Helen Littlejohn had never dabbled in art until one day in the early 1990s, when her son brought home a mask-making project from his middle school. “He opened me up to something in the universe that has no limits,” says the public-relations professional. “I thought I would try it. And…
When local historian and native nice Jewish boy Phil Goodstein steps up to the podium at the Mercury Cafe this Friday evening to speak on Blarney! Denver¹s Wild Irish Heritage, it’ll be as Phil O’Goodstein. Or, in fact, that’s “Oy Goodstein,” an honorary appellative he’ll enhance with a fake Irish…
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is one of the finest early-modern buildings in the country, which means it’s the rarest kind of treasure in Colorado’s bleak architectural environment. Only such monuments as the prehistoric ruins at Mesa Verde and the 1960s Air Force Academy Chapel, by Walter Netsch of…
The small but smart-looking Fresh Art Gallery (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255) is currently presenting encaustic evolution, which officially includes four artists and unofficially includes another five, all of whom use encaustic to create their paintings and sculptures. The gang of four is made up of Andrew Speer, Rachel Urioste, John…
The Aurora Fox Arts Center’s The Memory of Water has some passable portrayals, but the play’s complex family relationships don’t progress beyond the embryonic stage. Plagued by glacial pacing, wretched British accents and frequent directorial miscues, English playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s touching work devolves into a mishmash of tinny one-liners and…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me You Them (Eu, Tu, Eles) is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit her life. Without knowing it, they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with…
Enemy at the Gates is a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin romance novel. No doubt director and co-writer Jean-Jacques Annaud thought he was making a Serious Film, but what he ended up with is…
As any mother of a library-going three-year-old will tell you, returning 21 thin picture books on time every three weeks is easier said than done. There’s always at least one shoved under the bed, to be found days — or months — later, unread and buried in dust bunnies. But…
Ah, those were the days. Rockin’ with Alan Hodges and His Nite Owls. Cruising your T-Bird to the Frosted Scotchman. Catching fouls at Bears Stadium and swilling Duffy’s soda pop. The names weren’t nationally known, but the ethos certainly was: ’50s Denver, like most other urban centers across the States,…
Lewis Sharp, director of the Denver Art Museum, was in his typical ebullient mood when he addressed an assembled group of the media recently. The occasion was the unveiling of the model for the new wing being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the Berlin-based American architect who’s one of the hottest…
For some reason, the little room off the entry at Pirate (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) always seems to be hosting an exhibit worth seeing. The space, dubbed ILK @ Pirate to distinguish it as a separate, alternative space, is currently showing higgled ripples, featuring the mostly three-dimensional work of young…
The Arvada Center’s production of The Dinosaur Play is filled with a wide array of sights and sounds, but the most impressive spectacle occurs shortly after the lights dim, when a stodgy professor wanders on stage and delivers a lecture about paleontology. The audience, made up almost entirely of elementary…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film-actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary probably…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, from 1996, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast…
From Arnold’s Terminator movies to the so-bad-it’s-good Small Wonder sitcom, the brains behind modern pop culture have rammed one robotic image after another down the public’s throat. These android icons usually fall into one of two camps: They’re either adorable fodder for the toy industry or cold, remorseless killing machines…
Sometime after 1 p.m. on Sunday, Barry “Wildman” Snyder expects to paste a few final decals — including a red-with-blue-striped Dole label and a classic Chiquita blue oval — on “My Sticka Zappa,” a thirty-by-forty-inch interpretation of the late rocker Frank sitting on a toilet. To create this masterpiece, the…
There’s no question that oil paints were used to create the paintings in Jeffrey Keith: Recent Work. Invisible plumes of airborne linseed oil immediately engulf anyone who enters the Rule Gallery, where the show is on display. It’s not a light aroma that simply wafts through the room — it’s…
Installed below street level along the greenbelt east of Broadway in Englewood is a hidden attraction: the Dry Creek Sculpture Garden. It may be entered at various points, but the easiest route is to take one of the pedestrian ramps on Hampden Avenue that lead down to a walkway running…
What becomes of an entire class of people when its members are summarily rounded up like common criminals, even though they’ve never committed any crimes? Are they to maintain their dignity when told that such imprisonment is for their own protection? Should they hold fast to democracy’s ideals when they’ve…
Filled with more raunch than a Friars Club roast, the first part of Bag Ladies Ball is initially hard to swallow. The interactive dinner-theater show, being staged in a second-floor meeting room at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in central Denver, is playwright and director Melvyn Benetti’s response to…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has a handful of films to his credit, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
