Arts & Entertainment

While conceptual art can be really ponderous, it can also be really witty — at times downright funny — and super-smart. That was the case with Joseph Coniff: This Is What It’s Like, a show at Rule Gallery that was the art-world version of a smirk. Coniff, a recent Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design grad, had his tongue firmly in cheek when he conjured up this collection of oddball pieces. “Listen,” a white square with a set of earphones that conveyed no sound whatsoever, referred to the silent concert that John Cage created — or didn’t create. And there were other pieces that didn’t work even though they looked like they would, turning them into exemplars and lampoons of new media at the same time. These non-functional devices were supplemented by digitally altered photos and a video of Coniff painting a monochrome, with the painting itself hung next to the monitor. All in all, it was a spectacular debut for an up-and-coming young artist.

Tucked into a corner of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s first floor, this gift shop serves two distinct camps: curious tourists and curious residents. There are more than 150 books on artists, art genres and just plain weird stuff; I Feel Relatively Neutral About New York vies for attention next to How to Be a Man. Staffed by four rotating employees, the shop caters to both the silly and the serious, with shelves housing limited-edition art pieces as well as gnome-themed cookie jars, pillows in the shape of logs and light-up key rings that look like mustaches. (MCA shoppers are not satisfied with keeping their facial hair to their faces.) But the best time to shop at the museum is during the Memorial Day sale, when the MCA offers bargain prices on pieces used in displays throughout the year.

Readers’ Choice: Denver Art Museum

William Havu, the director of his namesake gallery, came up with a frothy confection last summer that celebrated serious artists taking a lighthearted approach to subject matter. Many of these artists were riffing off toys or the idea of play, as indicated by the show’s title, Toy Stories. The exhibit featured many amazing things, including works by Michael Brennan, Michael Stevens, Frances Lerner, Laurel Swab and Esteban Blanco, but as good as they all were, nothing could compare with the sculptures by Phillip Maberry and Scott Walker. Working as a team, the two created pieces that at first glance looked like cheap inflatable beach toys but were actually meticulously made polychromed ceramics. They were unforgettable — and so was this highbrow/lowbrow show.

For MCA Denver’s Another Victory Over the Sun, put together by museum director Adam Lerner and assistant curator Nora Burnett Abrams, all of the exterior light sources were blocked, making the interior fairly dark, with the works only minimally lighted. But that was enough to make pieces by Denver artist David Zimmer stand out. A wall installation called “Chorus” was particularly impressive: On brackets, Zimmer had mounted thirteen apothecary jars with digital screens inside; on the screens were moving images of birds landing on and flying off a windowsill, where a camera had been mounted. This tour de force was both eye-dazzling and thought-provoking, no easy task for an artist — but Zimmer pulled it off.

For Bradley Borthwick: Not All Borthwicks Were Noblemen, artist Bradley Borthwick constructed an elaborate installation, staged a performance with deadly weapons, and acted nude in a film with an alternately pounding and haunting soundtrack meant to document a ritual he’d created. As it turned out, many of Borthwick’s Scottish ancestors, all noblemen, had been slaughtered by the English using longbows, so as a kind of revenge, the artist has taken up the longbow himself. He shot arrows not only in the film, but live at Ironton during the show’s opening. Taken together, the archery performance and the sculptural installation with its film projection forced viewers to completely immerse themselves in Borthwick’s family legend; it was a multimedia machismo spectacle that shot directly to the heart.

Regina Benson, who lives in the foothills above Golden, was among those evacuated in the face of an approaching wildfire last summer, and seeing the bright oranges glowing in the darkness of night inspired a new body of work. The centerpiece of Regina Benson: On Fire was “Passage,” a curving pair of walls hung from the ceiling, made from cloth that has been dyed in the orange-to-black range of the natural tones associated with fire. Using an elaborate method she invented, Benson discharged the dyes over and over until she achieved her desired effects on the ready-made synthetic cloth panels, the edges of which had been burned to seal them. Walking through “Passage” was meant to convey to the viewer what it must be like to be in the middle of a fire — and even if the experience could only approximate that horror, it was nonetheless compelling and visually rich.

A magnificent traveling show at the Denver Art Museum, Robert Adams: The Place We Live provided an in-depth look at one of the most important artists associated with Colorado. In the ’60s and ’70s, Adams revolutionized photography by depicting the local landscape. His shots of the breathtaking Colorado scenery also captured the tract houses and trailer parks set incongruously, and disturbingly, in the middle of it, exposing the rape of the environment — a favorite topic for Adams, and the one that guaranteed his fame. The show was put together by Yale University Gallery’s Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds and tweaked for its Denver stop by the DAM’s photo curator, Eric Paddock. Despite his politically charged subjects, Adams also imbued his work with an old-fashioned beauty that paid homage to the great landscape photographers of the nineteenth century, through his sense for composition, his intimate scale, and the high quality of his prints.

The marvelous Marvelous Mud, on display last summer throughout both Denver Art Museum buildings, was not a single show, but eight separate ones, all about clay — at least to some extent. The main display was Overthrown: Clay Without Limits, which showcased current trends in ceramics; Focus: Earth & Fire also concentrated on contemporary works. Then there were shows that looked at historic ceramics, including Blue and White: A Ceramic Journey, which examined classic Chinese ware; Marajó: Ancient Ceramics at the Mouth of the Amazon, made up of prehistoric Brazilian ceramics; the self-explanatory Mud to Masterpiece: Mexican Colonial Ceramics; a solo devoted to the first American Indian woman to gain individual fame for her pots, Nampeyo: Excellence by Name; and a look at some industrial archaeology with Potters of Precision: The Coors Porcelain Company, which showed how that outfit manufactured beautifully designed laboratory vessels. The celebration was so all-inclusive that there were even relevant photos displayed in Dirty Pictures. On their own, the shows comprised by Marvelous Mud were all wonderful diversions; taken together, they created a cohesive whole, a vessel filled with amazing ideas and art.

Collin Parson hit it out of the park with Robert Mangold Retrospective: Time, Space and Motion, a show that’s still open in the entire set of galleries on the lower level of the Arvada Center for the Arts. The center’s exhibition designer, the twenty-something Parson served as curator of this show as well: The son of sculptor Chuck Parson, he met Mangold, the dean of contemporary sculpture in Colorado, when he was a child. Parson brought in a timeline to map out Mangold’s long and distinguished career; the exhibit includes pieces from his many different series, notably the spherical whirligigs of “Anemotive Kinetics,” as well as sketches, videos, clippings and photos. As a result, it’s a full-tilt retrospective that takes the viewer through the decades of Mangold’s long and illustrious career, reflecting all his various musings on space and movement.

One of the star turns in the Overthrown portion of Marvelous Mud was the outrageous installation “Apoptosis,” which was later reconfigured and deconstructed for Oxytocin: Katie Caron and Martha Russo at Ice Cube. Using ceramic blobs that were internally lighted and connected by wires, Katie Caron and Martha Russo made forms out of clusters of smaller shapes; the tangle of wires linked these different clustered forms together. The piece was meant to refer to the nurturing hormone oxytocin, which is associated with childbirth. This multi-part work played off Pendent Tendencies: Jerry Morris, a two-part ceramic installation by Morris, an art newcomer who created suspension pieces that defined environments — one about politics, the other religion. These displays were a fitting postscript to the “ceramaganza” displayed earlier at the Denver Art Museum.

Except for the fact that they are both well-established artists, the two men featured in I Gotcha Covered: Roland Bernier and Bill Vielehr have nothing in common. Roland Bernier’s visual language is actually language — in this show, giant letters in alphabetical order — which he uses as found compositions for his conceptual pieces. Bill Vielehr, on the other hand, does welded aluminum in the form of abstract columns. To make them work in the same show at Walker Fine Art, gallery director Bobbi Walker put the Berniers on the walls and the Vielehrs on the floor, creating what could be seen as a solo within a solo, with each artist standing out on his own.

