Colorado is booming, and so are its mystery authors, although nobody seems to have a solid clue as to what causes detective fiction to thrive in the Rockies. “It’s the air,” claims Boulder wordsmith Margaret Coel. A general growth in the state’s population has something to do with it, along…
Less than a year ago, when I learned that Mark Masuoka was set to take on the director’s job at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on January 1, 2000, I told him, “May God save your immortal soul.” Masuoka gave out a ready guffaw, but I wasn’t even half-kidding…
Open Press, the fine print-making shop, is currently featuring a handsome group show in its gallery. Relief Prints refers to a process of making prints with blocks, either wood or wood-faced linoleum, that have been carved with patterns in relief. The blocks are then inked and finally pressed onto paper…
For much of the past year, pundits the world over have wondered whether John Barton’s Tantalus would be a millennium-defining hit or flop. Much like the nature of Greek myths themselves, British theater legend Peter Hall’s twelve-hour-plus production proves less absolute, drifting between scenes of wonderment and rhetoric, feeling and…
Before others could reject him, Michael Chabon had convinced himself no one wanted to read an epic novel about comic-book creators, mythical Jewish monsters called golems, New York in the 1930s, daring escapes from Lithuania, Nazis, and the Empire State Building’s elevator system. He wanted to write the book–desperately, one…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that has slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Italian-Americans may be glad to note that Two Family House, which centers on the Italian community in Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict the men as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered…
Artists are an independent lot — they expose and capture their views in visual terms, giving tangible shape to what might seem, at first, like crazy ideas. Crazy, anyway, to an accountant. But when an artist marries another artist, there’s a rare symbiosis, a respect and understanding of process, built…
Few marchers in life’s rich pageant are enjoying their success as much as Candace Bushnell. A former columnist for the New York Observer whose feisty 1996 book Sex and the City inspired the ribald HBO series of the same name, Bushnell gleefully rejects the dour, professorial air worn by all…
Over the last few years, Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery has increasingly specialized in abstract painting, with contemporary takes on minimalism often given center stage. “I’ve come to it by living in this environment,” says director Robin Rule, referring both to the austerity of much of the Western landscape and…
Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff, exhibition director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, says she selected the three photographers in the group show Retro Truth because all are working with memories, with the past. The title says it all retro. The first featured photographer is New Yorker Carol Golemboski. In toned gelatin…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row-houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have your cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation you take away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
Local choreographer Deborah Reshotko spends a lot of time working with ordinary citizens to create community-building performances. Intermingling art and real life is clearly her thing, but her latest project is a bit different: A collaboration with New York dancer Martha Bowers under the auspices of an NEA Millennium Project…
The 23rd Denver International Film Festival leaves the gate Thursday with an opening-night screening at the Buell Theatre of David Mamet’s State and Main. How appropriate. The playwright/filmmaker’s latest effort is a comedy about the effects of a film crew’s visit on a quiet Vermont village; it stars Alec Baldwin,…
Over the last century, hundreds of dedicated, masterful artists have worked in Colorado. But while a score of them have achieved genuine international recognition — on the level of Vance Kirkland, for example — only a handful made art history. There’s Boardman Robinson, the social realist painter who worked in…
Is That Jazz? is a real oddball of a show, a collection of bizarre, yet somehow quaint, paintings, watercolors and a construction by Dallas artist David McCullough. The pieces are dense, opaque and thick — words that also describe the tangle of theoretical concepts that underlie his work. Like Jung,…
Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the…
The truth-telling games and litany of deceptions that litter Conundrum State Productions’ version of The Maiden¹s Prayer might be tolerable if director Scott Gibson were to provide Nicky Silver’s play with an adequate staging. As it is, the two-act play languishes under a slew of problems, including vast passages of…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
