject, he might have made a genuine work of art. As it is, he has written an absorbing piece of…
Election season is fraught with rhetoric, innuendo, accusation and hyperbole. Facts are twisted, motives interpreted and failings magnified–each candidate spins his own image and spins the other guy’s, too. And this is the way it has always been in politics. CityStage Ensemble’s Dan Hiester recognizes spin-doctoring when he sees it,…
There are some pretty good reasons why it took 44 years for Truman Capote’s coming-of-age novel The Grass Harp to make its way to the movies. There are even better reasons why the movie’s on-again, off-again release schedule has meandered across most of the last nine months. First off, Capote’s…
Moviemakers are on one of their periodic Shakespeare binges, which is always good for the English language, if not necessarily for the advancement of the cinematic arts. Last year we got a radical Richard III, with powerful Ian McKellen reinterpreting the treacherous brute as a 1930s fascist, along with a…
Thursday October 31 Set for a spell: It’s witching hour, ground zero. So, trolls and ectoplasms, what will be your favorite Halloween haunt tonight? Since there’s no law that says ghosts and goblins can’t be in shape, you might start out at the Halloween Hustle ’96, a 5K twilight sally…
In the last thirty years, Japan has gone a long way toward establishing total world domination of the camera industry. At both the high and low ends of the market, Japanese cameras–Pentax, Canon, Minolta, Nikon–aren’t just the ones that predominate, they’re the ones that have become household names. If Japan’s…
“Children’s theater” too often equals boring pap–badly written, stupidly produced and amateurishly performed. But it can be magical, inventive and beautifully realized. Children’s theaters in Minneapolis, Louisville, Chicago and Seattle have done fabulous work ministering to the imagination of kids while entertaining and even enlightening them–and all without boring their…
What you want to achieve with Peter Pan is magic. And the Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production, adapted from J.M. Barrie’s original, makes it. It’s a little too long for the squirmy set–there are a few slow places that don’t keep the little ones involved, and a half-hour trim…
In Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, we learn nothing of the Irish revolutionary’s early life, and we get but scant patches of the long, tragic history that impelled him to invent urban guerrilla warfare. Instead, Jordan throws us immediately into battle. In this case, it’s the last moments of the Irish…
Mike, the lovesick protagonist of Swingers, has the slab-jawed, slightly baffled appeal of a young William Bendix–and only about half the savoir-faire. A struggling comedian with no gig and not many jokes, obsessed with a girlfriend who’s left him and gone back to New York, poor Mike is stranded high…
Thursday October 24 Stage cache: The fall theater season at the Plex reaches full gallop with a divergent duo: At the Ricketson Theatre, the Denver Center Theatre Company debuts Molly Sweeney, written by Irish playwright Brian Friel. Set in the fictional town of Ballybeg–also the site of Friel’s past hit,…
Increasingly, it seems as though every coffee shop or restaurant in town also fancies itself a gallery. Drop a stone in Cherry Creek or in LoDo and, likely as not, it will fall on an art show. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s getting any easier to find truly good…
Maybe it’s just the revue format that’s hard to get a handle on, but the intermittently amusing A Thurber Carnival at RiverTree Theatre doesn’t quite make it as an integrated evening of theater. Though the performers appear to have plenty of affection for the mild witticisms of longtime New Yorker…
Newtonian physics, time versus eternity, the glories of landscape architecture, and sex. English playwright Tom Stoppard doesn’t mess with the small stuff in Arcadia; he’s looking for the Big Picture and what it all means. Whether he’s looking in the right place–the world of science–is open to debate. But at…
The emotion in a Mike Leigh film is as plain as dirt and as valuable as gold. This most gifted of all British moviemakers may, in fact, be a kind of miracle worker: He takes the stuff of ordinary working- and middle-class life–trying and failing, the terrors of aging, small…
For those who don’t already know that Pablo Picasso was a great artist and a cruel son of a bitch, filmdom’s beacons of good taste, Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala, now step forward, shoes all shined, to oh-so-gently kick him in the derriere. In Surviving Picasso, they have once again chosen…
Thursday October 17 Around the world in eight days: An armchair traveler’s best friend might well be the Denver International Film Festival, an annual fete featuring the best–old and new–of films from around the world. This year’s star-studded event kicks off tonight at the Continental Theatre, I-25 and Hampden Ave.,…
Pity Colorado Springs if you must. Today it’s known primarily for its right-wing politics. But as recently as the early 1950s, the city was famous mostly for its art–a lot of which was left-wing. Hard to believe? Perhaps. But it’s a message that Manitou Springs painter Tracy Felix wants to…
The play may be the thing, but movies have always voraciously consumed the literature of the stage–and with wildly mixed results. A lot of plays simply don’t belong on screen (most anything with fewer than ten characters, for example). A lot of modern plays need the intimacy of the stage…