The hippie movement of the ’60s and ’70s played an important part in Colorado history. Like other spots in the American West, this state was invaded by hordes of young free-thinkers in VW buses; they camped out in Capitol Hill, Boulder, Nederland and Manitou Springs, as well as more isolated spots. West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, put together by Museum of Contemporary Art director Adam Lerner and his wife, Elissa Auther, attempted to establish an upward reappraisal of the West’s place in the art world by celebrating the contributions of this movement. Though different parts of the show dealt with different parts of the West, notably California, the crescendo came in the section devoted to Colorado’s legendary Drop City art cooperative near Trinidad, and one of Drop City’s founders, Clark Richert, emerged as the clear star of the show. West of Center reminded us that many of the region’s master artists came here as barefoot kids with pie-in-the-sky notions about how to revolutionize art and community — and many of them are still trying to do so.

It’s not that easy to put together a coherent show with the works of two artists with distinct sensibilities, but Space Gallery definitely hit the mark with Dissection & Deregulation: Michael Burnett and Lewis McInnis. Michael Burnett, who owns Space, put his own pared-down compositions featuring repeated motifs alongside the smeary geometric abstractions that are the signature style of Lewis McInnis. Though the two artists take different approaches, both refer to patterning and expressionionism in their abstract paintings, and their individual efforts looked great as two connected halves of a single outing.

The University of Denver has featured important artists on its faculty since Vance Kirkland founded the department in the 1920s. Dan Jacobs, director of the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery at the school, is interested not only in DU’s illustrious history but in its very vital present, and the latter provided the focus for Faculty Triennial. The university’s most famous teacher currently is Lawrence Argent of “I See What you Mean” (Big Blue Bear) fame, but there are other well-known faculty members, including Susan Meyer, Jeffrey Keith, Mia Mulvey, Lauren Mayer and Rafael Fajardo, all of whom took part in the show. Since there was nothing linking the works of these various artists other than their connection to DU, the show wound up providing a glimpse not only of what’s now happening on the campus, but also what’s happening across Denver’s art scene.

Colorado Springs artist Sean O’Meallie managed to change deep-seated ideas about chairs in a single day. But it really took many months of hard work — planning, fundraising and chair-collecting — to bring the Manitou Chair Project to fruition. And it came off without a hitch last October, when about 700 chairs were lined up in a seemingly endless row down the middle of Manitou Avenue in Manitou Springs at dawn, though only a great deal of community input and volunteer work made it possible. The well-documented one-day event, kind of a downscale Christo installation by and for the people, also inspired a show of chair art at the sponsoring Business of Art Gallery in Manitou, and will live on as a marketing tool for the touristy town and artist enclave through a series of posters depicting the project’s singular ripple in time.

The art scene we have today in Denver is rooted in the late ’70s and early ’80s. That’s when the first co-ops were founded and a generation of galleries began coming on line, with a crowd of artists emerging to fill those places; the first First Friday celebrations even date to that era. Many of the people intrinsic to establishing the scene are still around, but a few who died prematurely have been all but forgotten. John Haeseler Revisited, at Z|Art Dept., resurrected the reputation of one such once-lively force. The display of Haeseler’s brightly colored, somewhat Warholian paintings was a definite stretch for Z, where the normal stock-in-trade is the quiet elegance conveyed by vintage abstraction. But it was great to once again experience Haeseler’s work, which hadn’t been exhibited for more than fifteen years, and to see how fresh and new it all still looked.

The late Vance Kirkland is unquestionably the most famous abstract painter in the history of Colorado art, making the Kirkland Museum the perfect place to mount a show about abstraction in this state. The four-part show, which is still on view, was conceived by museum director Hugh Grant, using his usual more-is-more style. With this loosely organized exhibit, Grant provides a look at Kirkland’s illustrious career, at the work of his contemporaries, at abstract sculpture and at later abstraction — all made here in the Centennial State. Despite the title, much more than abstract expressionism is on display. In fact, there are so many great things included by Kirkland and the likes of Al Wynne, Ken Goehring, Charles Bunnell and Mary Chenoweth, among a host of others, that this show deserves more than just one visit.

The trend in central Denver galleries, especially in RiNo, is to tout exhibit spaces as extensions of someone’s home, as found at places like Hinterland and Pattern Shop Studio. But when Tran and Josh Wills rolled up the garage door on Super Ordinary last year, they inaugurated a new underground house-gallery: In the same space where their kids like to skateboard between exhibits, the Willses have launched a unique showcase for emerging and urban artists where every opening is an event and everything from cupcakes and beer to independent local fashions are rolled out along with the art. We like their homey hospitality and the DIY ambience, which fits right into the genre-jumping rhythms of RiNo.

Denver not only boasts the 2011 national champion slam-poetry team, Slam Nuba, but in March the city hosted its largest poetry event to date: the Women of the World Poetry Slam. And then a local won it: Longtime poet and 37-year-old mother of four Dominique Ashaheed, a member of the Slam Nuba team, held on to the first-place slot through all three days of competition. She finally took the title with “For Emmett Till,” a piece that related her ancestral history while also telling of the 1955 lynching death of a fourteen-year-old African-American boy. Being home to two national champions as well as host of the successful Women of the World event puts Denver squarely in line to host the national slam championship in the near future. Word.

For decades during the first half of the twentieth century, Birger Sandzén, a Swedish painter based in Kansas, spent his summers in Colorado recording the celebrity scenery in photos, drawings and, most famously, paintings. His signature style — characterized by wild flourishes of brushwork carried out in cotton-candy shades of thick paint — created a bridge linking post-impressionism to abstract expressionism, and in the process brought that heroic moment in the development of modernism right to our front door. Taking advantage of the fact that the Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Kansas was closed for remodeling, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center museum director Blake Milteer organized Sandzén in Colorado, using pieces from the Kansas facility, along with loans from important Colorado-based collections, to put together the largest show ever devoted to Sandzén.

People still flip out when they learn they can check out a pigeon at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver — and we don’t mean that they can just see one; we mean they can check one out like a library book, then take it home — with the stipulation that they then let it loose. These birds, part of an ongoing project called Thinking About Flying by artist Jon Rubin, are trained homing pigeons, which makes them way more convenient than a book. We had our own fun with the project when Westword writer Jef Otte raced a checked-out pigeon to MCA on his bike (the pigeon, it turned out, took her own sweet time), but you can also find documentation of other pigeon experiences on MCA’s website. Or just try it on your own, though time’s running out: Thinking About Flying packs up and flies away after April 30.

That Mythica von Griffyn is a colorful character goes without saying once you’ve met her. That’s partly because she holds down some of the rarest jobs on earth: She turns models into exotic birds, sidewalks into masterpieces and actors into the walking dead. And sometimes she simply is the walking dead, as a character herself in haunted houses. As a mistress of the paintbrush, Mythica seems to understand how the images she paints will mesh with the body’s nooks and curves before she starts work — but even she admits it doesn’t come without many hours of practice. As an award-winning chalk artist and especially a colorist, she shapes oversized patchworks of pure hue into recognizable images. It all fits in with her haunted-house career, part of her life since she was fourteen and took the job on a lark, eventually developing an obvious talent for making monsters as a makeup artist. Not your everyday occupation? Leave it to the professional.

Okay, the Clyfford Still Museum has only had one show, but it’s so incredible, it deserves its own award. The spectacular Inaugural Exhibition was organized by Dean Sobel, the museum’s founding director. Five years ago, Sobel was one of only a handful of people who had actually seen Still’s work, since the artist was a major recluse. New discoveries on his part caused Sobel to completely upend all previous research on the artist, demonstrating that it was the figure, and not the landscape, that Still was referencing. This show lays out how Still began in the ’20s with post-impressionism and by the early ’40s had progressed to abstract expressionism — years before the rest of his generation arrived at related aesthetic conclusions. From then on, until his last works, in the late ’70s, Still perfected his pictorial aims, with his paintings becoming airier and flatter as time went on. This spectacular show has true international significance — and it’s still on display, for those here at home who somehow missed it.

Entering the Aurora Fox’s black-box theater for K2, audience members were confronted by a steep cliff (a miraculous piece of design by Charles Packard), where two men were sitting on a ledge. Pakistan’s K2 is the second-highest mountain in the world, and it kills climbers; these two men are stranded there. One of them has a gruesome injury on his leg; the other makes a few attempts to climb the cliff and summon help. It’s bitter cold and growing dark. The two debate survival strategies, muse about mortality and consider what their lives have meant — and that’s pretty much it for the action. The play asks a lot of both actors and viewers, trapping them together in a static situation and a bleak and terrifying place. But under the direction of donnie l. betts and in the hands of two veteran actors, Jude Moran and William Hahn, K2 proved a riveting evening of theater.

