SUN, 7/13 It’s fitting that the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture’s first Lazarus Family Summer Concert would feature a group called Mikveh: The all-woman klezmer supergroup is named after the ritual bath that is a monthly tradition for many Jewish women. (The practice also happens to be the subject…
For the past ten years or so, the Denver Art Museum has presented one important exhibit after another, focusing on art from the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first ones of the twentieth. As a result, Denver audiences have enjoyed numerous explorations of such relevant topics as…
The exhibit ReconFIGURED: Persons and Personas of the Permanent Collection, on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-634-5581), includes an eclectic assortment of pieces that range widely in style and date. One standout among this mixed bag is the institution’s famous John…
A life in art requires absolute dedication. We all know about the obsessive writing and rewriting, the pain-filled, sweaty workouts in the ballet studio and the hours of instrument practice of the serious artist. It’s this kind of passion that’s on view in Take Me Out to the Ball Game…
This revival of 42nd Street is a musical-comedy lover’s musical comedy, a self-referential tribute to an artform that’s already self-referential and artificial at its most sincere. Writers Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble don’t even try to create multi-dimensional characters or to imbue the hoary old plot (bright-eyed ingenue becomes a…
Much like “hilarious Islamic comedy” or “sublime Affleck picture,” the term “terrific second sequel” isn’t bandied about very much. Name one. Took you a minute, didn’t it? Don’t be ashamed — there are probably support groups for fans of Smokey and the Bandit III. Generally, creative juices are drained by…
The Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James rose to prominence in 1994 with Hoop Dreams, a gritty, uncomfortably intimate portrait of two inner-city kids who try to escape poverty and deprivation through basketball. Shot over four years, it was at once a stirring indictment of the social-services bureaucracy, a tribute to family…
The Boulder Public Library has been running a Stanley Kubrick retrospective since early May as part of its popular free summer movie series, and it’s difficult to imagine a more welcome return to the big screen than Kubrick’s gorgeous vision of eighteenth-century Europe, Barry Lyndon (1975). Adapted from William Makepeace…
“I am a woman, and I am beautiful, and I am black,” says Panther, a spoken-word artist. “We are all sisters, and we are all beautiful, and everyone else needs to know that now.” Panther joins forces with poets Bianca Mikahn and Lady Speech in Black Woman Love, a hip-hop…
Thursday, July 3 Who’s warming up Red Rocks for the Dead? John Popper and the rest of Blues Traveler, of course, continuing what’s become their annual tradition of spending the Fourth under the stars at Colorado’s most awesome natural amphitheater. Gates open today and tomorrow at 4 p.m. for shows…
It’s appropriate, says Judy Anderson, that the PlatteForum arts and education project stands at the base of the Millennium Bridge. According to the artist and executive director, the nine-month-old initiative is all about connections. “It’s a working collaboration with the community,” Anderson explains. “Arts. Education. Youth. Everything we do is…
Here’s the thing about Sunday brunch at Pierre’s Supper Club: From the outside, the place, at 2157 Downing Street, looks closed. Sure, this fifty-year-old Denver institution can still pack ’em in on Friday and Saturday nights, but on Sunday afternoons — when you would think a supper club should be…
FRI, 7/4 Ron Cavill, an investment advisor from Genesee, wants to make some noise on the Fourth of July. So he’ll hop on his purple 1500cc Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad and join hundreds of friends and fellow motorheads as they roll into the second annual Liberty Ride n’ Rod. Participants, who…
TUES, 7/8 Where’s the last place your mother wanted to catch you hanging out on a summer evening? No contest: It was the pool hall, where boys became men (and girls became sharks) while racking them up in the back-room murk. The game of billiards comes with twenty tons of…
FRI, 7/4 Tai Beldock of Denver’s Erico Motorsports wants the U.S. to give equal time to European motorcycles. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival, she says, eschews the Harley’s stylish overseas cousins with its all-Harley “Art on Two Wheels” display. So her faction decided to put on its own show, Moto…
SUN, 7/6 Do you remember your first Grateful Dead concert? The one you went to before Jerry got really tired and grizzled? Maybe you’re having a hard time remembering after the concoction of mind erasers you took that day, but it wouldn’t have been a real Dead concert otherwise, right?…
On the morning of Thursday, June 12, Mayor Wellington Webb and First Lady Wilma Webb, among a host of political and art world luminaries, dedicated the most expensive sculpture ever erected in Denver, “The Dancers,” by international art star Jonathan Borofsky. The public was invited to the event, and I…
The commercial strip that lines Tennyson Street in northwest Denver has changed a lot over the last few years. Whereas once it was a collection of thrift shops and laundromats, it is now home to loft buildings, coffee shops and specialty stores. In the last category are Metro Frame Works…
I really wanted to be a lot more amused by The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) than I was. Some of the bits were clever, and the three appealing actors — Keith Hershman, C.J. Hosier and Eric Mather — worked so damn hard. Sadly, the audience was tiny on…
Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana is essentially a one-joke play. Fortunately, the joke is so savage, and it’s taken to such outrageous and unthinkable lengths, that the result is a startling and original evening of theater. It doesn’t hurt that the dialogue is always inventive and sometimes downright lunatic, or…
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they’d come on conservative talk-radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for comparing…
Once in a while, a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
