Best Season for a Director 2008 | Warren SherrillParagon Theatre Company | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Season for a Director

Warren Sherrill
Paragon Theatre Company

Neither The Gin Game nor Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are particularly timely, though the latter is an American classic and welcome viewing any time. But at Paragon, Warren Sherrill's productions of these two plays made them contemporary. The Gin Game featured Jim Hunt as a man fighting the ravages of time and his own loneliness in the most ungracious way possible, with Patty Mintz Figel as his cunning opponent; despite the unspectacular text, you felt deeply for these lost people. And Virginia Woolf was a jolt of rage-fueled adrenaline, with Sherrill's sure directorial hand evident in everything from the strength of his casting to such tiny details as the real snapdragons used in one scene.

Best Secret Show

3OH!3
Oriental Theater
January 9, 2008

Due to a restrictive agreement for a show they'd played a few nights before, the members of 3OH!3 were unable to promote their performance at a Sims Snowboard-sponsored event at the Oriental in January. While this was a shame for the duo's rabid fans as well as the Oriental's owners — especially considering that the act had sold out the Gothic the previous Saturday — the show was a rare treat for the audience, who'd only expected to watch an endless parade of kids snowboarding down staircases on the big screen. So when Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman appeared on the stage, throwing Sims swag into the mostly underage crowd, the audience went apeshit. Then the goof-hop outfit proceeded to play the intimate show with the same energy and intensity they'd displayed at the sold-out Gothic.

Best Shakespeare Production

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Within the magical A Midsummer Night's Dream, realities dissolve and two pairs of lovers are bamboozled by fairies into losing track of their original alliances and switching partners again and again. The interrelated themes are that love is crazy and lovers blind, that we all live in a world of illusion, and that theater itself mirrors this shifting, upside-down universe. At the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, director Gavin Cameron-Webb set these shenanigans on a stage within a stage, and the design was simple, elegant and workable. The actors were all convincing, and they didn't attempt English accents or pound away at the humor and exaggerate the sentiment as so many Shakespearean performers do. As a result, you heard the lines clearly — and since A Midsummer Night's Dream is filled with poetry, that clarity made the production sing.

Best Shakespearean Leading Lady

Sarah Fallon
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Sarah Fallon has a lovely voice and she knows how to speak Shakespeare, giving the poetry its due without ever sounding phony. At the Colorado Shakespeare Festival last summer, she brought real humor to the role of the jilted Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream — broad but never over the top.

Best Short-Lived Band

Games for May

When former Insider Spider members Nathaniel Barsness and Greg Schoonmaker (also ex-Mannequin Makeout) joined with Diana Sperstad (formerly of As Seen on TV) and Suzi Bromfield (previously with Supply Boy and Catatonic Lydia), they wrote some of the most feisty, beautiful pop songs ever to grace Denver stages and performed them as the charming, energetic Games for May, whose name was taken from a Syd Barrett song. In April 2007, the outfit released its first and only album, The Season Is the Reason, and included in each copy a photograph of the band posing at Sperstand's house, making each CD a collector's item. Despite having released such an accomplished record, the group wasn't able to capitalize on its achievement and wound up breaking up in May, ironically.

Best Show About Letters

A Retrospective: 20 Years of Roland Bernier
Walker Fine Art

Instead of using shapes to define his artwork, contemporary conceptual artist Roland Bernier uses letters that form words. These letters are made of laser-cut mirrors, sawn plywood or printed vinyl. For a twenty-year retrospective — representing the second half of his forty-plus-year career — Walker Fine Art was transformed into what looked like a museum. One reason was that some of the installations, sculptures and bas-reliefs had been part of his Close Range show at the Denver Art Museum in 2001, but the best parts of Retrospective were all the new works that revealed Bernier's relentlessness in following his unique aesthetic journey.

Best Show About Numbers

Quasi-Symmetries
Rule Gallery

Denver painter Clark Richert is a perennial favorite with young artists, both the many students he's influenced as an art professor at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and others who have taken his lessons through osmosis. Richert is interested in advanced math, which he uses to determine the details of his paintings and other works like "Riemannian Tangercies," his public-art piece in pavement and epoxy that decorates the fire lane at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. That work was closely related to the paintings and digital prints shown at Rule last fall, in which he laid out non-repeating patterns using a range of colors against an indeterminate monochrome ground. An intriguing aspect of Richert's oeuvre is the way he remains loyal to his principles while constantly changing the way his pieces look.

Best Show to Rip the Still-Beating Heart Right Out of Your Chest

Vaux
Bluebird Theater
July 28, 2007

Vaux billed its final show as a funeral and encouraged everyone to wear black. That turned out to be an apt suggestion, given how many fans at the Bluebird felt that night. As expected, Vaux didn't go gently into that good night. Quentin Smith and company played like it was their last night on earth, with a molten ferocity that made everyone on hand simultaneously grateful to witness such a breathtaking performance and filled with regret that we'd never see it again.

Best Singer-Songwriter

Joe Sampson
www.myspace.com/adogpaloma

While we don't know who your favorite singer-songwriter is, we're willing to wager a bet that his or her favorite singer-songwriter is Joe Sampson. Whether Sampson is playing with A Dog Paloma, sitting in with the Wheel or Bad Weather California, or just strumming and singing his pastoral folk tunes all by himself, he manages to maintain a rather unassuming profile. Like all the best songsmiths, though, he lets the music — and his growing list of admirers — do all the talking. And let's just say his songs make for absolutely stimulating conversation.

Best Soundmen

Devon Rogers and Xandy Whitesel
hi-dive

Recently, a gal at the hi-dive noticed us watching a show off to the side and came over to offer us some unsolicited advice. "Listen," she said, "if you want to really enjoy the show, you need to stand over here." And she nodded toward the rear of the club, insisting that's where the sound is the best. While we were grateful for the tip, the truth is that the sound at the hi-dive is flawless no matter where you're standing — just as long as Devon Rogers or Xandy Whitesel is behind the board. The best soundmen in town, these guys deliver consistently crisp mixes with clear and distinct separation that's music to our ears.

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