In the spring of 2011, Jill Desmond, then a young curatorial assistant at the Denver Art Museum, looked at the contents of the permanent collection in the Modern and Contemporary department and realized there were a lot of high-tech pieces. Enough, it turns out, to pull off the blockbuster Blink! Light, Sound and the Moving Image, a show that rambled over two levels of the Hamilton Building. Desmond included works by the greats who started it all, including Nam June Paik and Dan Flavin, as well as contemporary local practitioners such as Donald Fodness and Gary Emrich. By cramming in so many pieces, she captured the feel of a carnival funhouse filled with emphatic sights and sounds, each meant to attract our attention. Unfortunately, Desmond has been bumped upstairs to the DAM’s administration, which means her curator days are over for the time being. Too bad.

Readers’ Choice: Yves Saint Laurent at the Denver Art Museum

Last summer’s inaugural Denver County Fair, which took shape in the fertile, never-say-never imaginations of event promoter/dreamer Dana Cain and artist/gardener/doer Tracy Weil (not to mention pie-making artist Chandler Romeo, who came up with the original concept), cut through every cultural cross-section you could think of. There was fashion. There was urban commerce. There were pancakes, chickens, a freak show, performing pigs, pie contests and Devo. The most important point? The Denver County Fair wouldn’t have worked without the dozens and dozens of volunteers who stepped up to set it up and tear it down, coordinate events in each pavilion and keep things running smoothly throughout. More than a spectacle, the fair demonstrated how disparate folks from a diverse community can come together and throw the best party this town has seen. We can hardly wait for the 2012 edition in August.

Readers’ Choice: Taste of Colorado

If Curious Theatre Company had only brought us Clybourne Park — Bruce Norris’s witty and insightful update of Lorraine Hansberry’s famed A Raisin in the Sun — this season, well, dayenu, as we say at Passover: It would have been enough. If artistic director Chip Walton had seized only on Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul to introduce to Denver audiences, that might have been enough, too. But instead, in a season that also included Caryl Churchill’s strange little brain tease A Number, the (frankly forgettable) On an Average Day, and Alison Moore’s clever comedy Collapse, Walton presented another regional premiere: Bill Cain’s 9 Circles, a play about a war crime in Iraq that left audiences stunned. Curious is one of those rare theaters where programs are shaped by a unified artistic vision: There’s no pandering, no holding a finger to the wind to see what’s likely to sell. Which means that over the years, the company has developed the kind of discriminating audience that makes its risk-taking possible.

Readers’ Choice: Curious Theatre

Many artists are interested in environmental issues, and former Center for Visual Art director Jennifer Garner brought a bunch of them together for Reclamation, an exhibit dedicated to art made from trash. Though a group show, Reclamation zeroed in on California artist Ann Weber, who weaves cardboard strips to make big abstract sculptures that have a monumental presence despite their modest materials. To supplement the Webers, Garner invited five Colorado artists — Brian Cavanaugh, Yumi Janairo Roth, Jon Rietfors, Terry Maker and Sabin Aell — who all work along similar lines, at least conceptually. The show provided striking proof that one person’s trash really is someone else’s treasure.

Readers’ Choice: Ice Cube Gallery at Ice Cube Gallery

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning Ruined is based on interviews that the playwright conducted in refugee camps with women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo — a lawless, bloodstained place where women are raped and mutilated by the thousands. She set the action in a whorehouse run by Mama Nadi, a raucous, tough-minded soul who both protects and exploits her girls. Despite the protagonists’ desperate circumstance, the play is full of vitality, and even snatched moments of joy — and the Denver Center Theatre Company production caught this perfectly with a bright, evocative set; warm lighting; colorful costumes; a highly talented cast; and the pulsing, on-stage presence of a couple of talented musicians, Ron McBee and composer Keith E. Johnston.

Readers’ Choice: Wicked

It was an off-the-wall choice on the part of Singer Gallery curator Simon Zalkind to mount an important show dedicated to an artist who quit doing work years ago. But Myron Melnick: Taking Shape: Works with Paper turned out to be a fabulous exhibit. Zalkind sampled both wall sculptures and monotypes by Melnick that showed off his two very different gifts: a sense for form in the sculptures, and an expertise in color in the prints. In addition, Melnick’s elegant abstracts refer to a range of earlier art, everything from tribal pieces to works by the modern masters. The Singer, part of the Mizel Arts and Culture Center at the Jewish Community Center, has had a much-reduced schedule of late, with only a few shows a year, but with exhibits like this one, Zalkind is holding up his end as best as he can.

Readers’ Choice: Clyfford Still at Clyfford Still Museum

American Night tells the story of immigrants in America through a crazed mix of skits, historical references, inspired parody and moments of pathos and insight. As the play opens, the protagonist is studying for his citizenship test, and as he reads, a phantasmagoric tapestry of historical events unfolds. He witnesses the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 — under which huge swaths of Mexico’s land were lost to the United States — and runs into such figures as Malcolm X and Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. He gives Sacagawea, the Native American woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their voyage, a bright-green pair of Nikes and advises her to “just do it.” The play explores the evils of racism with serious intelligence and irrepressible high spirits, and the Denver Center Theatre Company’s joyous, driving production was first-rate, from the fluid tech to the balls-out energy of the cast.

The creation of “Mustang,” Luis Jimenez’s 32-foot-tall rearing stallion in blue painted fiberglass, has all the elements of a good movie: Mature artist gets a major commission and attempts to create his masterpiece, but can’t seem to complete it. More than ten years pass, with dueling lawsuits crossing between the artist and his patron, the City and County of Denver. Then, in what would be considered the climax — if later outrageous events didn’t eclipse it — the still-under-construction piece falls and kills Jimenez. The sculpture was eventually completed by his studio and erected in 2008 outside the Jeppesen Terminal at Denver International Airport — and that’s when the manure really hit the fan. The piece was stung by the slings and arrows of genuine hatred, including a social-media campaign to have it removed; its nostrils, glowing eyes and scrotum were the subjects of obsessive interest. The commotion proved once again that great art can elicit strong emotions; these just weren’t the right ones. The haters obviously don’t understand (much less appreciate) Jimenez’s sophisticated neo-pop work, a combination of the heroic Western sculpture tradition and the sensibility of Chicano low-rider culture — and a perfect symbol for Denver.

Readers’ Choice: “Mustang,” Luis Jimenez

Phantom is different from that Andrew Lloyd Webber behemoth, Phantom of the Opera. It’s smaller in scope, stronger on plot and character, and has a more supple score — though the surging emotions and Gothic plot points are all still there. For this production, Boulder’s Dinner Theatre fielded two leads with terrific voices, as well as a stage full of impressively skilled performers in smaller roles. By now the company has its tech down pat, which meant a cunningly contrived set and elegant costumes. The direction — pacing, focus, balance — was top-notch, too. And the sound, as always, was crisp and professional: Neal Dunfee’s orchestra has been an unsung (no pun intended) gift to this company for many years.

When Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale was read at the Denver Center Theatre Company’s New Play Summit in 2011, we all wondered how a work that centered on a morbidly obese man slowly dying while anchored to his couch would fare in full production — and the production mounted by the DCTC this season laid all those concerns to rest. While Charlie’s world is static, the action is essentially emotional and metaphoric rather than physical. He may be anchored to his couch, but he’s visited by several people: a friend who’s determined to try to help him, a nineteen-year-old Mormon, his ex-wife and — most important — the estranged daughter with whom he’s determined to make some kind of connection. Well-cast and -directed, this premiere illuminated the profound half-submerged contours of The Whale and illuminated its large-spirited gentleness.

Clyfford Still, a pioneer of abstract expressionism and a giant in the history of modern art, died in 1980, leaving behind a will stipulating that his estate, comprising some 94 percent of his life’s artistic output, would be given to an American city that would pledge to build a museum to display his work — and nothing else. In 2004, then-mayor John Hickenlooper brought home the bacon when he sweet-talked the artist’s widow into selecting Denver as the recipient of Still’s posthumous gift. Five years later, construction began on the Clyfford Still Museum, hard against the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, according to a design by Brad Cloepfil’s Allied Works Architecture, and the doors opened this past November. While the exterior is chaste, made up of simple cubic volumes with unexpected cutouts in the grooved cast-in-place concrete walls, the interior is stunning, with these three-dimensional walls providing the perfect counterpoint to Still’s utterly flat signature work.

