Best News for Movie Buffs 2001 | The Starz Encore Film Center | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best News for Movie Buffs

The Starz Encore Film Center

Last November, cable-TV giant Starz Encore and company chairman John J. Sie pledged $5 million cash and launched a $7 million fund drive to finance a three-screen, state-of-the-art movie theater facility in the Tivoli. The Starz Encore Film Center, scheduled to open in summer 2002, will become the permanent home of the peripatetic Denver International Film Festival, as well as the site of year-round screenings and film education programs overseen by the University of Colorado at Denver. At last, Denver will have a suitable home for the cinematic arts equal to its art museum and concert halls.

Best Drag Wear

Lamecia Landrum
When Pigs Fly

When the impossibly fanciful costumery creations of Howard Crabtree had to be re-created for a local production of Crabtree's campy revue When Pigs Fly at Theatre on Broadway, costumer Lamecia Landrum was completely up to the task. While other career costumers might have been slammed by the demands of fabricating Crabtree's outrageously outlandish drag wear, Landrum stepped to the plate with a swagger, creating believable mermaid and pig suits, a centaur, giant playing cards, and wearable vanity tables that transformed themselves into seventeenth-century gowns with remarkable savoir faire. Crabtree's vision was in good hands.

Best Festival Dedicated to Flower Power

Wildflower Festival

Take a walk on the wild side at Crested Butte's annual Wildflower Festival. Now about fifteen years old (in good Crested Butte fashion, the origins of the event are a little vague), this festival remains as fresh and invigorating as an alpine meadow after a summer shower. Crested Butte is known as the Wildflower Capitol of Colorado -- it's the micro-climate, stupid -- and you'll be convinced that the title's well-deserved after just a few minutes at this weeklong summer festival. Official activities include wildflower walks that are easy, moderate and downright challenging, along with tours, photography workshops, sketching instruction, cooking classes and musical entertainment; unofficial activities include lying in fields filled with bright flowers and drinking yourself silly in Crested Butte's classic bars. This year's festival is set for July 9-15.

Best Character Actress

Lori Hansen

Past seasons have seen Lori Hansen play a lewd nun (Nine), and a failed poet, chorus member and disturbed nun (Suddenly Last Summer). Last fall Hansen eschewed her twisted-sister ways and turned in a nicely controlled performance as a wronged Cherokee bride in part one of The Kentucky Cycle. As another performer knelt by the side of a rustic bed and simulated the sounds of childbirth, Hansen told the moving story of her son's arrival through suggestive movement and lyrical speech. Later, she demonstrated that she was capable of more than saintly forbearance, seeking revenge in a way that wound up casting a pall over her character's entire family. Hansen always creates distinctive characters without letting them detract from the play's bigger picture.

Best Singing Hero

Christopher Simmons
PHAMALy

Before Christopher Simmons died of an aneurysm last year, he had begun working on improving the singing skills and overall professionalism of the group he'd performed with for several seasons. According to one of his colleagues at PHAMALy (The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actor's League), Simmons "admonished us to prepare better for auditions, take classes and to raise things up a notch. During the last few months, one of PHAMALy's volunteers has taken over his project," the friend continues, "and I'm hoping that his challenge will make people rise to the occasion. If PHAMALy wants to be taken seriously, we've got to work harder at it." Giving a posthumous award is one way to honor his memory; but picking up where Simmons left off would be even better.

Best Friday-Night Entertainment

Shabbat Unplugged

While some young Jews have drifted away, organizers of the regular Friday-night Shabbat Unplugged at Temple Emanuel have figured out a way to make the Song of David ring out. Featuring modern instruments and a rabbi who can riff, the monthly event has been catching on. Where once there were little more than a hundred people in the synagogue, there now comes a crowd of some 800 or more singing, swaying and praying. This is truly a musical mitzvah.

Best Concert (since June 2000)

Neil Young

Backed by a band that included sister Astrid and wife Pegi, Neil Young ably demonstrated that he still has the chops, the power and the appeal to keep fans coming back again and again. And again. In three consecutive sold-out appearances at Red Rocks -- one of which included a freakish downpour that didn't manage to turn the music, or the audience's enthusiasm, soggy -- Young's performance was nearly flawless. In a setting that matched his almost prehistoric essence, he tore through acoustic renderings of gentler material and blazed through more visceral favorites, at times appearing to be transfixed in some netherspace reserved for genuine guitar demigods. We can only hope he keeps on rockin'.

Best Steps Taken by a Public Institution

Poets Way

They're four small steps for Boulder, but four giant steps for poem-kind: The first four of fifty proposed engraved sandstone slabs were laid in a walkway at the Boulder Public Library's south entrance last fall, featuring quotes by poets Wawatay Eninew, Rabindrath Tagore, Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Anna Akhmatova. According to project coordinator Michael Evans-Smith, a few new poets will be added to the walk each year for the next ten years; Evans-Smith hopes that upon completion, Poets Way will be "an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond." A refreshing idea in a noisy, media-driven new millennium.

Best Way to Appreciate Local Art

Documents of Colorado Art

Over the years, Ocean View Books (the press relocated from the West Coast in the mid 1990s, thus the name) has published a series of volumes on the history of Colorado art. The two-person operation -- Lee Ballentine is the designer; his wife, Jennifer MacGregor, is the editor -- has just put out its tenth issue, The Erotic Art of Edgar Britton, by poet Jane Hilberry. The volume takes a look at Britton, the state's most significant modern sculptor of the mid-twentieth century. Previous monographs have been devoted to Edward Marecak and Roland Detre; there have also been surveys on modern sculpture and painting. Luckily for us, Ocean View isn't finished yet, with more books in the Documents of Colorado Art collection being added to the list all the time.

Best Annual Transformation

Lannie Garrett into Pasty DeCline

You know the cows are coming home when normally sleek and sultry local entertainer Lannie Garrett pulls on her cowgirl outfit and emerges as Patsy DeCline, a country singer who's never going to make it to the Grand Ole Opry. On Friday and Saturday nights through May 5, the popular sendup of country music transforms the Denver Buffalo Company into the ReCliner Lounge. You'd be crazy to miss it.

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