Thursday July 25 Show some retrospect: Celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities can look back on a job well done. Along with its stellar track record of music, dance and stage performances, the center also enjoys continued excellence as a fine-art venue…
The distinction between sculpture and installation is a blurry one–and that makes sense, given that the two mediums are both essentially concerned with artfully occupying space. Many local contemporary sculptors and installation artists test the boundary between the two art forms. But no one knows the territory better than well-known…
Grand opera, like crime movies and modern tragedy, is largely peopled by sluts and scalawags. Big, blustery sins are committed and paid for, and the spectacle is thrilling. Often the innocent get mowed down in the process (usually as part of the naughty protagonist’s punishment), but in the end, the…
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League (PHAMALy) takes on Stephen Sondheim’s bawdy musical with energetic glee. Some of director Don Bill’s choices may offend–he goes a bit too far over the top for “family” entertainment. But sometimes Bill’s experiments…
John Grisham’s legal thrillers are the Big Macs of American publishing–more filler than meat and devoured in alarming numbers by consumers who are not interested in real nourishment. Then the books are dutifully recycled as Hollywood movies–because waste never really goes to waste in pop culture’s digestive tract. The former…
The good news about James Mangold’s Heavy, a gritty, small-budget first feature centering on a shy, fat mama’s boy whose life is wasting away in the kitchen of a dingy bar and grill in upstate New York, is that the place is completely free of space aliens, and Demi Moore…
Thursday July 18 Forever blue: Like endless summers, the ten commandments of love and all that kind of teenage hokum, some things should never change. And if anyone oughta be held responsible for preserving that timeless pop pastiche, it’s Chris Isaak, who, with his chiseled pout, vintage axes, sparkly duds…
Summer is typically the time for the art world to put up its collective feet and relax. But that hasn’t been the case this year, when June and July have been chock-full of exciting and interesting art events. You’d think it was October already–ordinarily the high-water mark for art exhibitions…
The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League (PHAMALy) has launched another hit–a lively production of Stephen Sondheim’s bawdy musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This time, director Don Bill’s experiments get outrageous. Some of his choices are tasteless–a bit too far over the top for…
Roundfish Theatre Company is off to a fast start. The new group’s taut, smart production of David Mamet’s scathing indictment of American salesmanship gone awry, Glengarry Glen Ross, proves the new producers have guts–and taste. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Mamet’s use of profanity is almost poetic. He stealthily reveals…
In Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, the age-old drama of soldiers doing battle gets a treatment-in-depth that is both overdue and welcome. Between the outright flag-wavers of the 1940s in which John Wayne single-handedly defeated the treacherous Japanese and the heart-of-darkness job Hollywood eventually did on the divisive Vietnam War,…
Between comeback kid Eddie Murphy’s lively new take on The Nutty Professor and the unintentional nonsensicality of the sci-fi megahit Independence Day, this has turned into a pretty good summer for movie yuks. For my money, though, the sharpest and funniest comedy of the silly season is Multiplicity, a breakneck…
Thursday July 11 High notes: The area’s outdoor concert series season is hitting its summer peak, but few of the venues afford more striking surroundings for a better price than Classics by the Cliff, which features the Littleton String Quartet, with friends, tonight in the Visitor Center courtyard at Roxborough…
The reputations of Pirate and Spark have been rehabilitated in recent years owing to the hard work of their members. Both of these co-op galleries are often the place to find intelligent art shows by accomplished local artists. Surely that’s the case right now with exhibits from versatile painter Stephen…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo earlier this year was terrific, but it wasn’t really Brecht. Much truer to the spirit of the radical German playwright is CityStage Ensemble’s testy, uneven production of The Good Person of Szechwan. Too long, sometimes annoying and certainly abrasive, this…
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote their first show together in 1943, and Oklahoma! has proven to be one of the most influential musicals in the history of American theater. With Hammerstein’s sentimental yet memorable lyrics and Rodgers’s lavishly melodic tunes (nearly impossible to refrain from humming), they built…
The lean, windburned sheriff at the heart of John Sayles’s Lone Star descends directly from the classic lawmen of Hollywood’s Old West–quiet loners obsessed with raw justice and denied the comforts of home. But Sayles’s present-day creation, Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), has a slightly different bale of hay to burn…
In the realm of movies aimed at preteens, there is probably very little this discerning group won’t find dorky. An exception, I say with some trepidation, might be the long-overdue movie version of Harriet the Spy, which is a joint venture of Nickelodeon TV and Paramount Pictures. The late Louise…
Thursday July 4 Go Fourth: You won’t have to look far today to find a bang-up time, but our advice is to simply look up: That’s where the real fireworks happen. The former Stapleton Airport will be Pyrotechnics Central when it hosts the Sky Art Festival ’96, a combined two-day…
For the past six months, the Mackey Gallery has presented one large and raucous group show after another–out of character for a place that made its reputation presenting in-depth displays featuring only two or three artists. But it’s apparent that her experience with so many group shows has caused gallery…
We don’t really understand our world. Flailing about in unsuitable relationships, many people really want a perfect blend of community and independence and just can’t find it anywhere–except maybe at a place like Stanton’s Garage, where life unexpectedly solves its own riddles and strangers help each other through emotional distress…
The so-called phenomenon in Phenomenon first shows itself when a likable but dim-witted auto mechanic played by John Travolta suddenly starts beating brainy Robert Duvall at chess. A little while later, the ex-dumbbell learns Portuguese in twenty minutes, just in time to save a lost boy’s life. He cleverly engineers…