A variety show like Vox Phamalia: Quadrapalooza, presented at the Avenue Theater, required a whole different set of skills from a director. The show was intended as a place where everyone in the PHAMALY company could find a home, regardless of singing or acting talent or level of disability. To achieve this, director Edith Weiss selected stories from those sent in by cast members, edited them and did some writing of her own, along with Jeremy Palmer. She had to learn how to work with actors who had not only the usual emotional vulnerabilities, but unusual physical ones, too. Under her direction, the cast found ways to help and support each other, and the rage and sadness of the stories were often transmuted into humor, without any diminution of truth or impact. As a result, the performers forged a strong emotional connection with their audiences.

It’s hard to beat the art heavyweights around the Civic Center, but by virtue of its vast scale alone, RiNo — the River North Art District — definitely does, and thus deserves the title of best arts district in Denver. Though pioneering arts outposts began to occupy the Upper Larimer section of the district three decades ago, only over the past five years has a critical mass of art-related outfits occupied the former railyards — with some 100 studios, galleries, ateliers and other art-related operations now sited there. Credit for the successful promotion of RiNo goes to artists/arts advocates Jill Hadley Hooper and Tracy Weil, who founded the district just as the artistic invasion of the almost-abandoned industrial zone hit full speed. As a result, today RiNo is a favorite destination not just for local artists, but for arts enthusiasts throughout the metro area.

What was fascinating about the set created by David M. Barber for the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, which was set in 1950s America, was how it melded broad and cartoony elements with others that were subtle and aesthetically pleasing. There was a big map at the back of the stage that tracked the characters’ wanderings around the country in lines of light, as well as a number of ’50s-style ads for Shakespeare-referencing products hanging at the sides: a car called a Dromio, Viola’s Kiss makeup. Petruchio’s home was funky, dull-colored and rustic, but Baptista’s restaurant was so elegant, the colors melting into each other in shades of pink, silver and purple, that you found yourself wondering what was on the menu and if they’d let you sneak in for a bite.

Black Book brings urban and street-inspired art to Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe in a big, bold way, hosting exhibits that showcase both local and national figures. One month you might see seafaring woodcuts by John Fellows, the next, sculptures and prints by Ravi Zupa; international names like Ottograph, Galo and 2501, who showed together here a year ago, are also a big part of the fluid Black Book mix. And the gallery keeps the art coming, one show after another, sweeping house monthly. Watch carefully: This kind of work isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither is Black Book, which deals in affordable, collectible works that reflect the times we live in.

You don’t need pages and pages to tell a good story. In fact, a great story can be related in just six words. Fast Forward Press constantly proves this by publishing flash novels and annual anthologies devoted to literature that falls under the 1,000-word mark. From six-worders like “Seven cock-rings later, she kissed me,” by Michael Flatt, to longer, more involved pieces, the Denver-based press consistently publishes quality flash fiction for those of us who tend to nod off in the middle of Dickensian descriptions.

When the Arvada Center’s new production of Hairspray opened last summer, everyone, but everyone, was checking out the costumes. That’s because Denver hero and Project Runway superstar Mondo Guerra designed them, putting his way with fresh and professional looks to the test. But in fact, Mondo had worked behind the scenes at the center’s theater long before he became nationally famous, and it was a natural step for him to take on this particular costuming job — which, he told us, was very different, especially in terms of functionality, from designing for the runway. We especially loved how he dressed up the guys in plaid jackets, sweater vests and vertically striped V-necks (we could almost imagine Mondo wearing them himself), but the rest of the retro looks were awesome, as well. We’re certain John Waters would’ve agreed.

Canadian actress Rebecca Northan sat forlornly at a table on the stage of the Galleria Theatre wearing a tight dress and a red clown nose. She told us that her name was Mimi the Clown, that she had been stood up, and that she was going to select a new date from the audience. She did. And this wasn’t one of those token audience-involvement gestures you see so frequently. This was the real thing. The man she selected at each performance spent almost two hours on stage with Northan, improvising his way through the getting-to-know-you chat, a snuggle on her sofa and an imagined five-years-down the line sequence — all under her shrewd, sometimes gentle, sometimes slightly sterner, guidance. A show like Blind Date, brought here by Denver Center Attractions, is a high-wire act, calling for instant judgment — everything depends on the man who’s selected — and a knowledge of when to control and when to let the untried partner take the reins. But Northan’s presence, charm and intelligence never faltered.

Though it appears to be on the front lawn of the new Clyfford Still Museum, “For Jennifer” is actually on land owned by the Denver Art Museum, which also owns the fabulous Joel Shapiro sculpture. A signature Shapiro, the 32-foot-tall, dazzling blue piece is a cross between minimalism and representation, with the rectilinear metal bars economically brought together in such a way as to suggest a woman dancing. And that woman is the late Jennifer Moulton, the planning director during Wellington Webb’s administration who envisioned the Civic Center Cultural Complex. Moulton never saw her vision come to fruition; she died in 2003, before the DAM’s Hamilton Building had been built and before the History Colorado museum and the Clyfford Still had even been conceived. But it’s fitting to have an ad hoc memorial to her located in the middle of it all. And a stunning memorial it is.

Readers’ Choice: “Cloudscape,” Christopher Lavery

In the alley heading north off the 600 block of East Colfax Avenue is the coolest unsolicited advertising in Denver. Local graffiti artist Theo took it upon himself to spray-paint a ten-by-twenty-foot love letter to Kilgore Books and Comics, a Capitol Hill institution at 624 East 13th Avenue. Featuring images of such bohemian writers as Kurt Vonnegut (creator of the character Kilgore Trout), Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, the mural points the way to the store with an arrow and the helpful instruction “2.5 blocks.” As a teaser for the books you’ll find there, Theo also included quotes below each picture, including this classic from Vonnegut: “We were put on this earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

Readers’ Choice: Graffiti by David Chloe

Even now, on the brink of total approval, the controversy still seems to rage around international installation artist Christo’s dream to drape sections of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado with translucent fabric canopies. And though the Bureau of Land Management gave its okay to the project in November, clearing a major hurdle for Christo, and it seems likely that the project, which outlived Jeanne-Claude, Christo’s famous red-haired partner in crime, will proceed, there are still a few permitting roadblocks. Originally slated for 2014, the Over the River schedule has been moved back another year, to August 2015. But no matter: It will happen. And when it does, folks from around the world will journey to Colorado to see it.

Art and design intersected three ways last summer at Microclimates, the product of a successful Kickstarter campaign launched by artists Samuel Schimek and Rob Mack. The installation, a sort of soundscaped walk through three environments — the woods, a cave, and a meadow inhabited by animal graphics and iconic images — spread throughout the garage that is Super Ordinary. At the opening, many of those images repeated in the fashion designs of a third partner, Rebecca Peebles, whose styles hit a makeshift runway that led out onto a street lined with onlookers and food trucks. It helped that it was a beautiful, festive summer evening and that the subject matter was whimsical. We can only hope that next summer brings more happenings of this sort to Super Ordinary.

We couldn’t help feeling like we were living in a big city last spring, when Create Denver brought digital media and 3-D video projection to the heart of the Denver Theatre District, making use first of the giant Colorado Convention Center LED screen at 14th and Champa streets before turning the whole wall of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House into a many-storied projection screen for an eye-popping light show. Random dancers and BMX bikers entertained in the intersection as the sun went down on a beautiful evening, and we swear we heard a collective inhalation of expectation and joy as the first images of the digital video program, curated by Ryan Pattie and Ivar Zeile of Plus Gallery, flickered into view up above. After that ended, the Ellie began to light up with site-specific patterns and images in a spectacular narrative in the dark. It was a major art happening…and we’re ready for more.

