I don’t think I’d call this a good production of Shakespeare’s high-spirited sexual tease of a play. The problem isn’t that the Theatre Group’s Twelfth Night is staged on a shoestring — a lot of local companies overcome that limitation — or that many of the costumes (with the exception…
For those with any kind of pop-culture memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was, too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions that…
Since average folk can’t often afford to fly to Paris (unless they live, say, in Lyon), 93-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira offers some consolation in the form of I¹m Going Home (Je Rentre à la Maison). Shot more than two years ago, it’s a seemingly sweet and deceptively simple…
Everyone who’s seen it seems to agree that Charles Busch’s newest play, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, is funny. More than funny: “laugh-filled,” “witty” and “hilarious.” It’s a specific kind of funny, too, the kind that centers on New York City and has at its heart a wry, desperate,…
Though there’s no sensible way to fathom the first anniversary of unfathomable events of September 11, we’ll somehow all have to remember how and why things changed in America one year ago. For most, the day will carry with it a weight of reflection that’s distanced from the buy-sell-or-trade mentality…
The art season runs from September to May, roughly paralleling the academic year. There is even a corollary to summer school, in the form of the art world’s light summer season, which is just now winding down. It’s September, the kids are back in school, and a new season is…
There’s an elegant solo exhibit at Edge Gallery that’s definitely worth seeing. Installed in the middle space at the co-op, Intersections features the latest work on paper by well-respected Denver artist Susan Goldstein. The meaning of the show’s title is hard to pinpoint. As Goldstein herself suggests in the statement…
The set is an arrangement of black platforms and boxes. It stretches a long, long way back so that — despite the overall intimacy of the theater — an actor standing in the rear looks very small and far away. Periodically, grotesque forms limp, shamble or crawl around this space…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: Tough-yet-sensitive cop…
Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…
How many times was Peter Sagal told he has the perfect radio voice before he became host of National Public Radio’s weekend news quiz game Wait Wait…Don¹t Tell Me!? Exactly none, he says, mellifluously. In fact, smooth-talker Sagal’s elegant vocal cords had never set foot, so to speak, in a…
Most rock bands come and go. Others stick around for a decade or more, and a few, such as the Stones and the Who, seem to have been touring since the invention of fire. But no band has transcended the bounds of space and time in quite the same way…
For the past few years, one of Denver’s most urbane public spaces — Skyline Park, by world-renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin — has been continually endangered by various remodeling plans, some of which include the threat of demolition. Let’s put it this way: To even discuss the destruction of Skyline…
For almost twenty years, the Curtis Arts & Humanities Center (2349 East Orchard Road, Greenwood Village, 303-797-1779) has sponsored an annual exhibition open to all artists in Colorado. The process goes like this: Artists deliver original works (not slides), and a celebrity juror goes through the hundreds of entries and…
In Oscar Wilde’s famed novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist remains youthful and beautiful through all the decades of his evil life. Only his portrait, hidden in the attic, reveals the ravages of sin and time. Dorian Gray, the OpenStage musical production now showing in Fort Collins, worked…
Any young movie director seeking to make a mark in the underworld gravitates to certain conventions of the crime genre. Major bloodletting is a must. It doesn’t hurt to stage a power struggle between an established mob boss and his overly ambitious protégé, preferably with undertones of Greek tragedy. There…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but…
Bathed in the glow of a tiki torch, trapped on a deserted island — or stage — with nothing more than their funny bones, a group of Denver comics will try to outlast each other in the first Improv Survivor. As in other improvisational shows, these ten players will solicit…
Sick of too-hip-for-you nightclubs, with their complicated cocktails, goateed pretty boys and bitchy size-2 cocktail waitresses? Then what you need is an unpretentious bar with a blaring sound system and beer-sippin’ folks looking for love. You need a tavern whose dress code demands shoes that can’t be sullied by tipped-over…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
Perhaps this will give you some idea of the effect of I Love a Piano: The morning after seeing it, seated in my hairstylist’s chair while he snipped away, I started humming “Cheek to Cheek.” Just as I was beginning to wonder if I was embarrassing him and should stop,…
Mark Lundholm is a terrific performer. He holds your attention effortlessly. He’s vital, funny and charming, and he also communicates strong emotion, moving freely from anguish to laughter and back again. (If anyone wants to excerpt this review for publicity purposes, this is where to stop.) But even though Lundholm…
