Great Wall Story, by Lloyd Suh, opens at the Denver Center this week, having begun life with a staged reading at last year’s New Play Summit. It is based on one of those tall tales that just happen to be true. In 1899, a small group of Denver journalists who…
Musical director Jason Yarcho and the cast of Wicked had grown tired of their regular fundraising efforts — post-show collections, autographed posters, rock revues — and they needed a new option. And as Yarcho drove from Arizona to Texas, the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack blasting, it came to him…
“stupid america, hear that chicano / shouting curses on the street / he is a poet / without paper and pencil / and since he cannot write/he will explode.” — Lalo Delgado Given what’s going on in Tucson, Arizona, these days, this kind of poem is coming back into style…
The Boulder History Museum’s current exhibit, Hollywood, Colorado, takes a look at the history of moviemaking and movie-going in the Centennial State with a series of movie posters and artifacts from films with a Colorado connection. In conjunction with the exhibit (which runs through May 6), David Emrich, film buff,…
Colfax Avenue, all 26 miles of it, is home to a wide spectrum of restaurants, shops, live-performance venues, historic landmarks, not-so-historic landmarks and just about everything else you can think of. This week, more than twenty of those locations — including the Fillmore Auditorium, the Satire Lounge, X-Bar and Charlie’s…
Simon Zalkind, curator at the Singer Gallery in the Mizel Arts and Culture Center, is one of many local exhibition organizers who are saluting Clyfford Still this season in conjunction with the opening of the new Denver museum dedicated to the legendary abstract expressionist. Zalkind’s participation in Still-mania is Mene…
Attention, would-be skater daters: The Denver Roller Dolls’ Mile High Club all-star roller derby team is putting its “Real men play with Dolls” slogan on the line this week with a “help us kick butt all over the country” date auction to raise travel funds for the team. Bids start…
When artistic people dress, they often create stylistic masterpieces almost as impressive as the masterpieces they work around. Just take a look at this week’s street-style subjects:…
Welcome to the first installment of Guess where I’m biking, where I, the intrepid and incredibly hip fixed-gear cyclist, Britt Chester, will attempt to stump you as to where my tires take me. In our Best of Denver issue that recently hit stands, we revealed the location we believe to…
Five dollars buys you a collage by Colorado artist Kathy Fisher. Fisher creates collages for Art-O-Mat, the company that turns old cigarette machines into art-dispensers — one of which, since last month, has made its home at the VSA Colorado/Access Gallery on Santa Fe Drive. Fisher took some time to…
When we last spoke with Corey Elbin — the one-man orchestrator of the Mercury Cafe’s weekly avant-garde food and music throw-down, Gorinto — he was unsure of the fate of the unique get-together. After curating, cooking, booking and running Gorinto on his own for the better part of two years,…
Dune “Cocktail” This scene from Dune made our list of David Lynch’s ten weirdest scenes, by film, which inspired one commenter to say that Lynch “sucks.”…
The new History Colorado Center, at the corner of 12th Avenue and Broadway, is clearly the most accomplished, developed and significant design ever done by Tryba Architects. In fact, the museum, which opens to the public on April 28, crowns David Tryba, the head of the firm, as among the…
Disneynature’s latest Earth Day release hunkers down in an Ivory Coast rainforest, taming its beasts-in-the-wild raw material into a family-friendly (though not totally sugarcoated) heroes-and-villains adventure, as did the brand’s previous film, African Cats. Chimpanzee follows energetic young primate Oscar, still reliant on his mother, Isha, for food and protection…
It’s Nicholas Sparks’s world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven’t scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical salesman who’s written sixteen bestsellers since 1995, when The Notebook was plucked from the slush pile by a wily publisher. The Notebook was the third Sparks work…
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley’s Mellow Mood, “a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages,” in my neighborhood deli just a few hours after seeing Marley, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on the reggae and Rasta emissary — a reminder of just how crassly the Jamaican legend, who…
Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn is equally adept at comedy — his Noises Off may be the funniest and most intricately structured farce of the twentieth century — and high-minded, contemplative drama. In Copenhagen, for example, he has the ghosts of physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg reminiscing about a…
When I saw the reading of Lloyd Suh’s Great Wall Story at last year’s New Play Summit, I thought it smart and entertaining, a lighthearted take on some pretty serious topics, but with one specific problem: Suh’s depiction of an adolescent boy, who behaved in ways I couldn’t imagine any…
USA Pro Cycling Challenge organizers revealed the winning design in a national poster competition yesterday, by Montrose-based artist Leanna Johnson, and this morning gave us a first look at the winning poster for the Denver Time Trial stage poster, the seventh and final stage of the second annual race, by…
Among the lines delivered at poetry slams, one is often repeated: “The point is not the points; the point is the poetry.” This has never been more true than over the last week and a half in Denver, when all three of the city’s national teams — Slam Nuba, the…
I can’t claim to own this idea. I picked it up secondhand from my sister, who told me that when her friend gets junk mail with return envelopes that say “no postage necessary if mailed in the United States,” he sends it back. With stuff in it. What kind of…
We’re not in Kansas anymore. Wicked took a classic villain of American folklore — the Wicked Witch of the West — and transformed her into Elphaba, a misunderstood victim, the prejudice against her and her green skin a clear parallel to racism. Even drenched in the saccharine coating of musical…
