Thursday April 4 Sheer poetry: Bet you didn’t know April is National Poetry Month. True, the fragile, sometimes-ridiculed literary genre won’t change the world, but it does, by virtue of its rich, metaphoric language and deep insights, help make our mean old planet a slightly nicer place. That’s reason enough…
The comet Hyakutake has just passed close enough–9 million miles or so–to be seen from the earth without the aid of a telescope. Just over a year ago, the comet was completely unknown, even to the amateur astronomer in Japan who ultimately discovered it and for whom it was named;…
Rootless youth trying to figure it all out, angry young men and women, bright, soulful and lost–it may sound very Rebel Without a Cause, but Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia at the Theatre on Broadway is wholly contemporary. From the marvelous graffiti art decorating the set to the Rollerblades on Buff’s energetic…
The Thirties produced great Hollywood comedies and a few equally dazzling Broadway offerings–sophisticated yet crazed, darkly perceptive about human frailty, and often politically subversive (all the best comedy is subversive in one way or another). The Marx Brothers, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, W.C. Fields, Noel Coward, Ben Hecht and so…
At the beginning of Primal Fear, an alleged courtroom thriller, defense attorney Martin Vail, portrayed by Richard Gere, is unctuous, facile. In conversations with a journalist (Jack Connerman) whose sole purpose in the script is to serve as an excuse for a flood of exposition, Vail–a former Chicago state’s attorney,…
Thursday March 28 Star man: Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo originally was written in response to the rise of Nazi Germany. But it’s as much the story of a famous astronomer as it is an examination of the uneasy relationship between free-thinking scientists and fascist ideology. Brecht, who equated Galileo’s struggle against…
Only a handful of Colorado artists are genuinely famous–unless, of course, we’re talking about artists who work in ceramics. In that field, Colorado can point to a tradition that has produced many important figures, several of whom are known around the world. Think of Nan and Jim McKinnell, Paul Soldner,…
Big hair, ponytails and full skirts with bobby socks may sound like the Fifties, but the bubblegum in Suds has a definite Sixties flavor. The compilation musical at the Vogue Theatre is one of those nostalgia trips meant to tickle the boomers–and their grown-up babies who grew up hearing replays…
The young always accuse the previous generation of screwing up the world–and very often for good reason. But when they try to go and fix it, there’s another fine mess to clean up. Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek’s Tango is a social allegory with an absurdist twist–there’s a thread of reason…
Girl 6 has slipped into the theaters without the fanfare that ordinarily accompanies a new Spike Lee movie. That may be just as well, because this tart little comedy about a struggling actress who makes ends meet by serving up phone sex has none of Lee’s usual in-your-face rhetoric or…
When Exorcist director William Friedkin remade Henri-Georges Clouzot’s great existential thriller The Wages of Fear in 1977, he dedicated Sorcerer to Clouzot, as a respectful student might. By contrast, the perpetrators of a new version of Diabolique, which is the late M. Clouzot’s most famous film, don’t even bother acknowledging…
Thursday March 21 A walk on the wild side: There’s not much one can say about Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed that hasn’t already been said: The influential, timeless and poetic elder statesman of urban rock has seen it all, done it all, commented on it all and come through…
It’s tempting to compare Denver’s vibrant alternative art scene to a circus. But that wouldn’t be fair to circuses, which have only three rings, as well as an underlying organization and theme. The alternative scene, on the other hand, is governed by anarchy. Literally anything goes at the co-op galleries…
Brash and bawdy, George Bernard Shaw’s one-act Great Catherine is now playing with his more talky Overruled in a terrific CityStage Ensemble evening, Shaws Together, calculated to bust a gut. As extravagant as both of these little plays are, director Greg Ward keeps his delightful cast tottering on the brink…
It’s easier to preach than it is to teach–but too many contemporary playwrights are still on the pulpit. With all the white-collar crime undermining public confidence in Wall Street these days, one might suppose an angry little play exposing the selfish, callous nastiness of it all would be most welcome…
Giuseppe Tornatore’s reputation on this side of the Atlantic rests on the 1989 Academy Award winner Cinema Paradiso, his engaging but sticky-sweet valentine to movie memory. That nostalgic box-office success sought to recapture a bygone filmmaking style, and it endorsed the prevailing American view of Italians as mushy sentimentalists who…
Anyone who saw Marleen Gorris’s militant fantasy A Question of Silence in the mid-1980s immediately understood the Dutch filmmaker’s no-holds-barred feminism. In a clever twist on Death Wish and four decades of male-dominated revenge Westerns, Gorris had three ordinary women–a housewife, a waitress and a secretary–heap their pent-up resentment and…
Thursday March 14 Eve of destruction: “While sketching a series of ideas for monoprints and reflecting on the dilemma of Eden,” artist Connie Lehman says, “it occurred to me that no one has ever blamed the apple.” Score one point for the women. Lehman decided to explore that discrepancy by…
There is no region in the United States more firmly implanted in the popular imagination of the world than the American West. The images are romantic ones and have a long history. A rough-and-tumble Western mining town, for example, is the setting for a Giacomo Puccini opera–chosen, no doubt, because…
The great thing about a comedy such as Much Ado About Nothing is its treatment of potential tragedy. There’s a lot of thought behind all those laughs. Shakespeare examined what malicious false witness could do in Othello–how it might turn a good and loving husband into a murderous fool. In…
The 1932 film version of Grand Hotel is best remembered for Greta Garbo’s languid “I vant to be alone.” A better signature line was never invented for an actress–particularly since Garbo was a famous recluse. No one could ever read that line again without invoking her presence as the elusive…
In these days of mindless Hollywood conformity and obscene movie budgets set aside for the destruction of cars and helicopters, the career of the magisterial Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray should be a lesson to us. In 1952, when the former economist and advertising man was working on Pather Panchali, the…
