As much an icon of African-American comedy as Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans pioneered a new style of televised sketch comedy with In Living Color, introducing mainstream Americans to the stylish humor of early ’90s black culture. The show also launched the careers of Jim Carrey, Jennifer…
With two Halloween events, three filthy shows and three comedy contests, October humor is shaping up to be scary, sexy and heavily competitive. After a summer of record-breaking comedy festivals, you can fall into the autumnal weather with some bone-chilling monologues of creepy copulation with Bob Saget and Competitive Erotic…
After the Revolution. Playwright Amy Herzog enters a very specific world in After the Revolution: the passionate, close-knit, hyper-idealistic world of Jewish Communism in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century. For these activists, Soviet Russia was a model. But when Khrushchev denounced Stalin during the…
You wouldn’t expect this production of The Full Monty at a dinner theater — not so much because of the script, but because of the daring with which it’s staged. Places like Boulder’s Dinner Theater are kept alive in large part by church groups and Rotary-type clubs, and they need…
Defending the Caveman is a low-key, low-budget one-man show, part standup comedy, part nightclub act. Written by Rob Becker, the piece has been appearing in intimate venues around the country for several years, promoted as a fun way to pass an evening with a drink in your hand and your…
For this year’s Now Showing, Westword’s fall arts guide (you’ll find it tucked into our September 26 issue), we asked artistic movers and shakers to answer a few questions about the state of the arts, both locally and around the world. We’ll be rolling out their answers over the next…
Because of chance employment as a waitress at Comedy Works, Crystal Allen found herself surrounded by comedians — and her husband, Ben Roy, even became one. An aspiring photographer, Allen used this opportunity to start capturing on film not just aspiring Denver performers, but some of the most accomplished standup…
Over the weekend both Louis C.K. and Bill Maher dropped some wisdom about how the Internet is draining us of empathy and encouraging a consequence-free environment of cruelty and debasement. After spending the last two weeks whining about homophobic roasts and the irony of “clean comedy”, it feels good to…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
Known as a blitz-eyed giggler from Half Baked, or the animal-hybrid, nostalgia talk-show host Goat Boy from Saturday Night Live, Jim Breuer has been subtly shifting his comedy content over the last five years, relating stories of domestic life and spiritual yearning through his autobiography and documentary. While avoiding any…
A wild-mannered legend of comedy history, Jon Lovitz has created a mid-tempo career with roles on The Simpsons and in movies like Casino Jack and Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks since his unforgettable years as a pathological liar and Jewish Santa on Saturday Night Live. Rarely a leading man and…
If 1967 was the summer of love, then 2013 was definitely the summer of laughter — at least in Denver. After absorbing three comedy festivals in four weeks, there must have been a lot of chuckle-trimmed abs that got another workout last night. Because closing out this season of the…
People love talking to their pets — and some even imitate their pets. But how many people can not only imitate their pets, but play a slew of characters at the same time? Somehow, Gemma Wilcox morphs seamlessly from male to female roles, from feline to feathered pets, in her…
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. There are so many levels to Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and such a mix of clarity and evocative ambiguity in the way these levels are presented. The play talks about the ugliness and irrationality of war and the dividing lines between cultures…
Playwright Amy Herzog enters a very specific world in After the Revolution, now receiving its regional premiere at Curious Theatre: the passionate, close-knit, hyper-idealistic world of Jewish Communism in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick showed this…
Throughout all three hours of Camelot, I was entertaining a single question: Why would anyone decide to stage this thing? I’d been pleased when I first read the show’s title on the Arvada Center’s season announcement: I had never seen Camelot before, and was anxious to make up for it…
For Racheli Mendelson, a former EMT who’d been creating performance-art pieces since she was thirteen, it just made sense to explore her time serving in the Israeli military through a red-nosed clown performance. See the result at Mendelson’s Boulder International Fringe Festival debut, Shoot, Cry & Forget About It!: A…
On Sepember 19 Denver crowds will unload a serious amount of cash on an event titled “The Clean Guys Comedy,” which features such stand-up legends as Jamie Kennedy (Scream), Uncle Joey from Full House, and some other folks you vaguely remember from somewhere. The comics themselves aren’t what’s selling this…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
If you missed the big announcement of Off-Center@The Jones’s upcoming programming at the theater’s season opening event last night, you also missed a big party with lots of free beer. Under wraps until the live trailer show commenced, the venue’s third season of nonconformist theater can now be discussed, and…
Zoos tend to fare badly during wartime, with the plight of captive animals mirroring that of besieged populations. Diane Ackerman’s beautiful book The Zoo Keeper’s Wife tells the story of the Zabinskis, who ran a zoo in Warsaw that was devastated by German bombers: “The moaning of lions and yowling…
Multimedia artist Adam Stone has collaborated on four of Buntport’s most interesting shows, making music for three and contributing a soundscape and his own haunting presence to Wake, the company’s take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. So a fair amount of excitement greeted the recent announcement that he had created a…
