Whenever a great novel is turned into a play, something inevitably will be lost in the translation. When the play is also a musical, a lot more of the original evaporates into thin air to make room for the song and dance routines. The most one can hope for is…
Moliere’s Tartuffe, now in a searingly funny production by CityStage Ensemble at Jack’s Theater, takes on religious hypocrisy with such fervent zeal that it laid its original audience to waste. But then Moliere’s patron, the “Sun King” Louis XIV, was overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of the irreverent playwright and…
This is how Captain James Tiberius Kirk dies: He jumps across a broken bridge to retrieve a device whose function is too complicated, and frankly, too unimportant, to describe in any detail. The bridge gives way, and he falls into a ravine. Yes, Captain Kirk–the man who cheated death a…
Wednesday November 23 Touchy subject: Modern issues and sexual politics get an incendiary workout during David Mamet’s play Oleanna–in previews tonight at 6:30 in the Space Theatre, 14th and Curtis in the Plex. The work, delivered in Mamet’s shotgun style, pits a college professor against his faltering student–resulting in a…
Denver artist Louis Recchia’s raucous, jam-packed style has changed only slightly since he burst onto the Denver art scene in the early Eighties. And in Recchia’s case, that’s a positive: His trademark mirror-filled backgrounds, found-object tableaux and flat cartoony representations of lovers, dogs, ballerinas and everything else under the sun…
It may not run as smooth as brook water, but the production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes at the Country Dinner Playhouse sparkles with the sophisticated nonsense that made all those great Thirties musicals so endearing. Andrew Lloyd Webber and his clones couldn’t pop a tune like Cole Porter (or…
Gilbert and Sullivan turned comic opera into an extraordinary form of satire in their time. Tarantara! Tarantara! at the Denver Civic Theatre is a gleeful yet oddly dark tribute to the great team. Plays like H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and Trial by Jury are still funny because the…
The third and fourth generations of “magical realist” writers and moviemakers may have strayed from the path lit long ago by Borges, Garcia Marquez and Bunuel, but there’s still a bizarre metaphor or two lurking out there in the darkness of Latin America. Witness I Don’t Want to Talk About…
Bridget Gregory, the scheming vixen at the heart of John Dahl’s neo-noir thriller The Last Seduction, is already undergoing feminist scrutiny, and her credentials are said to have come up short in some quarters. I find this hilarious. For while those breakout queens of the road, Thelma and Louise, may…
Wednesday November 16 Jazz on the rocks: Thought-provoking, avant-garde music hasn’t exactly been a mainstay here in stolid old Denver, but that seems to be changing. More venues mean more variety, and as concert halls blossomed in the last year or so, so did the fare. In that spirit, the…
When Marcel Duchamp found an industrial bottle rack and proclaimed it art, he transformed fine art from an activity for a privileged few to one that everyone–and almost everything–can play. Almost eighty years later, people still delight in “found” objects, abandoning the formal grind of academic art to celebrate the…
Farce can be insipid drivel or sublime madness, depending on the play and the wit of the director. Fortunately, Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the University of Colorado-Boulder is more sublime than insipid, more caustic madness than silly drivel. And though this production can lose its way…
Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, now at the Theatre at Muddy’s, exposes the murky side of scientific inquiry. Even professors of archaeology, we learn, can be despicable and put their egos before the well-being of others. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Somebody really does have…
To hear David Mamet tell it, his two-character play Oleanna is such a lightning rod that, all over the country, couples who come to it wind up shouting at each other in the lobby and often leave separately. Judging from the public-radio interview I heard recently, Mamet is quite taken…
The new-wave ghouls who inhabit Anne Rice’s vampire novels don’t back off from the traditional threats. Wave a crucifix in the face of one of these doomed, androgynous wanderers and he’ll coldly laugh it off. Drive a stake into his heart and he’ll come right back at you, bloody in…
Wednesday November 9 All keyed up: Classical music will never seem the same after you’ve attended one of Jeffrey Siegel’s Keyboard Conversations, an annual mainstay at the Arvada Center, 6901 Wadsworth in Arvada. The internationally known pianist’s popular lecture/concert series, beginning its 1994-1995 season tonight at 7:30, combines Siegel’s renditions…
After a decade spent isolated in a Highlands barrio, Spark Gallery, the oldest of Denver’s cooperative art spaces, gained a new lease on life two years ago with its move to the industrial-grunge neighborhood near the Paris on the Platte coffeehouse. The once-sleepy Spark now buzzes with activity: A recent…
OpenStage Theatre’s production of The Philadelphia Story, now running in Fort Collins, proves once and for all that unemployed rich people dashing about trying to find true love in romantic comedies are no longer interesting. Whenever their plight did engage us in the Hollywood films of the past, it was…
A fine paradox has risen in the Mother Country: Some of the most expressive British films now portray characters who are notably inexpressive, buttoned up and repressed. Last year, Anthony Hopkins’s stoic butler in The Remains of the Day, paralyzed by his devotion to Stiff Upper Lip, won hearts and…
That rumble you hear down in the laboratory is mad Dr. Branagh putting a charge into the tragic creature De Niro. Whether we need it or not, there’s a new Frankenstein afoot, and it’s a freak of nature. Kenneth Branagh, the British boy wonder who’s given us a pair of…
Wednesday November 2 Signs of life: A bout with spinal meningitis left Peter Cook permanently deaf at the age of three, but that hasn’t kept the Chicago performance artist from expressing himself. This amazing dynamo’s Flying Word Project–a funny, topical and sometimes surreal poetic interpretation incorporating sign language, gestures and…
To be an innovator in today’s art world takes more than skill, knowledge and talent–it also helps to know how to focus an electron microscope or calculate the frequency of a microwave transmitter. These seemingly nonartistic techniques are only two elements involved in the extraordinary creations at the Arts Innovation…
