SUN, 8/3 Winnie Wenglewick brought more than her furniture with her when she moved to Denver from Orlando two years ago. The improv theater entrepreneur also brought a novel, breakneck idea: the Extreme Playwright’s Adventure, a patented concept of her own invention that pits a dauntless crew of playwrights of…
Mark Masuoka, director of the Carson Masuoka Gallery, has put together the very impressive Ambient Lux, a group show featuring installation art that can be readily compared to the installation-filled biennial now playing at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. As many will recall, Masuoka launched the MCA’s biennial series with…
The Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) is presenting its annual summer feature, the members’ show; this year’s edition has the prosaic if eloquent title CPAC Members Juried Exhibit 2003. Membership in CPAC is not limited to serious photographers, meaning that amateurs are also represented in the ranks…
Director Robin McKee has made two risky choices for her production of The Taming of the Shrew. She has presented the play as pretty much an unadulterated love story, with Kate and Petruchio clearly gaga for each other from their very first encounter, despite all their subsequent yelling and jousting…
My primary conclusion after seeing Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Enrique Granados’s Goyescas at the Central City Opera was that hearing singers of this caliber in a reasonably-sized auditorium with good acoustics, their voices flowing freely and undistorted by mikes, is a rare privilege. Soprano Emily Pulley’s song about the…
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over continues a fine tradition of turning third installments of film series into three-dimensional efforts; Amityville 3-D and Jaws 3-D exploited the gimmick long before Robert Rodriguez made clever use of the numeral signifying the milking to death of a franchise. But what Rodriguez lacks –…
Like the wounded nation that loved him, he was uncertain and half crippled. So in the depths of the Great Depression, when a knock-kneed thoroughbred named Seabiscuit rose up to outrun the elite racehorses of the day, he became a folk hero suited to his moment and a fixture in…
Former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos’s infamous collection of shoes — over 1,500 pairs, some never even worn once — forever branded her an abomination when the revolution came a-knockin’ in 1986. Thank your lucky loafers, then, for Buckner Orphan Care International’s Shoes for Orphan Souls, a charity that has…
Thursday, July 24 Did you ever wonder what kind of artist will sit for hours, painstakingly reconstructing a fly’s eye or a parrot’s foot in super-real detail? It’s kind of like spending an afternoon counting the pores in your skin or snapping a slow close-up with nothing but your own…
“I don’t do standup,” Andy Dick insists by phone from Los Angeles. “Please! I stand there. I’m up on stage. But that’s about as close as I get to anything that’s called ‘standup.'” Best known from prime-time shows like Less Than Perfect and NewsRadio, in which he plays accident-prone dweebs,…
FRI, 7/25 Downtown Denver will be buzzing today as the streets are infiltrated by a swarm of scooter enthusiasts participating in this year’s Shopping Ride, a highlighted adjunct event in the sixth annual Mile High Mayhem scooter rally. “Still pushing junk” is the theme as the two-strokers take the road…
SAT, 7/26 Bringing frog racing to Empire required a real leap of faith. After all, the tiny mountain town is far from any lily ponds. Still, two decades ago, a farsighted mayor decided that a Frog Rodeo would be just the thing to put Empire on the map, and he…
SUN, 7/27 Now is the time for some testifying on the merits of hip-hop life by brother KRS-One. The performer (born Lawrence Parker but known professionally as Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), is in town to headline the July 26 Elemental Flavas show at Universal Lending Pavilion. But that…
SUN, 7/27 Although it’s a bit of a sideshow to the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver’s diverse Colorado Biennial showcase, the Colorado Film Biennial: 10 by 10 has also turned out to be its own three-ring circus. The ten finalists, chosen from nearly fifty entries in three categories, including narrative, avant-garde…
SAT, 7/26 After years of tolerating male-dominated music charts and watching mass-marketed boy bands hog the stage, female performers are giving the finger to the audition couch and bustin’ out on their own. National tours such as Lilith Fair and Ladyfest have set the precedent that chicks can riff, and…
The Colorado Rockies — the mountains, not the baseball team — have attracted painters for more than a hundred years. But it’s the period between 1900 and 1950, without question, that is the most significant for Colorado landscape painting, with scores of accomplished artists working here at that time. It’s…
The truly wonderful summer show at the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788), Divining: Art and Water in the West, provides Denver gallery-goers with some badly needed psychological refreshment on these hot, dry days. It’s water, water everywhere — at least by implication, because there’s not a real drop in…
One of the things that distinguish Shakespeare from all of the playwrights who preceded him (and almost all who followed) is the emotional complexity of his characters — and, indeed, of his entire worldview, in which comedy and tragedy are inextricably intertwined. Some of the characters in his comedies are…
The outline of a black eagle on a red background painted on banners and signs dominates the action of Su Teatro’s Papi, Me and Cesar Chavez. This eagle is the symbol of the United Farm Workers, founded by Chavez in the 1960s to improve the lot of the men, women…
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans before seeing the film, which was no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary — about a Great Neck, New York, family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddie-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children — has…
So much for those crackpot theories about flighty teenagers and their short attention spans. For four long years now, the bland pop star Mandy Moore has stuck in the brainpan of white adolescent America like a wad of bubble gum, and there’s no sign that she will loosen her grip…
“Callin’ out around the world/Are you ready for a brand new beat?/Summer’s here, and the time is right/For dancin’ in the streets.” Particularly in the Ballpark neighborhood, where the eleventh annual AT&T LoDo Music Festival hits the pavement this weekend. The two-day, four-block street party between Blake and Larimer and…
