After leaving Colorado for L.A. and New York, comedian Ben Kronberg gained a lot of momentum on the national circuit: He landed a gig on John Oliver’s New York Standup Show and has recorded a half-hour special for Comedy Central. But as one of the original members of Wrist Deep…
A lot has happened in the careers of Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky since they co-hosted Loveline, MTV’s relationship-related call-in show, in the late ’90s. Carolla went on to host one of the most successful podcasts on the Internet, as well as becoming the new Dennis Miller as a…
Like fellow ’90s upstarts South Park and Mr. Show, the films of Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) were dismissed in their time as witless dick-and-fart-joke spectacles with all the depth of a spring-break lap dance. Yet Smith and his superhero-sex-organ-obsessed cronies have aged well over the decades, maintaining a loyal…
When a band’s most prized feature is the electric chaos of its live show, finding a studio sound to match can be tricky. Wire Faces’ latest full-length has moments that come close to capturing this vitality, with the first half of the record offering all the ornamental delicacies that are…
While the rest of the world will be looking ahead to 2013 on New Year’s Eve, Slam Nuba will travel back three decades for its Kwanzaa ’80s Hip-Hop Theme Party at Crossroads Theatre. “Kwanzaa is a celebration of family, community and culture, and this is what I feel that old-school…
Like an Appalachian tent revival performing a Day of the Dead ceremony in the year 2500, Itchy-O’s live performances have become infamous for a kind of digital spirituality, a bone-shaking sensory experience of complex instrumentation and feverish exigency. “We always plan a few surprises for all of our shows,” says…
Just ask George Lucas or Peter Jackson, and they’ll confirm that telling an epic three-part story is a lot of work — surely too much for one man. But that’s exactly what Charlie Ross is all about. Last year he brought us the Star Wars trilogy in its entirety in…
It’s a Wonderful Life – quite possibly the ultimate in cinematic comfort food — is getting a makeover this year, and the new radio-play format is coming to the Sherman Street Event Center. The production involves seven actors playing thirty roles, all costumed in the garb of George Bailey’s 1940s…
With predictions of doom dancing in his head, Kevin Larson has created a synthetic version of the apocalypse in Civic Center Park, portraying doomsday in a three-level art installation, with asteroids on level one, Mayan warriors on level two, and a post-apocalyptic bunker in level three — all soundtracked by…
Opening the curtain on its 39th year, Germinal Stage Denver begins the new season with a production of Don Juan in Hell, by George Bernard Shaw. Written in 1903 as a section of the larger, four-part drama Man and Superman, Don Juan in Hell is a pleasantly strange tale of…
Other than Christmas carols, there is probably no other collection of music that inspires an infectious sing-along more quickly than the Beatles catalogue. Hence the fourteen-year success of the John Lennon/Beatles Memorial Sing-along Celebration, an anniversary remembrance of the death of John Lennon and a tribute to the twentieth century’s…
Tired of all the carols, the shopping, the waiting in impossibly long lines for a picture with Santa? A refuge awaits at Comedy Works with Chuck Roy’s NAUGHTY (dirty) Holiday Show. “As comedians, we all work squeaky-clean shows during the holidays,” says Roy. “People at a company holiday party rarely…
Sometimes overlooked by those chronicling the Beat Generation, Neal Cassady was the inspirational nucleus of what would become the counterculture movement, inspiring memorable literary characters like On the Road’s Dean Moriarty and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Randle P. McMurphy, as well as crazed pop-culture intellectuals like Hunter S…
Whether through his walking tours of Capitol Hill or his numerous books on Denver history, if you’ve lived in the city for any period of time, you’ve no doubt encountered the name Phil Goodstein. And now the fourth-generation native has once again proved that his curiosity has no bounds, releasing…
“When you play a video game, you become that character, so the music kind of becomes the soundtrack to your life. That’s why so many people are attached to this music,” says Tommy Tallarico, iconic video-game music composer and the man behind Video Games Live, a rock/symphony celebration of memorable…
Fear is on the menu on the new Men in Burka album, War/Magic. But while themes of anxiety and trepidation are familiar territory in instrumental music, there is something inherently authentic about this release. Traditional Middle Eastern aesthetics are filtered through modern beats and compounded with samples of machine guns…
Rarely do you find as much emotional range on an album as you do on Esme Patterson’s new release. From the pop-love warmth of “My Young Man” to the mournful “All the Days,” All Princes, I travels an arc from juvenile romance to painful wisdom, with Patterson crooning the apt…
Bob Dylan doesn’t belong here. Not here, but here — as in 2012. And he’d admit as much. Throughout his career, Dylan has always had sentimentality for a world before his time, romanticizing the lives of Robert Johnson and Hank Williams. “I was born very far from where I was…
A record to brighten up even the cloudiest of days, the debut from Denver’s latest orchestral rock collective, Mega Gem, is a hyper collection of anthemic melodies and ascending choruses. The band, which boasts an ever-fluctuating roster of seven to twenty members (including guest spots by Princess Music’s Tyler Ludwick…
Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Big Love, Milk, J. Edgar), one of the most recognizable names in the LGBT-rights movement, is once again using his storytelling prowess to teach a history lesson, this time about the 2011 courtroom drama that overturned California’s gay-marriage ban, Proposition 8. The documentary play, called 8,…
In his attempt to compose a soundtrack to a novel — Lair Hunt’s The Impossibly — Roger Green, with the help of Mark Harris on saxophone and bass clarinet, Janet Feder on prepared acoustic guitar and James Han on piano, delivers an emotionally complex, sonically inverted collection of instrumentals. By…
Because it’s an island, Iceland has always been isolated from the bustle of the rest of Europe, a fact that allowed it to form its own cuisine and culture. And over the course of four days, Denver (which also recently landed direct flights to the republic) will highlight a variety…