You might have stumbled into the Denver Art Society on a First Friday, wondering what it was all about. Well, here’s the deal: The nonprofit, which looks something like an art flea market and hallway art exhibit at a grade school during an open house, is all about advocating for kids whose schools lack sufficient arts programming. With that in mind, the society offers classes for kids (and the aforementioned exhibition opportunities), as well as space for working artists and performers who in turn volunteer their time. The Denver Art Society’s biggest dream yet? The Treehouse Youth Art School, a more formal version of what it’s already been trying to do that will offer free cultural classes for kids because — hey — without an arts education, kids grow up not seeing the world in all of its colors.

Our region doesn’t lack good photography, but it’s been lacking a good photography showcase since Hal Gould’s Camera Obscura shut its doors a year ago. In the meantime, though, two of the area’s biggest photography boosters — the then-homeless Colorado Photographic Arts Center and Working With Artists in Belmar — struck up a merger deal last summer that’s still being finalized. Here’s our snap judgment: Now under the directorship of Rupert Jenkins as the New Colorado Photographic Arts Center, the strengths of both venues, pre-merger — WWA’s instructional side and CPAC’s curatorial reach — combine to make this a powerhouse representative of the future of photography in Colorado. We can’t wait to see what develops.

These two fabulous murals might never have come to life were it not for artist Carlos Fresquez’s Community Paint: The Mural class at Metropolitan State College of Denver, a beautiful nod to Auraria’s former life as a vibrant Hispanic community. The class’s two-fold project last fall was to create murals for the facades of Su Teatro, in the Denver Civic Theater, as well as Metro’s Center for Visual Art gallery, both located along the burgeoning Santa Fe strip. The resulting pieces honored Su Teatro for its forty years of keeping Chicano heritage alive on stage with a traditional depiction of the feathered serpent of myth, Quetzalcoatl, that snakes across the building’s east wall; in the coming year, subsequent classes will complete a wrap-around continuation of the mural. And for the CVA, Fresquez worked with director Jennifer Garner to create an abstract, vivid swash of colored shapes that fits with the gallery’s modern bent while beautifying the street. What Fresquez and his students have accomplished not only gives a visual nod to the barrio past of Auraria while acknowledging the current life of Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe, but also offers a look at the future of the area. Thanks for the history lesson — and the local color!

Tucked into the artist studios above City, O’City, the Deer Pile is the latest venture in the Dan Landes empire, which stretches from vegetarian restaurants to a resort in Mexico to an urban farm in Lakewood. The Deer Pile — named after an inexplicable mural of a giant pile of deer — is devoted to showcasing a wide variety of programs, everything from late-night comedy to (quieter) concerts, lectures and the like. The emphasis is often on countercultural topics, and admission is all donation-based. Not only are these programs a bargain, but they’re open to all ages — which means the Deer Pile fills a definite void in Denver.

Brian Smith and the Space Creators are on a roll. They took a chance in 2010, when they opened the doors at Wazee Union, the first of their growing empire of warehouses transformed into artist communities with affordable studio space. When that gamble turned out to be even more successful than they could have imagined, they moved forward with Walnut Workshop, another project right across the tracks from Wazee Union. And this past year the third cog in their growing empire, the Laundry on Lawrence, didn’t just open its doors; it also introduced an expanded concept. In addition to continuing the cheap, dorm-like studio/office model featured in the first two locations, the Laundry also includes a dedicated gallery space; a performance venue called Work | Space that’s already home to the LIDA Project and Control Group Productions; and even an inexpensive photography studio, Bleach, which can be rented by the day. Smith and his Space Creators can also be commended for upping their commitment to the RiNo neighborhood by sponsoring a monthly Makers & Doers networking meet-up and participating in the RiNo Yacht Club neighborhood beautification organization. It all adds up to an impressive example of how the business and art worlds can collaborate to make our city a better place. And, hey, guys, there are plenty of other empty warehouses in this town just waiting for a new coat of paint!

Hidden away on the dark northwest side of the Denver Performing Arts Complex is the little Jones Theatre (known as the Source when the facility was originally built), which has always seemed like an afterthought with its shadowy, back-door locale. But what goes on here might be one of the best deals in town: clever performance- and improv-based events that usually cost between $10 and $20 and often include a reception as well as entertainment, all under the umbrella of Off-Center @ the Jones. Curated by Denver Center Theatre Company projection designer Charlie Miller and DCTC artistic associate Emily Tarquin, the series includes Cult Following, a monthly “live movie” improv party with free popcorn, the current Square of Ice battle-of-the-bands Johnny Cash spoof, and a changing palette of little plays and performances like DATE*, coming up in April, which is based on real stories about Internet dating. Quirky, funny and cutting-edge, Off-Center definitely lives up to its name.

Several years back, local artist Katie Taft curated Self Made, a stimulating art-talk series at Double Daughter’s that eventually outlived its shelf life there. But it wasn’t an idea that was ready to be tabled altogether. Taft brought the idea back into play last year, when Action Figures debuted as a monthly event at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Belmar. A new opportunity for artists to get together and share ideas and challenges, Action Figures provides both a fascinating look at the artistic process and a kick in the butt for working artists. Go be inspired.

Is Denver on the brink of becoming a notable national fashion center? Some people think it could be just that, with the right kind of push. A circle of friends in the local fashion industry — Tricia Hoke, Deb Henriksen, Lisa Elstun and Jose Duran — got to wondering how they could draw the design community closer together to create a more cohesive front. Inspired by the success of Green Drinks, a shmoozer for folks in the environmental arena, they devised Red Drinks, a once-a-month networking get-together where fellow designers can network and share ideas at Double Daughter’s over drink specials and snacks. In that welcoming atmosphere, they hear speakers, view fashion and trunk shows, and talk business. On the agenda recently? A presentation about the newly forming Fashion Association of Denver.

The hoopla for this exhibition began long before it opened in late March at the Denver Art Museum, and with good reason: Not only is Denver the only stop that this blockbuster from the Foundation Pierre Bergé — Yves Saint Laurent in France — will make in the United States, but it’s breathtaking, even if you aren’t a dedicated fashionista. The forty-year retrospective, which demonstrates how YSL drew influences from menswear staples and the art world to create an ascending staircase of style rising through the decades, is also a fascinating peek into the details and craft of haute couture. And on a local level, it’s giving a boost to our own fashion scene, involving Denver designers in an accompanying series of stylish events thrown in conjunction with the main attraction. From the elegant display of nearly forty YSL women’s tuxedos to the finale of evocative evening gowns, the big show doesn’t misstep once. Bravo!

We take care of our own. While this notion has always held true in Denver, the sentiment was never driven home more convincingly than when 3 Kings Tavern co-owner Jim Norris was unexpectedly hospitalized after being bitten by a brown recluse spider. Norris spent nearly a week in the hospital, racking up a mountain of bills. But soon after news of his dilemma spread, a number of good friends, including Jerri Thiel and John Baxter, organized a series of benefits for the local music champion, and tons of bands stepped in to lend a hand. Way to go, Denver.

In 2004, DJ Vajra earned a Best of Denver nod as Best Hip-Hop DJ/Turntablist. Back then, we described the DJ, otherwise known as Chris Karns, as an unassuming record clerk from Boulder. “All DJs fear Vajra,” one of his peers said at the time. And in fact, even back then a number of people considered him not just the best DJ in Denver, but one of the best in the world. And now, with his win at the 2011 DMC Championship in London, the freshly minted champion has officially been crowned the best DJ in the world.

You know the one about the guy with the smoking-hot girlfriend, the one who, when folks see the two of them together, they’re all like, “How the hell did you land her?” And you know his answer? “I asked.” While the members of FaceMan could never be accused of playing out of their league like that, they used much the same tactic to enlist both the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the Rebirth Brass Band, along with local luminaries, to join them in the studio when they were recording their new record.

Once BLKHRTS came roaring onto the local scene, it was only a matter of time before the act’s ferocious brand of hip-hop attracted attention outside of Denver. So it came as little surprise when estimable Los Angeles-based music critic Jeff Weiss praised the group in the L.A. Times after seeing it in California this summer. But what was surprising was that the outfit made a big enough impact on Weiss that he included BLKHRTS’ BLK S BTFL in a roundup of his favorite underrated rap releases of the year on Pitchfork — props that were well deserved.

