Best Movie Theater -- Food 2010 | Cinebarre | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Movie Theater -- Food

Cinebarre

Popcorn and hot dogs might be classic cinema foods, but sometimes you hunger for more. And for those times, Cinebarre is the place to go. The Thornton theater offers first-run movies with a full menu (and bar!). There's nothing too fancy on the menu -- just pizza, burgers, sandwiches, salads, desserts and appetizers -- but it offers a solid selection of quality comfort foods with movie-themed names. The prices are reasonable, and you even get to sit at a real table. And traditionalists can still get a bucket of popcorn to munch on.

Best Artistic Reuse of a Historic Building

Mirada Fine Art Gallery

Mirada Fine Art Gallery Facebook

Back in the '20s, when the foothills town of Indian Hills was marketed as a "mountain getaway" for Denver's elite, George Olinger erected the Indian Hills Trading Post to serve as a general store, post office and sales office for the new community, which quickly gained a reputation as an artists' colony. Today the renovated building again welcomes artists, as the home of Mirada Fine Art, a new gallery in a great old space dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art from across the region.

Best Gallery Show ? Duet

Monroe Hodder and Michael Clapper

In order to present two solos in the same space, William Havu Gallery often pairs a painter with a sculptor. This approach was stunningly successful when Monroe Hodder: Painting Metabolism!, a show of gorgeous post-minimalist paintings, was put together with Michael Clapper: New Sculptures, an equally stunning exhibit of abstract three-dimensional works. Monroe Hodder, who divides her time between London and Steamboat Springs, creates luscious striped paintings with complicated palettes, while Michael Clapper ingeniously combines stone and metal to come up with his ambitious sculptures. Though the artists work in their own distinctive styles, their pieces were absolutely wonderful together, making for a gallery show as good as any museum exhibit this year.

Best Members' Show

You of All People! Here of All Places!

Courtesy RedLine Contemporary Art Center

RedLine was founded by Laura Merage, an artist as well as arts supporter, and the facility combines studio space with one of the most impressive exhibition galleries in the region. Though there hasn't been a regular schedule of shows here, many of the exhibits have been first-rate — and that was certainly the case with You of All People! Here of All Places!, which highlighted the accomplishments of the studio artists. The curating was done by committee, but Jonathan Saiz took the lead; both he and Merage were featured, as were Margaret Neumann, Bruce Price, Clark Richert, Jeff Page, Virginia Folkestad and a raft of others. Nothing linked these artists beyond living in Denver and having studios at RedLine, and the result was an eye-popping assortment of art in a wide variety of mediums. Here's hoping the exhibit becomes an annual outing.

Best Set Design

Indiana, Indiana

For weeks before Indiana, Indiana opened, Buntport Theater Company was on Facebook, asking for Mason jars. From the moment you entered the theater, you could see why: The entire back wall of the set was composed of glass jars. These were filled with objects representing aspects of the protagonist's past: corks, dried leaves, yarn, used teabags, buttons, seed pods, sticks, bones. Buntport creates its theater pieces as an ensemble, and the physical and technical aspects — lighting, sound, furniture, walls and doors — are part of each play's meaning and are fully integrated into the performances. So the shimmering back wall melded seamlessly with other elements of the production, both human and inanimate, and while from the audience it wasn't possible to figure out just what the jars held, the mysterious shapes and colors within them added mystery and depth.

Best Actor in a One-Man Show

Steven Burge, Fully Committed

Steven Burge was a charmer in Fully Committed, a one-man show about Sam, a hapless employee manning the phones in the grubby basement of one of New York's snobbiest restaurants, the kind of place where Diane Sawyer competes with supermodel — and vegan — Naomi Campbell for a table. In addition to playing Sam in this Aurora Fox production, Burge provided the phone voices of dozens of characters, from kvetchy customers to panicked kitchen staff to Sam's kindly father. His timing was terrific, his memory prodigious, and he was very, very funny. But Burge was also vulnerable and sweet, which made it nice when Sam got his own little happy ending.Best Actress in a One-Woman Show

Best Theatrical Event

New Play Summit

For three days in February, playwrights, critics, actors, theater lovers and theater professionals thronged the Denver Center Theatre Company complex, watching staged readings, attending performances, listening to panel discussions and holding animated debates of their own over breakfast pastries or lunchtime salads and sandwiches. The Denver Center's New Play Summit, which got its start in 2006, becomes more sophisticated and attracts more national attention every year. Several plays that began their life as readings at past summits have been staged by the company; artistic director Kent Thompson has selected three of this year's plays for his coming season.

Best Venue for Dance/Avant-Garde

Packing House Center for the Arts

Patrick Mueller of Control Group Productions (and its home, the Packing House Center for the Arts) thinks Denver hasn't been living dangerously enough — at least in its arts offerings. He aims to fill the gap by booking more challenging, fringe-style performance programming, from Butoh to multimedia to theater to Control Group's own Dance Night for Beginners series, which blends humorous instruction with dance performance. Mueller says he's looking for a bigger space and better opportunities for collaboration with other groups; in the meantime, look for the Stop. Crawl. Walk. Run. multi-arts festival, coming in May.

Best Ongoing Rise to Stardom

Pictureplane

After his remixing of a HEALTH track a couple of years ago, the ascent of Travis Egedy, who performs under the Pictureplane moniker, to national and even international renown would have been hard to predict. Dark Rift, his 2009 album, made it onto playlists far from Egedy's immediate group of friends. But despite the attention he's received for his own impressive work, Egedy is always ready to go to bat for the Denver underground scene, asserting in interviews both foreign and domestic that it's one of the richest in the world. And he's proof of it.

Best Music Documentary Produced by Coloradans

Wesley Willis's Joy Rides

Chris Bagley and Kim Shively befriended Wesley Willis when he briefly made Denver his home in the early part of the last decade. Fortunately, they had the foresight to shoot footage of the legendary artist and songwriter as he charmed everyone he met. Culled from five years of meticulously edited footage, including interviews with Willis's family and friends in Chicago and elsewhere, Wesley Willis's Joy Rides tells the story of an extraordinary creative mind that would not be hampered by any ailment. Replete with animations of Willis's artwork, this documentary brilliantly portrays an unlikely rock-and-roll hero in loving detail.

Best Of Denver®

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