The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver finally has a somewhat permanent address: Sakura Square. The ground-floor, two-story MoCA/D space fronts a garden done in a handsome Japanese style, with rocks, gravel and several of those tortured miniature Ponderosa pines that are native to our state. It makes an appropriate entrance for…
Everything an artist produces is, to varying degrees, a manifestation of his or her own experience. In the case of playwright Henrik Ibsen, scholars have long speculated that The Master Builder was the great Norwegian’s attempt to channel a few of his personal demons through a series of fascinating characters…
When Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace opened in January 1941, stiff competition from radio and film was fueling talk of the theater’s imminent demise. That idea permeates Kesselring’s only Broadway success. Fifty-eight years and several entertainment conglomerates later, though, the playwright’s old chestnut–filled with antiquated references, stock characters and…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely but true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial and error and error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting…
Stalking the crucial puberty-to-prom-night demographic can be a hazardous business, leading studio bankers and unwary moviemakers into some gruesomely familiar dead ends. That’s just what’s happened in the case of a sleep-inducing teen melodrama called Jawbreaker. Billed as the inevitable result of all the suburban slasher flicks and high-school comedies…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
When local promoter Pat McCullough decided to book a Denver installment of the Once Upon an Accordion tour last year, his associates thought he’d sprung a leak in his bellows. “When you tell people you’re going to have a concert with a bunch of accordion players,” McCullough says, “they look…
Thursday February 11 As hard as it is to imagine any jazz combo functioning without its bass player, one listen to the artistry of bassist Ray Drummond makes that prospect seem even more impossible: The tasteful veteran has provided the heart and soul of recordings and live performances by a…
One reason to attend this weekend’s Denver Jazz on Film Festival is for the rarities screened there–brilliant glimpses of musicians at work, caught for eternity on film or video. Many of those artists–Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae, Clifford Brown and Cannonball Adderly–are gone now, and clips such as these provide…
Since Virginia Folkestad received her bachelor of fine arts degree from Metropolitan State College in 1991, she’s gained a considerable reputation for her thoroughly thought-out environments. In 1993 she simultaneously joined Spark and Edge, guaranteeing at least two annual opportunities to express her artistic vision through the interrelated installations she…
Nearly a year before a rat’s nest of tape recordings and a Pandora’s box of kitschy souvenirs became props for the interminable Bill and Monica show, Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde had already earned kudos as the surprise hit of the off-Broadway season. A year’s…
After having paid double the price of admission to a movie, it’s a wonder that some of the Denver Victorian Playhouse’s patrons don’t object to their view of the stage being blocked by a large metal support pole or the night’s entertainment being compromised by a series of clearly amateur…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
Put all the world’s doll collectors in one place and they’d barely fill a cosmic thimble. But try narrowing the category down to collectors of black dolls, and you’d need a microscope to see them. Members of the local Touch of Color Doll Club think that’s just fine–it’s easier for…
Thursday February 4 Another arm of the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center’s Red Scare/Black List: McCarthyism and the Arts series gets under way tonight, adding film to a winter-long cauldron already boiling with lectures and an art exhibit. Naming Names: HUAC and Hollywood kicks off at 7 with a…
Burnis McCloud was one of those unsung heroes who go about what they do, first, because they have to, and second, because they love to. But time and talent are a rich combination, and over the years, McCloud, a prolific Denver photographer whose lens rested primarily on members of the…
Though still in its inaugural year, Ron Judish Fine Arts has already established itself as one of the city’s most interesting galleries. Although director Ron Judish has earned this reputation with excellent exhibits featuring nationally famous artists, he doesn’t ignore local talent. And his current show, 3, is a real…
The greatest comic playwright to grace the English stage in the less-than-fertile period between Shakespeare’s fantastical exit and Shaw’s boisterous entrance, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a dramatist of great-hearted humanity, sharp insight and exquisite wit. A gifted orator whose political opinions were prohibited full dramatic expression–Britain’s Licensing Act of 1737…
Learning from past mistakes isn’t always enough to prevent them from happening again. The 1978 murders of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, for instance, nearly crippled a city still reeling from the news that former housing-authority chairman Jim Jones had committed suicide along with 900…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian Central Station concerns the relationship between a homeless nine-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear award for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival (along with…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed forty-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
