When Fancy Tiger announced earlier this year that it wouldn’t be hosting its annual holiday craft market, which had grown exponentially — almost unmanageably — during its five fabulous years, it left a lot of handmade-gift fans foundering, in search of somewhere else to shop. Happily, many other established markets…
Denver loves The Book of Mormon, and the feeling is really mutual: Though the laugh-out-loud funny, touring Broadway musical from Colorado’s own boy geniuses, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is in the last week of its second run at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, Denver Center Attractions announced yesterday that…
#32: Eric Dallimore New Orleans native Eric Dallimore is a many-faceted artist: A large-scale sculptor, photographer and installation artist, whose work ranges from a public-art piece built from the wreckage of homes lost to Hurricane Katrina to a yearlong photographic documentation of the Denver dance troupe Wonderbound, he’s already keeping…
Trends in comedy come and go, but there’s something classic about Kevin O’Brien’s monthly Arguments and Grievances night. The simple twist of pitting local comics against one another for debates on inconsequential themes — which garnered a Best of Denver award this year from Westword — has been working for…
#33: Michael Chavez Michael Chavez had already worked as an artist and curator, experience that prepared him well for his current job as public-art administrator for Denver Arts & Venues. In that role, he both oversees and maintains the city’s present collection of 350 works and coordinates new commissions. High…
It’s hard to believe, after last year’s hoopla over The Book of Mormon’s premiere at the Ellie, that its return engagement will be just another show. A very good show, as Westword’s Juliet Wittman pointed out in August: “The show is smart, cheeky, raunchy, irreverent and also surprisingly and exuberantly…
The team players at Buntport Theater make it their business to upend every cornerstone of drama, and that’s how they’ll start their new season — with Electra Onion Eater, a tragedy-turned-comedy that peels Sophocles’s Electra down to its soap-opera core, with a pared-down, floating chorus that speaks from the strangest…
A San Antonio-based comic actor by way of Chicago, homegirl Ruby Nelda Perez is an old friend of Denver’s Su Teatro ensemble and artistic director Tony Garcia. And when she brings her touring one-woman show Doña Rosita’s Jalapeño Kitchen to Su Teatro beginning tonight for a weekend run, it won’t…
Theatre Esprit Asia, a local company bringing together pan-Asian casts with culture-centric works, has already proven in its first season that the concept is no flash in the pan. Not only is T.E.A., the theatrical brainchild of actors Maria Cheng and Tria Xiong, strong on talent, but the fine acting…
In her one-woman show Doña Rosita’s Jalapeño Kitchen, Ruby Nelda Perez rules her realm of pots and pans with an iron will and a big bowl of laughs, all while musing over whether or not to sell out, leave her business behind and let greedy developers change the face of…
Boulder-based photographer James Balog is an adventurer with a camera and a conscience who burst into the public eye last year with the release of Chasing Ice, a film about Balog’s ongoing project to document the slow melting of arctic glaciers brought on by global warming. He’s been around the…
The Halloween ghouls have all slunk back into their closets for another year, and that means — you guessed it — the holiday shopping season is upon us. And the urgency is amped up in 2013, thanks to an early Hanukkah (the first candles are lit on Thanksgiving eve this…
Arts funding and how it is meted out is a hot-button issue these days — especially if you’re a starving artist seeking a grant. In her comedy The Most Deserving, which opens today in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Ricketson Theatre, playwright Catherine Trieschmann puts those big questions into a…
The real point of Denver Arts Week isn’t to invent ten days of cultural events out of thin air. Rather, it’s to shine a spotlight on what happens here all year long — if you know where to find it. Think of it as a definitive map of the local…
#34: Janet Feder Denver musician Janet Feder started out a classical guitarist, but couldn’t be held back by classical constraints. Experimentation with prepared guitar became her invention and her ouevre, and over the years, she’s quietly become an integral working member of the experimental-music community not only on the Front…
#35: Brit Withey As artistic director of the Denver Film Society, Brit Withey is the man behind the curtain pulling all levers when it comes to bringing innovative, rare and artful film to the Sie FilmCenter for special screenings throughout the year. But at the annual Starz Denver Film Festival,…
The September flooding across the Front Range left lives tangled in its wake and victims struggling to recover their belongings — a photograph here, a cell phone there, a doll washed away in a torrent. For Denver-based artist Viviane Le Courtois, such objects and mementos, however damaged, represent the spirit…
RedLine is both a showplace and a godsend for its resident artists, who have two years to work there and show the results, both in and out of the built-in community it fosters. It’s also an elegant gallery space that accommodates every kind of art, from multimedia and photography to…
The Arvada Center is returning to “earth” this fall with a series of shows exploring how art — and especially ceramic art — evolves alongside culture by building upon and tweaking its traditional roots. In the main gallery, the center will present Earth Moves: Shifts in Ceramic ArT and Design,…
Artist Alicia Bailey spent time with her great-aunt Ruth Wheeler — an educator and naturalist — before the elder relative died and left behind a trove of found artifacts, photos, letters and specimens from nature that Bailey had naturally gravitated toward as she got to know Wheeler more intimately. “She…
A shorthand history of American music wouldn’t be complete without mention of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where a white sharecropper’s son, Rick Hall, pumped the spirit of the South into several decades’ worth of rock and soul hits alike. Using a stable of local session musicians, Hall produced…
When Phamaly, Denver’s theater company for actors with disabilities, puts on a formal production, it’s all business from start to finish, usually to rave reviews. But once a year, Phamaly stalwarts get to cut loose a little while performing material they’ve written and developed themselves for the comedy-sketch show Vox…