While we certainly understand the desire to protect one’s brand, the chances of anybody confusing Elway the band with John Elway the man are about as good as people mistaking this fishwrap for the similarly named Westwood college. Just the same, when the Broncos executive caught wind that the band formerly known as 10-4 Eleanor was now calling itself Elway, he got all John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt about it. Only instead of marveling, “Hey, that’s my name, too!,” he sicced his attorneys on the dudes, requesting that they kindly knock it off.

Before the Fray definitively claimed the title, Five Iron Frenzy was one of Denver’s biggest success stories. The homegrown, Christian-centric ska-core band earned its renown the old-fashioned way: by building up a grassroots fan base through constant touring. When the band called it a day in 2003, playing its final show in front of a capacity crowd at the Fillmore Auditorium, its members never imagined that a decade later they would claim the distinction of being one of Kickstarter’s biggest success stories. When Five Iron Frenzy decided to regroup to record an album, the band put out a plea to fans to help raise $30K. Astoundingly, the act reached that goal within one hour, and ultimately ended up raising just over a quarter-million dollars.

When the property that once held Time Capsule Studios — the iconic recording facility where a number of classic Denver albums were recorded — went into foreclosure and was taken over by the bank last May, Martin Anderson, a real-estate agent charged with overseeing the sale of the building, discovered what he suspected to be master recording reels left behind. Sensing that these tapes might contain irreplaceable recordings — with sentimental value for those who recorded them, if nothing else — he made arrangements for the tapes to be salvaged by Haylar Garcia, whose band Hippie Werewolves had recorded at Time Capsule, and whose Decibel Garden Studios agreed to serve as custodian of the reels at no charge. As a result, classic recordings from the likes of the Fluid and Christie Front Drive were saved.

When Bon Iver earned a Grammy nod for its self-titled 2011 album — besting heavyweights like Radiohead, Death Cab for Cutie and My Morning Jacket — it wasn’t just a victory and upset for Justin Vernon and Jagjaguwar, the indie label he records for. It was a major win for Colorado’s own Brian Joseph, a former member of Achille Lauro and the Fray’s road crew, who engineered the album. Although Joseph currently hangs his hat in Wisconsin, he grew up and cut his teeth in Denver. And although this award wasn’t part of the televised ceremony, we all beamed with pride when we heard the news.

Scott Fuller had pretty much retired Magic Cyclops. But he found the opportunity to rekindle his long-running brand of performance-art comedy and music by trying out for American Idol last year, at what was then Invesco Field at Mile High. Clearly, he did it for his own amusement and perhaps to have stories to tell later; he didn’t necessarily expect to make it to the first round of the broadcast version. In what has to be one of the most memorable few minutes in Idol‘s history, Magic performed a couple of songs for the judges and got to be funnier on the show than anyone has ever been. While the appearance translated into a bit of national notoriety for Fuller, it also added real color to an otherwise tame program.

It’s hard to recall a band in recent memory that made as much of an impression as Spires, a quartet that appeared quietly but instantly engaged us with its auspicious four-song debut, which was far too short for our tastes. Somehow the group’s lush, atmospheric dream-pop sound — which has plenty in common with acts like the 77’s and Slowdive, as Spires itself acknowledges — manages to be familiar enough that you can identify the well it draws from without it seeming like some blatant, carbon copy. Of all the year’s new acts, Spires is the most promising.

Readers’ Choice: Codec

Fallene, Fallene, Fallene — where have you been all our lives? We like to think that Fallene Wells’s big year actually got its start in 2010, when we named her to the sixth annual MasterMind class, but though the multi-talented fashion designer, hair stylist and fashion-show promoter was already a big thinker, the best was yet to come. In 2011, Wells, who’d been thwarted in her first attempt to compete on Lifetime’s Project Runway, tried again and was chosen as a competitor for PR‘s ninth season. And if her run on that show was short, it was definitely auspicious. Cute as a button and exuding a style all her own, Wells is now in demand in everywhere — from her lower stratum as a hairdresser to her powerhouse capacity as the sole machine behind Forever Darling, a runway benefit she’s planned and run since 2008. And this year’s event, which happens at the end of March, is the biggest yet, produced in tandem with the Denver Art Museum’s Yves Saint Laurent blockbuster and boasting a design pool of fellow Project Runway couturiers. And in the midst of planning it, Fallene not only dreamed up a new fall 2012 clothing line, to be created right here in Denver by a local clothing production team, but also launched a $20,000 Kickstarter campaign to finance it — and more than made her goal. If that all sounds like a fairy tale, the happy ending isn’t over yet: For Fallene Wells, the fun could be just beginning.

In an era when even critics complain that there’s not a lot left to say about Radiohead, it seems that Thom Yorke has opted to dance things out instead. At the conspiracy-crooning band’s two-hour, two-encore set in Broomfield, the ponytailed frontman came in two speeds: slow seizure and grand mal groove thing. As he propelled his small, spastic frame through a set lifted heavily from recent album The King of Limbs, Yorke’s moves mirrored the running man — if that man had recently encountered a swarm of wasps. The only people moving faster than Yorke and his fans — legions of wallflowers now comfortable to break it down en masse — were the British quintet’s lighting techs, who sped through carpel tunnels on their trip through two dozen songs of blinding lighting effects, lowered from the rigging in twelve constantly moving panels. Simultaneously captivating and cathartic, the night’s blend of boogying, revamped hits, straight mega-jams and rotating rave lights can best be summed up in Yorke’s own words: “Cool beans.”

Readers’ Choice: Radiohead at the 1STBANK Center

Read more: Review: Radiohead at 1STBANK Center, 3/13/12

In just a week, Girls Rock Denver turns girls ages eight to eighteen into rock stars. The local organization formed in 2007 as part of the national Girls Rock Camp Alliance, and ever since, it has been putting on an annual week-long summer camp where aspiring rock goddesses learn how to play instruments, form bands and then perform before a crowd of adoring fans. Last year’s showcase marked the debut of such camper bands as Rockin’ Funky Donuts, the Heartless Doves of War and Purple Lipstick, playing hits like “Cross Out the Boys” and “Rainbow of Death.” By empowering females through music, Girls Rock Denver shows there’s a place for those little ladies more into Bratmobile than Bratz dolls.

Brian Norber has been such a mainstay of Boulder’s Dinner Theatre for so many years that he could well say with Gus, the Theatre Cat (a role he took on this year): “I have played in my time, every possible part/And I used to know seventy speeches by heart/And I knew how to act with my back and my tail/With an hour of rehearsal, I never could fail.” His work keeps getting richer and deeper, however. As the Phantom’s father, Gerard Carriere, he was quietly dignified through most of the evening, breaking down emotionally only at the end of the Phantom. And as the melancholy, middle-aged Man obsessed with 1920s musicals, he provided the spine and just a touch of gravity for The Drowsy Chaperone, a charming piece of fluff, pitching the role precisely between cynicism and wonder, and making the Man’s enthusiasm infectious. Yes, it’s dumb, he seemed to be saying, but, damn, ain’t it great? Isn’t the musical just about the best thing the USA ever gave the world? And in that moment, you simply had to agree.

In a town full of boys with ruffian rhymes, Bianca Mikahn has made a name for herself as a breakout MC. An award-winning poet on her own, Mikahn first attracted attention as a member of the live hip-hop act Paradox and has continued to progress with the release of Left Fist Evolution, her debut solo album. A lecturer and teacher of hip-hop, Mikahn empowers girls to stand tall with their lyrics amid other traditional roles. Poet and straight rhyme slayer, she has held her own on the same stage as the city’s most vibrant rappers and left more than a few in her dust.

Myke Charles made a name for himself as the MC in his a cappella group Urban Method on NBC’s Sing Off. Before that, though, he was known as Purpose, the super-charming fresh-faced kid with the golden rhymes from Fresh Breath Committee. More than just one of a posse, though, Charles has honed all of his skills and emerged as a breakout star in his own right. His writing is deep and dramatic, and his rapping execution is poised and confident. A singer as well as a rapper, Myke Charles is most definitely on the verge of national notoriety.

