Like any good tragedy, the Broadway musical Titanic begins by introducing us to characters who yearn, Icarus-like, to “fabricate great works” that will confer a larger sense of meaning on their day-to-day lives. Citing such manmade marvels as the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids, Thomas…
As the majestic strains of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” play in the background prior to the start of The Complete History of America (Abridged), you can hear some devilish laughter as the audience anticipates a sharply satirical take on our nation’s checkered past. But when three grinning…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients: a rigged card game, a hydroponics…
The hot splendors of Carlos Saura’s Tango are supported by a scrap of plot, and that’s all it needs. The soul-searching Spanish director of Peppermint Frappe and Taxi, who previously showed us his passion for dance with 1995’s Flamenco, leaps into tangomania like a man falling hopelessly in love–with no…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her fifteenth…
Thursday March 4 The wonderful world of radar guns and livestock scales comes alive today during something a little bit different–a Colorado Measurement Standards Open House. It’s being thrown in celebration of National Weights and Measures Week, which commemorates the March 2, 1799, passing of the first weights and measures…
Humor is the great curative potion for pain. It’s a concept we’re all familiar with, and it’s something Canadian director David Adkin has mulled over for a long time. In making his film We’re Funny That Way, featuring eleven gay and lesbian comedians speaking their minds on and off stage…
We usually think of scientists as a pretty dry and serious bunch. But a new exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History, Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, based on Alaskan artist Ray Troll’s slightly weird vision of evolution, proves that even paleontologists–folks who spend their lives digging up and labeling…
By the early twentieth century, artists from the East Coast, as well as emigres from Europe, were making their way to the handful of art colonies springing up out West. They came to places like Santa Fe, Sedona, even Colorado Springs, for a variety of reasons, ranging from magnificent scenery…
If it’s true that the supreme test of any classic play lies in its adaptability to a modern director’s radical vision, then it’s also true that the playwright’s unique insight into the human condition is what made the play a classic in the first place. In fact, contemporary adaptations of…
When the time comes to pay final respects to a loved one, we’re usually compelled to talk about our loss–which means that in order for the cathartic experience to be complete, someone must listen to what we say. That’s the essential concept underlying Jeffrey Hatcher’s Three Viewings, a collection of…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
In James Moll’s documentary The Last Days, the third film the young producer/director has created for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, five Hungarian Jews who lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps and eventually immigrated to the United States describe their experiences before, during…
How a lad from Seattle became a scholar and virtuoso of the shakuhachi–a five-holed, vertical bamboo flute with a haunting timbre intrinsic to Japanese classic music–is a story in itself, but suffice it to say that David Wheeler, who now lives in Tokyo, is happy to be one. “I planned…
Shaun Landry’s story is completely believable. An actress first, but one with funny pretensions, the native of Chicago’s South Side worked her way up the theatrical comedy ranks–once upon a time–to find herself a waitress at Bennigan’s. “Improv comedy was all done by white guys predominantly from the suburbs,” she…
Thursday February 25 There are damn few throat singers in the world, let alone Tuvans–all of which serves to make an appearance by Huun-Huur Tu: Throat Singers of Tuva even more rare and wonderful than it already is. The Tuvan troupe, Eastern horsemen who hail from a remote area near…
The string of rooms on the ground floor of the funky Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts building that are rather grandly known as the CU Art Galleries have just undergone a makeover that makes them more worthy of the name. The formerly plain-Jane spaces have been dressed up with a fresh coat…
Infused with fantastical characters, references to Freemasonry and enchanting music, Mozart’s The Magic Flute lends itself to far-flung interpretation while embracing audiences of all tastes. You can set the two-act opera on the moon, against a blighted urban landscape or, as is the case with Opera Colorado’s enjoyable production, amid…
You can sense the anticipation building in the audience about fifteen minutes before the Country Dinner Playhouse’s production of Clue the Musical begins. Armed with tally sheets that list the suspects, weapons and rooms familiar to anyone who has played the board game of the musical’s title, most theatergoers seem…
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubblegum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving: It’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume and harmless enough, as long…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Thursday February 18 The funny stuff in Real Women Have Curves, opening tonight at 8 at El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High St., couldn’t be more proletarian, but the vein is super-rich: Josefina Lopez’s comedy about five Chicanas working in an L.A. garment factory who struggle to watch their weight…
