In a Pentecostal church near 11th Avenue and Acoma Street in downtown Denver, a corps of volunteer carpenters is busy building the only Elizabethan-style stage in Denver–and a one-of-a-kind theater arts facility. The church, where a small congregation still holds services on Wednesdays and Sundays, was recently purchased for $200,000…
Easy Rollins, the smooth private eye at the heart of four Walter Mosley novels, occupies the same city (Los Angeles) and the same period (the fertile 1940s) as his celebrated counterpart in the detective trade, Philip Marlowe. Both of them are stained by the violence of their antagonists and, quite…
The versatile British director Peter Yates once made American tough-guy movies like Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, as well as such quirky little comedies as Breaking Away. Now he’s joined the Irish charm cult. The Run of the Country is a coming-of-age story set in an Irish village…
Wednesday September 27 On their toes: Twenty-five years old and still growing, one of Denver’s most respected cultural institutions celebrates in high style. Cleo Parker Robinson Dance is throwing a week of silver-anniversary events that touch on every aspect of dance: Tonight at 6:30 at the Warwick Hotel, 1776 Grant…
Lately, and increasingly, museums across the country and around the world have begun “deaccessioning”–selling off parts of their existing collections as a ready source of “free money” to pay for new acquisitions. It’s money, more than art, that’s hard for many of these institutions to come by, especially in recent…
The Aurora Fox Theatre’s striking production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus proves once again that one can abhor the sentiments of a playwright and still find depth, meaning and mastery in his work. But it takes an ingenious performance or two, luminous directorial insight and a willingness from the audience to…
Reviving the quintessential Fifties drama is no easy matter; so many of the values and beliefs of the period seem dated. The best approach is to be as true to the period as possible. Director Jeremy Cole takes Terence Rattigan’s charming Separate Tables–two linked one-acts from the England of the…
Jerry Garcia had been at the undertaker’s about five minutes when a filmed valentine to his true believers hit the street. Your enthusiasm for Tie-Died: Rock ‘n Roll’s Most Deadicated Fans will likely depend on your tolerance for cult argot in general and Deadhead blather in particular, but make no…
In the cold, gray, unnamed city where David Fincher’s bloody thriller Seven takes place, it’s always raining. There’s a coating of grime on every door lock and lampshade, the coffee cups are all chipped and smudged, and every dark staircase in every tenement is collapsing. So is the tenement. All…
Wednesday September 20 A brand-new bag: Few men have the distinction of having worked with two of the most influential funkmeisters of all time, James Brown and George Clinton. Saxman Maceo Parker not only has it, but he wears it well. The oft-sampled Parker, who’s also provided propulsive riffs behind…
Words, just like art objects, are subject to fashion. Suddenly everyone is using the word “venerable” or mouthing a phrase like “narrative content.” Everywhere I go these days, artists, especially those associated with the alternative scene, are talking about a “critical mass”–or, more properly, the lack of one in Denver’s…
One can respect a play and hate it at the same time. Drawn in to the premise completely, you can ultimately feel manipulated, and finally angry. Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is just such a play–capable of awakening the darkest revenge fantasies and then convincing its audience that there…
Parents are difficult in every culture. If they’re kind, loving people who only want the best for their adult children, they can be pretty darn willful about just what that “best” might be. So grown-up offspring have to find ingenious ways of asserting their own independence while still preserving their…
Once your acne starts to clear up, there’s not much reason to see an Allan Moyle movie. Or so it first seems. The Montreal-born director specializes in high-test teenage fantasy, so it’s unlikely that anyone with less than a compelling interest in picking out a prom dress or getting a…
Actress Diane Keaton has declared herself a film director, and she hasn’t taken long to set a style. In Unstrung Heroes, a bittersweet tearjerker combining a twelve-year-old boy, his dying mother, his geeky father and two crackpot uncles, Keaton leans toward solemn silences and worried faces reflected in windowpanes. She…
Wednesday September 13 The rite stuff: We all go through changes–author and journalist Gail Sheehy proved that long ago with her book Passages, which chronicles adult life stages. But it doesn’t take into account that we all experience those changes differently–and at different times. Her latest, New Passages: Mapping Your…
People often talk about art when they’re actually referring to something else. We hear about the art of the deal, the art of medicine. There’s the art of cooking. And the art of politics. Even the art of baseball. Aren’t comedians and rock stars called artists? In fact, it seems…
It’s impossible to beat Alfred Hitchcock at his own game. Nobody could remake Dial “M” for Murder as a movie and make it work. But Frederick Knott’s 1950s crime play still crackles oddly on the stage. And Hunger Artists’ stylish production, though intermittently absurd, translates film-noir technique gracefully to the…
Once in a while a glimpse of something special comes through in a theatrical event. And Voices of the Children: The World of Brundibar is special. This is community theater as it should be: beautifully mounted, intelligent, moving and a little raw around the edges. Because the play is about…
Earlier this year Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds won four major Cesar Awards–France’s version of the Oscars–and the movie has attracted big audiences in that country. But not all French delicacies travel well. The four interwoven coming-of-age stories at the heart of the film are interesting enough because raging teen hormones…
Spike Lee’s in-your-face moviemaking style–the pounding insistence that we get it–is familiar by now. So there’s little surprise when Clockers, which explores the complex, uneasy relationship between cops and bottom-rung drug dealers around a decaying Brooklyn housing project, opens with a grim montage of bloody police crime-scene photos interspersed with…
Wednesday September 6 Ain’t had enough fun: This kind of longevity, for a rock band, is no little feat: True to its name, Little Feat has been mastering chunky, infectious rhythms since the early ’70s, despite the 1979 loss of original guiding light Lowell George, whose stunning slidework and droll…
