If America were as ballet mad now as it was in the 1970s, or if last year’s Center Stage were as good a movie as The Turning Point, the name Ethan Stiefel would be as iconic as the name Mikhail Baryshnikov. It’s certainly familiar to anyone with even a passing…
When Cydney Payton announced last summer that she was resigning as director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, groans of despair were heard all along the Front Range. Even worse was that she had no plans to continue working in the art world. This circumstance represented a genuine tragedy,…
The plot of Shakespeare’s As You Like It resembles that of a summer romance movie. Unfortunately, the Disneyfied version being presented by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival cheapens the play’s gentle beauty and robs the dialogue of its richness. As directed by Lynn Nichols, the show is riddled with drawn-out special…
When the Central City Opera revived Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe a few seasons back, thunderous applause and full-voiced cheers filled the tiny theater for a full five minutes as a steady barrage of flower bouquets, many hurled from the far reaches of the balcony, showered the stage…
There is only one reason Jon Favreau’s new film is called Made. Not too long ago, his old friend and co-star Vince Vaughn called him up and told him, in no uncertain terms, “You gotta write something that can get made.” It was less a demand than it was a…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes that has become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker — the poor man’s Eddie Murphy, who now pockets more than the real thing per picture — and Chan have just…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s Off-Off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…
What will it take to win this year’s upcoming National Slam Poetry Competition? Denver’s team, nearly a carbon copy of the one that lost in Providence last year, thinks it’ll have a fighting chance when 56 squads meet in Seattle beginning on Tuesday. Spokesman and returning member Seth says last…
“It’s hard to write mysteries,” author Walter Mosley notes, “because you have to worry about plot so much. In that way, it’s much harder than any other arm of literature. But that’s not why I stopped writing them. I stopped because I wanted to write different things — and I…
Photography is unavoidably linked to the summer, because nearly everyone takes a camera along on vacation. This point was brought home to me last week when, stopped at the light at Colfax Avenue and Lincoln Street, I saw a group of Buddhist monks in traditional robes taking snapshots of one…
Jeanie King’s Fresh Art Gallery (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255) is pretty crowded right now, filled to the max with The Colorists, a show featuring abstract paintings and sculptures by a quartet of Denver artists. The floors of the two small rooms that make up Fresh Art are littered with sculptures,…
Shakespearean companies have tried various approaches to producing the three parts of Henry VI, plays that are believed to have been written with the help of at least one collaborator. In 1963, Tantalus co-creators John Barton and Peter Hall combined the unwieldy trilogy with Richard III to make The Wars…
Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on screen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in…
Actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995, U.S. release, 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii, all of these films…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…
Fishing has long been a man’s domain, especially in Florida, where the big boys go out on big boats to hook really big fish. Men, it seems, have something to prove as fishermen, while the girls just want to have fun. Therefore, coed angling experiences can be humiliating for members…
Been there, done that. There are psychologists and birdwatchers and cowboys and gourmands solving crimes in books these days, along with the tried-and-true police detectives, private gumshoes and busybodies of classic mystery lore. So can the detective fiction/thriller market possibly support yet another brand of hero? Wyoming mystery writer C.J…
Flying way below the region’s art radar right now — it hasn’t even appeared in most of the city’s gallery listings — is Fetem, a thematically linked exhibit of sculptures by Bryan Andrews, a twenty-something artist who has been exhibiting locally for the last few years. The show is on…
In the park informally known as the Charles Heartling Sculpture Park, located northwest of the intersection of Ninth Street and Canyon Boulevard in Boulder, well-known sculptor Bill Vielehr is the subject of an outdoor exhibition titled 3-D Drawings (Search for the Mark). The exhibit, which is visible from the street,…
What a difference no-nonsense direction makes. Elizabeth Huddle heeds the clues in Shakespeare’s text instead of making her own mystery of them — as have many Colorado Shakespeare Festival directors before her — and the performers in her version of King Lear, led by guest artist Raye Birk’s virtuoso turn…
