Life Is a Cabaret

Mare Trevathan, GerRee Hinshaw and Melanie Owen Padilla, the very funny and multi-talented trio behind Balls! A Holiday Spectacular, keep bringing the benefit variety show back every holiday season for some very valid reasons, one of the most important being that it serves an important urban niche: “It fills some…

Hanukkah Hoedown

While the debate still rages over whether applesauce or sour cream is the ultimate latke topping, the real question is, where can one get good sufganiyot? The fresh baked Israeli-style jelly doughnuts (and latkes with toppings, too) will be in abundance tonight at Festival of Lights, the second annual collaborative…

All Is Bright

They’ve got butterflies, and they’ve got lights. Also, glowing scorpions — and in the museum’s Rainforest conservatory, “firefly” lights imitating the real thing. And you say you were looking for something different this holiday season? The halls of the Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Center, normally, um, a beehive of invertebrate…

Bad Elf

Screaming children, department stores, seasonal jobs, green velvet costumes. These are just a few staples of the holiday spirit, and it’s this madness that writer David Sedaris covered in SantaLand Diaries, an essay about his day-to-day life as an elf at Macy’s that first appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition in…

Rejoice for the Replay

I’ve seen the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of A Christmas Carol more than once, and as someone who was brought up on a diet of Mr. Magoo, Reginald Owen, that nice thick novel by Charles Dickens and, later, Bill Murray in Scrooged, I never tire of it: Well-played by…

The Hard Cell

Over the past few years, the iPhone has become a de facto camera for many people, from professional photographers to the average person looking for a point-and-shoot. Over that time, the phone as a photography tool has lost a lot of its kitsch value. And with the new show iPhoneography,…

Going To the Birds

At the risk of pigeonholing MCA Denver, the city’s bastion of contemporary cool seems to focus a lot on conceptual projects, and its latest, Thinking About Flying, is no exception. To put the, uh, show together, Pittsburgh-based artist Jon Rubin asked to have a pigeon coop installed on the roof…

Star Gazing

In the waning days of 2011, in the midst of holiday-season cheer, many folks turn to the movies — December blockbusters, to be sure, but also Oscar contenders. For Academy Award geeks, this is the season to both catch up with past and last-minutes entrants and look ahead, and if…

Scenic Sprawl

Robert Adams was teaching English at Colorado College in the early 1960s when he met Myron Wood, who taught him the basics of photography. But instead of taking the traditional approach of focusing on scenic beauty, Adams began capturing the ugliness of suburban sprawl — and it made him famous…

Catherine Robles Shaw captures the fine art of Tebowing

Nederland santera Catherine Robles Shaw usually sticks to the basics when creating her lovely retablos — plaques depicting the saints that are hand-carved and painted in a folk style that’s been handed down over hundreds of years in northern New Mexico and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Contemporizing the old art…

Telluride hosts FIS Snowboardcross World Cup this week

Governor John Hickenlooper and others who are eager to put together a Colorado bid for a future Winter Olympics Games must be making a case study out of our state’s worldliness this month. Since Thanksgiving, Colorado has hosted the Aspen Winternational FIS Women’s World Cup at Aspen Mountain and the…

Are you ready for 2012? Watch The True Mayan Prophecy tonight

Good news! The world is not going to end next December 21, no matter what people insist the Mayan calendar predicts. Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, the founders of PeaceJam, exploded that myth in 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, the award-winning film they released last year that will air tonight…

Hey, hot tranny: Where’d you get that sparkly tank top?

Long, long ago, in the fashion lexicon of yesteryear, satin meant “fancy.” But today, in the modern world of casual everything, sequins mean “fancy.” How fancy? Fancy, as in what you can wear with jeans to a holiday party. This is where sparkly tank tops come into play. Since fancy…

USA Pro Cycling Challenge celebrates 2012 host cities today

Today was supposed to be the big reveal of the host cities for the 2012 Pro Cycling Challenge — but that list leaked on Friday, in the Denver Post. Still, organizers are going to make an event out of the announcement, with a live Internet broadcast at 5:15 p.m. MST…

Alfie gives Boulder something to crow about

Denver has Sun Spot, a giant dog sculpture created out of dog tags outside the new municipal animal shelter. Now Boulder has Alfie, a huge rooster made out of more than 3,000 pieces of old farm equipment by longtime local artist Robert Bellows. The sculpture was dedicated this past weekend…

Reader: Stoked to see Kevin Pearce get back on board

Two years after a traumatic brain injury knocked him out of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Kevin Pearce is back on board — and will be riding one in Breckenridge today, before he moves behind the mike for this week’s Winter Dew Tour’s Nike Open. Pearce emceed the U.S. Grand Prix…

Artbeat: There’s lots on view this holiday season at Robischon

Though the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788, www.robischongallery.com) is a commercial enterprise, it’s indistinguishable from a tidy downtown museum in appearance and atmosphere. This has to do both with the relentless high quality of the offerings there and the venue’s enormous size. As you can imagine, that means there’s…

Now Playing

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden, but playwright Laura Eason has done a terrific job with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Her playhas energy and charm, and it really does communicate the fears, uncertainties and joys of childhood, as well as the atmosphere of…