That Thursday-night flier for Vinyl? He designed that one. And that special-event flier taking place at almost any urban nightclub you can imagine? Yep, he designed that one, too. Graffiti Black’s stamp of graphic approval appears on everything from business cards and album covers to T-shirts and fliers. A brand ambassador of sorts, Graffiti lends his unique, dope touch to every image he creates. Widely respected in the scene as one who can turn quality product into a gold mine, the young hustler has creative stamina and marketing appeal that puts him heads above the rest.

A resident at almost any hip-hop nightclub you can name, DJ Top Shelf boasts an in-depth knowledge of good Southern rap. But he doesn’t just break new records with wall-thumping bass; his selection is diverse enough to reach even the most underground of hip-hop heads. As a result, he’s quickly risen through the ranks of the city’s finest party rockers. Even when not behind the decks himself, he can be found alongside his DJ comrades on the mike, toasting up the crowd and keeping the energy moving. Recently inducted into the prestigious ranks of the Core DJ family, Top Shelf is one who’s definitely on his grind.

Civic Center turns into a carnival of mellow craziness every 4/20 — and this year’s pot celebration, which falls on a weekend in a year when a half-dozen marijuana-related measures could be headed for the ballot, promises to be the toke of the town.

Seeing DJ Premier live with every hip-hop head in the city who knows what a legend he is was spine-tingling. A humble giant, Preemo not only gave a show for the ages, but he got intimate with the crowd and gave props to all of the artists who had submitted material for the seventh installment of Shoe Shine. The crowd was adoring and Premier did not disappoint, playing all of the classics while showing love and paying homage to Guru. The smoldering energy he generated among fans was unmistakable.

Marky Bias and Big J. Beats have been doing incredible things with the MPC machine at basement and garage parties for a while now. Widely respected by local hip-hoppers like Whygee and Brikabrak, who’ve been lauding their talents the longest, the two consistently bring the heat out of their backpacks, both as producers and rappers over their own beats. The pair’s sample selection is unmatched among the producing and beat-making souls of the underground. Pretty much, 1984 kills shit, and you should know about it.

Lucy Roucis is a mainstay in PHAMALY, Denver’s outstanding company of disabled actors; she herself suffers from Parkinson’s. She was a wise and sightly ironic presence for PHAMALY’s program of skits, songs and stories, Vox Phamalia: Quadrapalooza; gave a killer performance as a gruff female executive in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; and really shone in The Elephant Man, where she played Mrs. Kendall, an actress, brought in by the doctor so that the grotesquely deformed protagonist can become accustomed to female company. In some of the play’s most touching scenes, they develop a genuine bond. “Mrs. Kendall, you are magnificent,” the doctor says. And, as played by Roucis — with a warm, low-voiced gravitas through which a spark of impish humor occasionally broke though — she most certainly was.

Turner’s world is turning on an axis of science that he’s using to completely change up his rhyme schemes, themes and patterns. Like a supernova getting ready to self-destruct, the rapper delivers the kind of heady content that you’d need a science glossary to figure out. The raps heard on Star Destroyer, his latest album, a collaboration with Big J. Beats, are a rap nerd’s wet dream. Turner’s elaborate descriptions are just outlandish enough to be believable.

Xencs L. Wing brings new life to an old tradition: painting sugar skulls. She posts up at hip-hop shows with her crafts — she makes earrings and other items — and offers live demonstrations, mixing colors to the beat of whatever head-nodding hip-hop music is being played at the time and creating a masterpiece in front of the crowds. Not surprisingly, she’s in great demand during Día de Los Muertos festivities and for other hip-hop-themed shows. And Wing doesn’t limit her artistic expression to life-after-death depictions; she’s also an MC.

From cult classics to box-office blowouts, Keith Garcia makes sure that every film — even a dog — has its day. The program director at the Denver FilmCenter, he does exhaustive research, and he’s willing to take a chance by booking movies that are unlikely to attract mainstream audiences. Garcia has put both the queer-advocate music documentary Who Took The Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour and the not-so-classic 1968 Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton flick Boom! on the big screen, as well as Mean Girls, Nightmare on Elm Street and more. And he curates his weekend late-night series, The Watching Hour, with incredible care, giving obscure, campy, serious, big-budget and art-house films equal play while pairing them with parties, special events, costume contests and other audience-participatory fun.

Ask for the “Konsequence special” and you’re likely to get a video with the best story line, cinematography and charisma out there. Konsequence has shot videos for rappers all over the scene, employing his personal tricks to bring to life some of hip-hop’s greatest joints. Whether capturing a melancholy instrumental video for a beatmaker like Kid Hum, or documenting the roughest, toughest life of a junkie, like FOE’s like-named project, Pape is on the case. His demeanor is calm, assertive and flexible, and, quite frankly, he brings out the best in rap’s moving pictures.

Fa’al of Eazy Media is hard to miss. Typically moving faster than the rest with his backpack and camera equipment, the guy can be seen at pretty much any and every hip-hop show in the scene — local, national or otherwise. Whether shooting the Foodchain or capturing footage of high-end fashion shows and other aspects of the nightlife scene, Fa’al has a keen eye for getting the best shots. Using his creativity, editing and directing ability and sound training, he’s helped bolster the scene and is most definitely on track to do much more in the future.

Not only is Gypdahip an incredible producer — he can sample, chop, screw and do pretty much everything you can imagine to a beat — but he’s one of the top DJs in the city. You can find him wrecking shop on everything from underground hip-hop you’ve forgotten about (Mos Def’s “Taxi”) to the rarest Dilla sample you’ve never heard to supreme cuts you don’t expect to hear in the club. We’ve seen him throw on the Roots’ famous drum track, “Din Da Da,” and come from behind the decks to slay the dance floor, freestyle on the mike and ultimately bring the house down with his sense of style and esoteric selection.

9 Circles, which had its regional premiere at Curious Theatre Company, is based on a real-life atrocity in Iraq: an incident in which a United States soldier entered a family home, raped and killed the fourteen-year-old daughter, killed both her parents and her six-year-old sister, then attempted to burn her body. Taking us into this man’s mind is a serious challenge. As Daniel Reeves, Sean Scrutchins needed to be twitchy and almost blurrily out of focus at first, and then, by turns, difficult, belligerent, humorous, unaware and in a state of deep denial. Scrutchins was all this — and then he took us by the throat for the play’s terrifying final scene, shaking us out of our complacency and then setting us back down again, forever changed.

For the past year, the Kimble Music Group family has been providing excellent engineering, recording and mixing services to hip-hop cats all over the rap scene at KMG Studios. From Rockie to the entire Super Dope team to every indie artist on the rise, KMG has made its mark on records across the board. Great quality, state-of-the-art equipment and the golden touch of engineer and founder Greg Kimble keep KMG a cut above the rest. Those who have recorded here bear witness to impeccable professionalism, flexible hours and a comfortable atmosphere.

VJ Dizy Pixl (aka Alie Lane) may be a VJ based in Denver, but the excellence of her craft landed her a gig doing visuals for cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy on his tours, as well as for group tours with Download, Otto Von Schirach and Dead Voices on Air. At home, Lane is an in-demand VJ for various shows, mostly at events hosted by the Backwards Records collective and avant-garde musicians including Orbit Service. She was originally inspired by experimental filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Stan Brakhage, whose own unforgettable imagery clearly informs her own approach. Her early interest in the visual presentation of bands like Meat Beat Manifesto and Skinny Puppy also clearly taught her a thing or two about fusing the visual with the musical, which you can see from her intuitive and interactive co-performances.

Jeromie Dorrance is not a name many people know right now, but teaming up with Mario Zoots, of Modern Witch and Men in Burka renown, was a stroke of good fortune for him. Both Dorrance and Zoots are talented visual artists in their own right, with Zoots having been a visual artist long before trying his hand at music. Together the two provide panoramic, colorful projections for various artists around town, including Snake Rattle Rattle Snake and Hearts in Space, as well as Zoots’s own musical projects. In collaborating with musicians, whether through video improv or prepared visuals, Dorrance and Zoots make every show in which they participate that much more engaging, adding another layer of meaning to enhance the experience and stimulate the mind and senses.

