This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen it before: When East High graduate Thaddeus Phillips hits the stage for his solo performances PlanetLear and The Tempest, both abbreviated versions of the Bard’s mainstream works shown under the collective banner of Shakespeare¹s Storms, Lear chills on the golf course while Prospero…
In the last decade, Boulder dance maven Danelle Helander journied to the far reaches of the world to complete a four-year cultural-exchange project with Boulder sister cities. With that behind her, she says, she went to Mali on a new mission last summer — without any preconceptions. “I knew from…
In the past, administrators at the Denver Art Museum have had a bad habit regarding the scheduling of temporary exhibitions. They’ve lined them up one at a time and then shuttered the rooms — usually the first-floor Stanton and Hamilton galleries — in the downtime between shows. Sometimes this state…
Fresh Art Gallery director Jeanie King is talking about expanding. “I’m looking at two places right now, but I’m not sure I’m going to take either one,” she says. “I’ll decide by the end of the month, with the idea of being open in the spring.” For the foreseeable future,…
The setting is the home of a wealthy Jewish family in Atlanta in 1939. A brightly decorated Christmas tree stands in a corner. Though Adolph, the breadwinner and de facto paterfamilias (he’s actually brother, brother-in-law and uncle to the numerous family members who occupy the premises), has read in the…
Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to use the name of the man interviewed below; indeed, it would have been expected, as he is no mere “spokesman,” the only identifier by which he is to be referred. Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to point out…
It might take a major suspension of disbelief (or the ignorance of a space alien who’s never seen a movie) for the average ticket buyer to embrace My First Mister, the good-natured and eventually uplifting first feature film directed by actress Christine Lahti. Because the premise here is that a…
It’s all here: madness, mayhem and murder, in no short supply. The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, have always had a knack for horror, as evidenced by their edgy gangster flicks, Menace II Society and Dead Presidents (which they’ve stated were influenced by the styles of Brian DePalma and Martin…
Some guys have the kind of face that suggests they’ve been to hell and back. The narrow, steely eyes, graying hair and deep lines crisscrossing the countenance of a James Coburn or a Clint Eastwood can practically do all of their acting for them in any role that calls for…
When times get tough in the world, as they no doubt have, there are two things you can do to ease the stress: First — what a no-brainer — you can simply do something. And then you can eat, because there’s no better way to affirm to yourself that you’re…
Director/film scholar Peter Bogdanovich, actress Debra Winger and Slackers creator Richard Linklater will be among the guests at the 24th Denver International Film Festival. The city’s annual cinematic debauch gets under way Thursday at the Buell Theatre with an opening-night showing of Lantana, a tense psychological drama from Australia’s Ray…
Capturing the human form has a very long tradition in the visual arts, going back over 12,000 years. And despite the rise of abstraction and its progeny a century ago, artists are still drawn to the figure as a subject redolent with possibilities. Here in Denver, a number of galleries…
Every once in a while, a show at one of the city’s alternative spaces is as good as — or better than — any exhibit in a prestigious gallery or museum. Chain Reaction: new works by Gail Wagner, at the Edge Gallery through Sunday, October 6, is just such a…
Almost everyone has some idea what Edmond Rostand’s famed play Cyrano de Bergerac is about: a man with an enormous nose who, sure he can never win the woman he loves, selflessly woos her on behalf of a handsome, equally lovestruck compadre. The plot is so resonant, so filled with…
I suspect I’m in trouble when I’m told at the door that The Vow runs an hour and forty-five minutes without intermission. Is someone intending to put me through a transformational experience? I’m not very good at those. They tend to leave me helpless with laughter. Or are the creators…
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars,…
Plot aside — way aside, as it’s almost a non-issue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about only one topic: the bald heads of Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing…
Thanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the U.S. In the wake of the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino,…
It’s not your old-fashioned chinoiserie, jade Buddhas and the like: In the European and Asian art markets, cutting-edge contemporary art from mainland China is the hottest thing on wheels — or oxcart. From the galleries of Beijing and Shanghai to the hallowed halls of Sotheby’s, this art — which may…
Think of jazz photography, and you must think of Herman Leonard, the shutterbug whose moody shots of the ’40s and ’50s jazz pantheon of 52nd Street and Harlem capture the soul of that musical era like the backlit wisps of smoke so often seen drifting through his famous frames. Those…
Like that of the academic world, national television and professional football, the art world’s season starts in the fall. Although a few pre-season openers were unveiled in Denver over Labor Day weekend, most of the 2001-2002 entries were set to open a week or two later. I don’t need to…
About thirty years ago, serious fine-art photographers began taking scenic shots that incorporated not only the magnificent landscape — the focus of their predecessors — but also glimpses of development’s litter. By now these poignant dichotomies, once so groundbreaking, are a standard of contemporary landscape photography, particularly here in the…
