Midway through Act Two of The Laramie Project, a pair of performers reenact one of the 200 interviews they conducted with the people of Laramie, Wyoming, after the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was robbed, beaten, bound and left for dead on a remote rail fence…
Seven months after Arthur Kopit’s father suffered a stroke, National Public Radio commissioned the author of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad to write a play for NPR’s Earplay series. While Kopit longed for a deeper understanding of his father’s altered…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is somewhat backward, consider that of late 1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
In bold counterpoint to the swinging girders of a multimillion-dollar complex slowly rising over the intersection of 16th and Market streets these days, a new burst of color stands out against the grit and grime of the bustling construction site. As departing mall shuttles whiz by and high-heeled businesswomen clack…
Last Thursday, Jesse Ventura, former professional wrestler and current governor of Minnesota, stepped off a light-rail train and marched into the 106-year-old Buckhorn Exchange, where the big, tough guy ordered…a chicken sandwich. Buffalo Bill must have been rolling over in his grave — which is definitely on Lookout Mountain, despite…
The story of how Rhonda Piggins came to be called Simbala runs quite parallel to the story of how Simbala came to be a jewelry and African-art entrepreneur. Both have to do with the very human art of becoming the person you were meant to be, by whatever magical means…
Manitou Springs painter Sushe Felix, whose work became well-known in the mid-1980s, has really been on a roll lately. Every time we turn around, it seems like there’s something by her in front of us. One of her abstracted landscape paintings was chosen as the publicity image for the Colorado…
In the main space at Pirate, John Crandall has brought in a handful of abstract paintings for his solo, Infinitely Minute. Several large and aesthetically ambitious paintings have been placed on top of shiny silver paint cans and are lined up leaning against the walls. The most successful of this…
Atticus Finch is perhaps the only resident of Depression-era Maycomb, Alabama, who believes that it’s possible to live by high-minded principles. He doesn’t merely espouse empty eloquence — the Southern lawyer accepts “payments” of turnip greens, hickory nuts and firewood from a dirt-poor farmer who desperately needs legal help he…
1776 winds up being more — and less — of a history lesson than audiences might expect. Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s award-winning musical, which premiered on Broadway more than thirty years ago, is an enjoyable retelling of the events that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age seventy. In Reindeer Games, a relentless, and relentlessly witty, crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
In the early ’90s, British actor Tim Roth made his bones with American audiences as one of Quentin Tarantino’s anointed hipsters: After getting gruesomely shot to pieces in Reservoir Dogs and sticking up a pancake house with batty Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction, Roth’s credentials as a bad cat were…
Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Then marvel at Michael Douglas showing off his wide spectrum of inert doldrums and tedious self-pity. Thrill to…
Tom Goldsmith, the man behind the Denver Jazz on Film Festival, has assembled an impressive lineup of flicks for his brainchild’s fourth edition. The event’s roster features several movies making their U.S. debuts, including In the Key of Eh, about ECM recording artist Paul Bley; a pair of projects by…
Each year on or around February 19, members of the Japanese-American community gather for a complicated ceremony. A mixture of somber observance, flat-out activism and unbridled hope for the future, the annual Day of Remembrance is a protracted commemoration of one of this country’s darker lapses in judgment: the day…
It’s really quite inspiring the way the entire metro art world is focusing, at least briefly, on ceramic artists, a group that is typically unsung, ignored and rarely exhibited around here. A year and a half ago, artist and Auraria art professor Rodger Lang began calling the city’s museums, art…
The O’Sullivan Arts Center is just a couple of big rooms in an old, nondescript building on the Regis University campus. But somehow, there’s always a good show on display, like the impressive Bill Joseph: A Retrospective, which fills the place now. Joseph, who has been making art in Denver…
The African Company Presents Richard III recounts events that, four decades before the Civil War, prompted the nation’s first African-American theater group to perform a Shakespearean tragedy next door to the Manhattan auditorium where a white company’s version was in production. Despite threats of civil unrest and objections from an…
Years before playwrights decided that raw emoting was preferable to shaded feeling and thought, Harold Pinter masterfully exploited the ambiguities of modern communication. Like Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot was described by one critic as a collection of “wordless meanings and meaningless words,” Pinter delved into the notion that…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
Even at just 92 minutes, Hanging Up feels endless. Intended as a humorous, heartwarming take on dysfunctional family relationships, this film doesn’t work as comedy or drama or anything in between. Given its wealth of above-the-line talent — director and costar Diane Keaton, writers Delia and Nora Ephron and actresses…
