In a theater scene littered with satirical treatments of everything from Shakespeare to Russ Meyer films, there’s a new kidder in town. The Theatre Group’s The Kitten With a Whip Club Presents 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Valley of the Dolls is yet another outrageous showbiz parody. But though it’s all…
Clarence Day Jr.’s novel Life With Father, about his eccentric old dad and the close-knit family that revolved around him, made a delightful play and a wonderfully funny film (William Powell and Irene Dunne were a brilliant comic duo). Director Michael Curtiz’s impeccable timing in the 1947 movie is hard…
Smilla’s Sense of Snow feels like two movies. The first of them addresses the animating drama of the original Peter Hoeg novel–the quest of its young scientist/heroine, who is Greenlandic Inuit on her mother’s side and Danish on her father’s, to break out of cultural exile in Copenhagen and reclaim…
This must be the year for nonsensical movies involving automobiles, violence, confused identities and sex, directed by guys named Dave. No sooner has David Lynch led his disciples off on a wild-goose chase called Lost Highway, in which the main character morphs into somebody else, than David Cronenberg pops up…
In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an Irish Republican Army gunman with 24 kills to his credit–13 British soldiers and 11 police officers. After a bloody firefight in Belfast, he escapes to New York, where, helped by a pro-IRA judge (George Hearn), he is placed in the…
Thursday March 20 Every picture tells a story: LoDo’s Robischon Gallery just seems to roll out one good show after another, making it a regular must-visit on the local gallery circuit. Its latest exhibition, The Marriage of History and Fiction, features works based on historical imagery by Jack Balas along…
Texas artist Luis Jimenez is a familiar figure in the Denver art world. His works have been shown here over the last couple of decades, and in 1994 he was awarded a city commission for a monumental public sculpture, “Denver Mustang.” This piece, which has yet to be completed, will…
You may want to run home and brush your teeth after attending Steel Magnolias–all the sugar in playwright Robert Harling’s script is likely to encrust them. The play does have a few redeeming moments, some of which the production at the Aurora Fox manages to locate. But in the end,…
French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote The Lady of the Camellias as a tribute to a young lover he admired and lost when she died at the age of 22, burned out by high living and the scourge of the age, consumption. Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi kept the memory of the…
The new Richard Linklater film, subUrbia, adapted by Eric Bogosian from his 1994 play, opens with a long, unbroken tracking shot through a ticky-tacky Texas suburb, backed on the soundtrack by Gene Pitney wailing “Town Without Pity.” This logy, Jim Jarmusch-y opening hints at even greater anomie to come–and boy,…
I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary. The scene was a mixing room in the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, California, and the master of ceremonies was much-honored editor and sound expert Walter…
The young black Chicagoans in Theodore Witcher’s love jones are busy finding themselves–in writing or photography, on the winding paths of friendship, in the mysteries of life and career that loom ahead. Most of all, they’re trying to figure out the real deal on romantic love, but the ambiguities of…
You know you’re in neo-noir country when the first images on the screen turn out to be empty freeway ramps bathed in cold moonlight and oil-cracking towers looming in the fog. It’s as though Michelangelo Antonioni and Nicholas Ray had both been let loose again in Los Angeles to spread…
Thursday March 13 Campy trip: The title tells it all–20,000 Leagues Beneath the Valley of the Dolls, opening tonight at the Theatre on Broadway, doesn’t take much of anything too seriously. The first original stage concoction of a group calling itself the Kitten With a Whip Club, Dolls is billed…
When ceramic artist Maynard Tischler arrived in Denver from back East in 1966 to interview for a job in the art department at the University of Denver, he came away with a mixed reaction. Though he liked the sunshine out west, he wasn’t so thrilled to learn that the university’s…
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and most self-help books about the battle of the sexes are written by space cadets. Since many of these tomes are also about what losers men are when it comes to their treatment of women, comedian Rob Becker took it upon himself…
Playwright Joan Ackermann makes sense out of the commonplace. In last summer’s biggest local hit, Stanton’s Garage, she wove the eccentricities of unremarkable men and women into a thoroughly involving slice of life. Zara Spook and Other Lures, also a journey of personal discovery, is a delightful fanfare for the…
The backwaters of our great republic are probably no more infested than the cities with photographers whose pictures are pure accident, novelists in need of remedial English or actors chugging along on grand illusions of adequacy. Indeed, every busboy and skateboarder in Los Angeles is waiting for a callback from…
The Indian-born director Mira Nair has never hesitated to cross borders–cultural, geographical or temporal. Some of her previous films have examined aging dancers in a Bombay strip club, an expatriate newspaper vendor in New York who’s been separated from his pregnant wife in India, the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of a black…
In Return of the Jedi, the last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy, an intergalactic window display of creepy and cuddly critters upstages the human characters. All the conflicts are resolved between the virtuous rebels–Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher)–and the wicked Imperials,…
Thursday March 6 The beat goes on: When John Coltrane changed the face of jazz music with his imaginative modal improvisations, he owed more than a little to the smoothly shifting bedrock off which he played. Coltrane’s classic quartet recordings of the early ’60s were more often than not held…
That an art collection even exists at the University of Colorado in Boulder became known to the general public only thirteen years ago. And the circumstances for the revelation couldn’t have been more embarrassing: a newspaper report that CU’s multi-million-dollar art collection had been allowed to “rot” through neglect and…
