While last week’s High Plains Comedy Festival was a tightly run ship that set sail to introduce the world to the Denver comedy scene, this weekend’s Too Much Funstival was a sloppy drunken kiss on the lips to this city’s funny fans, an incredibly loose bacchanal of free food, booze,…
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.
A week into his comeback tour, Dave Chappelle either had a “meltdown,” was “booed off the stage,” or was treated like a black-face minstrel by a crowd of “fucking animals” last Thursday in Hartford, Connecticut. The incident has made for a bloggery buffet of commentary on race, comedy and corporate…
50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…
About half an hour into Peter and the Starcatcher, I started wondering: What is it with the New York critics? They were so excited by this show — exhilarated, ecstatic. They loved that the tech wasn’t grindingly, massively hyper-expensive, but rather low-key, using ordinary objects in the way that experimental…
Get ready for The Kid, starring Joey McIntyre of the cult-favorite supergroup New Kids on the Block, which will have its world premiere in Denver this week. Earlier this month, on the heels of the act’s massive, fifty-city tour, McIntyre and Denver Center Attractions announced that they were teaming up…
Mike Birbiglia is not interested in your laughter. Or at least, that’s not all he’s interested in. While most comedians shy away from long-form jokes — for fear of not getting any laughs and being stuck with a sinking ship for ten minutes — Birbiglia is all about the long-term…
While Jon Stewart was away directing his first film in the Middle East, CNN took the opportunity to revamp Crossfire. One of the first politically polarizing talk shows on the first cable news network, Crossfire had a 22-year run before it was shut down in 2004, after Stewart called the…
Like an infant growing into an Olympian athlete overnight, this weekend the Denver comedy scene went from an impressive-but-small collection of local talent to a nationally recognized force with its own annual rendezvous. The High Plains Comedy Festival was more than just a killer weekend of ab-crunching hilarity; the heavily…
This weekend Denver’s funny business will mark a significant milestone with the High Plains Comedy Festival. While the scene has put together a handful of notable comedy fests over the years with Laugh Track and the Fine Gentleman’s Club’s Too Much Funstival, High Plains will be the first nationally recognized…
We’ve all heard of the concept of paying it forward, but Erin Rollman, one of the creators and mainstays of Buntport Theater, is taking it several steps further than most of us could ever have imagined: She’s donating a kidney to someone she’s never met. Evan Weissman, longtime Buntport collaborator…
We’d both been to some pretty amazing comedy festival setups ranging from Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon to the now defunct HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado and we both agreed that Denver deserved a truly sustainable festival that would be uniquely “Denver.” We thought by joining forces with creative fire stokers like Pete and Virgil Dickerson that we could make something special. Between our collective backgrounds and interests it just ended up being a pretty great team. It’s like Sesame Street. Cooperation is a real fucking thing.
50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…
Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made, These are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth change But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. — Shakespeare, The Tempest This summer, Geoffrey Kent directed one of the best Colorado…
Comedian and Westword feature subject Ben Roy is about as widely known as comedian can get in Denver. In addition to performing at the upcoming High Plains Comedy Festival, Roy will be headlining a show at Comedy Works downtown at 7:00pm on August 25th. Westword caught up with Ben to discuss his politics, being a comedy outsider, his motorcycle, his non-fictional reading habits, and how he’s like Bill Cosby.
The next four weeks in Denver will see a tsunami of comedy events. There are four killer standups at Comedy Works (Craig Ferguson, Mike Birbiglia, Marc Maron, Kevin Nealon), two comedy festivals (High Plains, Funstival) and the Oddball Comedy Tour (Dave Chapelle, Flight of the Conchords). It’s raining microphones in…
If you believe that podcasting saved comedy, then Marc Maron is a messiah of humor. After enduring divorces, a flaccid comedy career and losing his job on Air America, in 2009 Maron launched the WTF podcast, recorded in the same garage he often contemplated killing himself in. Today WTF is…
In 2012 Peter and the Starcatcher left the Tony awards ceremony with five trophies, including best performance by an actor, best sound design of a play, best costume design of a play, best scenic design of a play, and best lighting design of a play. Now the company is on…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel…
Steel Magnolias was inspired by the death of playwright Robert Harling’s diabetic sister, and I’ve tended to think of it as a pale-pink, Hallmark-card production — which is appropriate, since the ailing Shelby is obsessed with pink and is busily planning a sugar-pink wedding while ensconced in the home salon…
A lot goes on in three days in Washington Heights, Manhattan — at least as portrayed in In the Heights. Graffiti Pete gets driven away from Usnavi’s bodega — where everyone stops for light, sweet coffee in the morning — before he can make his mark on the door; Usnavi…
“I came to the decision that the album has to be called Greg Baumhauer: Live at the Squire Lounge. It has to. That’s why it came about so quickly because I found out that the renovations were happening, and I wanted to record this while the Squire was still the Squire. It’s going to be more than just my album, it’ll be a eulogy to what the Squire was.”
