The first Spanish-language production mounted by Opera Colorado, Florencia en el Amazonas, follows a character’s epic hunt for her lover, who has disappeared into the jungle. Tonight, Opera Colorado celebrates Florencia’s themes of intrigue and determination with The Scavenger Hunt, which frames First Friday in a new, interactive way. Teams…

Despite boasting a higher-than-average number of museums, parks, bands, venues, theater companies and designers, as well as the nation’s fifth-highest concentration of artists, Denver is still depicted by the mainstream media as a flyover city filled with rednecks and burnouts, equally ready to take a knee or a toke. Blame…

With so much variety in the canine kingdom, it’s easy to forget that all dogs — from the Tibetan Mastiff to the Miniature Yorkie — descend from a common ancestor, the wolf. The Rocky Mountain Cluster Dog Show is a chance to see more than 3,000 dogs of every shape,…

Launched four years ago as an indie, scrappy, weird and witty counterpart to the mainstream-comedy scene in Denver, Onus Spears’ Huge Comedy Show allowed clever voices to be heard by new audiences seeking artistry and connection. It was also hilarious — and a hit series was born. “It’s no longer…

Armistead Maupin’s novel The Night Listener fictionalized Maupin’s mysterious friendship with an HIV-positive boy who may not have existed — and inspired both a feature film and a 60 Minutes investigation. Published in 2000, the book introduced Maupin to a reading audience that had somehow missed his Tales From the…

Young Neal Cassady kept busy in Denver, tailing his father to Larimer Street dives, stealing cars and serving time in the Colorado State Reformatory. Cassady’s adventures left little time for formal education, which is why he dropped out of East High School after a short stint in the early 1940s…

Last year, Denver-based dance troupe the Silhouettes raised the artistry of America’s Got Talent, earning standing ovations, praise from judges and runner-up status for the season. Audiences and viewers were wowed by the troupe’s signature choreography: Behind a screen, bodies in shadow moved through precise yet fluid poses, creating shapes…

Six years ago, North High School’s production of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit electrified North Denver and, eventually, the whole city. As the first high-school production ever staged at the Buell Theater, Zoot Suit was lauded for its dramatic quality and for framing North High in a positive light. Its young…

Doris Giardini believes in the power of the wheel. “I think if it wasn’t for roller-skating, I would be in a wheelchair,” she says. “It’s low-impact, easier than walking, much easier than jogging. It’s something you can do from the time you start walking until you leave the earth.” Giardini…

As one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, Lower East Highland possesses a personality as fluid as the Platte River it sits above. Once the province of Italian immigrants, then Latino families, the area is now as known for its hipster hangouts and high-priced eateries as for its Queen Anne cottages…

Cocktails — like food, fashion, film and everything else that’s good in life — have life spans, eras, and some are better than others. One need look no further than a LoDo happy-hour menu to see that we’re well past the golden age of glamour when it comes to inebriants…

Buntport Theater was formed by a group of hyper-creative Colorado College kids who shared an affinity for quirk: The theater’s production history includes Kafka on Ice, a freewheelin’ biodrama about the existential, roach-centric German writer, set in an ice rink; and Donner, a documentary-style tragicomedy about Santa’s reindeer. This kind…

The French painter Louis Wain so loved cats that he devoted his entire artistic career to them, depicting felines at dinner parties, dancing jigs, and wearing bonnets and demonic grins. And although Denver’s Dogmata collective draws its inspiration from the cats’ mortal enemy — the dog — its members display…

If you take Hollywood’s word for it, the Wild West was populated by more donkeys than women; in the Spaghetti Western School of History, men and animals do the hard work on the range, and the only female faces belong to sympathetic saloon girls and babes from the bordello. But…

There’s something wonderfully odd and mysterious about the mind of the miniaturist; it takes a certain kind of person to spend so much time around small things, to appreciate the exacting elegance of a tiny table or an itty-bitty bed. Whether it’s a simple dollhouse or an extravagant diorama, creating…

FRI, 11/11 In 2000, artist Patricio Córdova produced a piece titled “Allegory of My Life,” an assemblage of painted hearts, abstract lines and scenes from his family history in New Mexico and Southern Colorado. A year later, the picture of Córdova’s life changed dramatically. Hit from behind while stopped in…

In the Upper 15th Street shopping district, centered around 15th and Platte streets, low-key commerce thrives to the distant tune of freeway traffic and an unmistakably downtown beat. The shops here are all about marching to your own drummer, whether that’s expressed by what you wear, what you feed your…

FRI, 11/4 Freedom & Liberties, the new show at Capsule Gallery, leaves a lot of room for interpretation. “I have wanted to do a show on the theme of freedom and liberties for a long time because Bush, in his State of the Union speech, used those words an ungodly…

SAT, 11/5 Finding a great bottle of wine can be an adventure or a crapshoot. You can spend years educating yourself about grapes, vintages and vineyards, or you can simply trust the little info tags (“A facetious little wine, with hints of birch and guava”) that punctuate the shelves of…