Midway through Act One of Kingdom, it becomes clear that Richard Hellensen’s play about a corrupt theme-park company is as much an indictment of popular taste as it is a rebuke of the soulless purveyors of mass-merchandised shlock. Bringing to mind the retrofitted, ultra-functional environment of the movie Brazil, the…
Guido Contini’s inability to separate his art from his personal life is what both tortures and inspires him–at least that’s what he maintains throughout the musical Nine. The brilliant Italian filmmaker freely admits that his insatiable appetite for women sometimes gives him more problems than a modern-day Casanova should be…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-view–love it or loathe it. In the…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching or even just thinking about the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
It’s been half a century since the maestro, Vittorio De Sica, created the undisputed masterpiece of Italian neo-realism in the chaotic streets of post-war Rome. The Bicycle Thief, which begins a fiftieth-anniversary revival this Friday at the Mayan, was made on a minuscule budget, using a pair of aging cameras,…
Back in the heydey of local trolleydom, the Denver & Intermountain Railroad Interurban Car 25 wound her way from downtown Denver through west Denver and Lakewood to her final destination in Golden, passing through scenery both urban and bucolic. She was capable of going a good sixty miles an hour…
Bobbie Boyer retired last September after 24 years of teaching in Denver elementary schools. But in the last year of her career, she planted a little seed that’s about to bear fruit. During that final year, she taught third grade at Smith Elementary School–now known as Smith Renaissance School of…
Thursday May 13 If you remember anything about him, it’s that voice–the halting, weathered, lizard-like Germanic drone of Henry Kissinger. But anyone with the tiniest sense for recent world history knows that Kissinger’s also been a key player in the outcome of numerous global affairs, serving in both the Nixon…
The normally staid Museo de las Americas, on Santa Fe Drive, is now hosting Los Supersonicos: Two Chicanos Zoom Into the New Millennium, a raucous contemporary exhibit filled with humorous political commentary in the form of irreverent paintings, prints and sculptures. “Los Supersonicos is a grupo,” says Carlos Fresquez, who…
Oozing with oily arrogance, a cutthroat movie executive explains to a budding screenwriter that his script about two gay men dying of AIDS isn’t likely to play well in middle America. Like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment, he says, such fare can be difficult to sell even when it stars…
Despite an ominous, foreboding prologue, a powerful final scene and several impressive performances, Opera Colorado’s production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet is plagued by the same sort of clumsy staging, static crowd scenes and uninspired acting that was so pervasive in the revamped organization’s recent, ham-handed production of Verdi’s Macbeth…
Australia, the land once stocked with convicts battling for a second chance, loves the scrappy underdog. Whether it’s a pig named Babe, who thinks he’s a dog, or an adventurer named Crocodile Dundee, exiled to callous New York City with a huge knife in his belt, the Aussie little guy…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’s famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal (and frequently raunchy) dialogue and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross–whose body of work is…
Boulder photographer Joanna Pinneo has come full circle. First attracted to her medium on a college study trip to Spain, Pinneo came back to the States, took up the camera and traveled the world, capturing masterfully beautiful and humanistic images from the four corners of the planet. Those images appear…
Independent theater entrepreneur kryssi wyckoff-martin is that rare bird, a native Coloradan. Better yet, after studying theater with playwright Edward Albee and Circle in the Square founder Jose Quintero at the University of Houston, she even returned to her home state. Wyckoff-martin then “puttered around” with Citystage Ensemble and some…
Thursday May 6 The Denver Center Theater Company ends its season with a cultured leap of faith–well, sort of. Truth is, the two new and untested plays being presented as the mainstage portion of the DCTC’s annual US West TheatreFest are the works of Richard Hellesen and Nagle Jackson, both…
More than any other medium, ceramics has achieved a high level of artistic development in Colorado. The glorious early history of ceramics here was partly determined by the availability of high-quality clay. Beginning in the 1890s, potters from the East and Midwest migrated to Colorado in a kind of clay…
Many contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies, such as Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, effectively use ancient myths to address modern problems. In fact, when it was first produced in 1944, the French dramatist’s modern-dress tale about a woman who defies her uncle’s edict outlawing the burial of her dead brother managed to…
“I may be eccentric,” Alma Winemiller tells the man she has always loved from afar, “but not so eccentric that I don’t have the ordinary human need for love.” A few moments later, John Buchanan Jr., who has known Alma since they were children in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, confesses that…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on its hands and knees to woo Generation Y to…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