Crawford Philleo, Sam Martin and Ryan Pjesky are three of the most active music bloggers in Denver. Last year they decided to put their heads and resources together to curate a music festival to reflect their mutual and individual musical interests. As with any such event, the organizers agonized over its planning and execution. These efforts paid off, as the September event seemed to go smoothly, and it felt as though each act was personally selected without there being some weird kind of application process or behind-the-scenes politicking. Because of this, up-and-coming out-of-town artists like How to Dress Well, Quiet Evenings and Happy New Year played alongside locals such as Tennis, Candy Claws and the Kevin Costner Suicide Pact.

Lynn Nottage has acknowledged that her brutal and richly textured play, Ruined, owes a debt to Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. Like Mother Courage, Mama Nadi profits from violence and war: She’s the owner of a brothel. But where Mother Courage worships profit alone, placing it above even her love for her children, Mama Nadi is more nuanced, and fiercely protective of her girls — as long as their well-being doesn’t threaten her own. And “fierce” is exactly the right word to describe Kim Staunton’s performance in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Ruined. She was electrifying. She made Mama Nadi passionate, tough and full of rage, but also capable of tenderness and even — in the midst of abject horror — tiny moments of the purest frivolity.

Denmark’s Iceage has been a bit of a buzz band for the past year and a half or so. Oftentimes, such bands are unable to live up to the hype that surrounds them — but when these guys played to a packed house at Rhino, from the beginning it felt like you were in an important moment. The stark iciness of the music was clearly coming from a place of raw emotion needing an outlet, and the crowd was swept up in that energy. Sometimes a show like this can get boringly out of control, with violence eclipsing any possible enjoyment, but this performance felt like everyone present was of a single spirit and discharging pent-up energies together rather than against one another. That unintentional togetherness is one of the marks of a truly great musical experience and not common enough.

40th Day was one of Denver’s most popular alternative-rock acts from the late ’80s through the mid-’90s. The band’s earliest work was atmospheric post-punk reminiscent of an early haunted U2. But by the time James Nasi joined on bass, 40th Day was changing musical directions. The 1991 album Lovely Like a Snake brought its more ethereal melodies together with a hard-edged, almost industrial sound for what is arguably the group’s best record. The outfit went through various singers, including Shawn Strub and Tammy Ealom, and broke up around 1996. But on February 9, 2012, Nasi — now writing music as I’m a Boy — got guitar prodigy Neil Satterfield to join him at Rockbar for a few classic 40th Day numbers to remind those present of the power of that music. A more full-fledged reunion can’t be far behind.

Take a contact mike and one or more of the following: water bottle, stacked cymbals, detached hood of a car, a sheet of metal, floor tom, chains, bricks, file cabinet — any item that can make a sharp, clattering sound — and process or amplify the sounds these items make together, and you’ll get a bit of the confrontational and eruptive sounds that Echo Beds uses in all of its sets. Echo Beds is to noise or the avant-garde now what Suicide was to the New York underground scene in the 1970s. These are not percussive sounds and textures for the sake of a cheap startle; they work in the context of unconventional songs and compositions. With its distinctive approach to rhythm, Echo Beds is effectively creating a new industrial music to reflect the harsh realities of the current era.

Ed and Marsha Edmunds like to make people jump. Their animatronic creations, which they build for haunted houses and other clients around the country, range from an almost-too-lifelike electric chair to set pieces for Alice Cooper to aliens for the UFO Museum in Roswell. And the Travel Channel took notice, making the Edmundses’ Greeley-based company, Distortions Unlimited, the subject of the show Making Monsters, which delved into the couple’s process of making those creepy crawlers come to life…so they can scare anyone who comes in contact with them to death.

Coming on the heels of a pauper’s life of dumpster diving and living in a bus powered by veggie oil, Paper Bird teamed up with Ballet Nouveau Colorado for the grant-fueled project of Carry On, which took the former to a new world of highbrow art, writing songs for a companion ballet production. Ballet Nouveau Colorado was likewise suddenly exposed to an audience of dusty freegans, traveling by road bike to the sober world of silent dance. And we all got a new Paper Bird album out of it, 2011’s Carry On. The two worlds will collide again this September, treating Denver to another round of the unlikely collaboration.

Elder Thomas is a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary who visits the dying protagonist in The Whale, Samuel D. Hunter’s play that premiered at the Denver Center Theatre Company this season. Through him, we learn a lot about the pull of Mormonism for some young people, and also quite a bit about how Mormonism operates. Elder Thomas returns several times to visit Charlie, both when he’s welcome and when he’s less so — and we discover that although he himself is brimful with concern and compassion, his faith remains punitive and judgmental. Cory Michael Smith showed both innocence and conviction in his performance, giving us a character who was no religious caricature, but a complex youngster with a troubled past.

You know a band was noteworthy if a number of its peers, based on word of mouth and having heard the music, say they wish they’d been able to see the band live before it broke up. That was the fate of Hot White, which, after roughly four years of existence, played its last show on September 26, 2011, with No Babies and Echo Beds. The band’s raw, wiry energy and fearlessness, coupled with a complete disregard for any expectations, always made Hot White one of the most interesting and exciting outfits around. The threesome started as a twosome, with Kevin Wesley and Darren Kulback making instrumental noise rock, but the lineup came to include Tiana Bernard on circuit-bent devices before she started playing bass and doing archly intense vocals. A favorite of the underground cognoscenti and ever-increasing circles of fans of challenging music, Hot White will be sorely missed.

There are few more pleasant ways to give back to the community than drinking while doing so — which makes Illegal Pete’s latest charity venture both sweet and savvy. The restaurant chain recently launched a series of collectible beer glasses dedicated to noteworthy (and Illegal Pete’s-friendly) bands on the Denver scene, with local dance-punk outfit the Photo Atlas the first on its roster. For just $10, music/beer lovers can purchase a band-designed glass filled with Colorado brew — and while they get to keep the beer and the glass, the money goes to the band. Since each edition has roughly 200 glasses, that means each act could collect up to $2,000 to cover equipment, recording costs and other fees. And bringing it full circle, Illegal Pete’s is presenting live shows with each band during its commemorative glass’s run, so that you can drink up the sound and the suds at the same time.

Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind is bleak, fragmented and full of violence and rage. Just about every male in it is despicable, and it’s up to the women to provide anything resembling a glimmer of redemption. We haven’t seen much of Patty Mintz Figel on Denver stages this season, but every time she appears, we remember what a treasure she is — and she was certainly up to the challenge in the Paragon Theatre production of A Lie of the Mind. It may have been unclear how Meg, the long-suffering wife of a blindly brutal husband, put up with him, or what motivated some of her comments and actions, but what was crystal clear was the quality of truth and compassion that Mintz Figel brought to the role.

Dressed in thick tweed suits to match their infectious twee songs, the members of Fingers of the Sun have not only graced the Denver music scene with one of the most expertly crafted albums of 2011, but they’ve delivered plenty of eye candy, as well. From Nathan Brasil’s mid-’60s slug mustache to Suzi Allegra’s thrift-store dresses and Marcus Renninger’s daring leisure suit and ascot, the band always looks theatrically sharp, strutting that fine line between Prada perfection and what Project Runway‘s Tim Gunn would describe as “costumey.”

Wealthy Victor is living the expatriate’s dream in 1960s Europe, but he’s very, very sad, nonetheless: His mistress Louise has just refused his offer of marriage. So he has come to the elegant cafe he owns in Paris intending to starve himself to death. The staff is horrified. They suggest feeding him an imaginary banquet, plate by luscious plate, in hopes of changing his mind. As Victor in the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of An Empty Plate in the Cafe de Grand Boeuf, John Arp sampled each imaginary dish judiciously (Arp is actually a trained chef), and while he did, he dictated his obituary to the distressed waiter. This is a character who could easily seem tedious and narcissistic, but Arp played him with such warmth and intelligence that you couldn’t help hoping Louise would accept him — and that he’d have a bite to eat.

Neal Samples has put out music under multiple names for years with an abundance that most people would never bother to explore, much less indulge. His Cabaret Voltaire-esque Tollund Men took his lo-fi, electro-post-punk/performance-art inclinations to another level when he began performing the music live with the aid of friend Daniel Bouse. Last fall, Samples combined that cold, dark, evocative music with his absurdist, self-deprecating sense of humor and produced a music video for his cover of the classic Q. Lazzarus song “Goodbye Horses.” Most people know that song from the Married to the Mob soundtrack or, more likely, The Silence of the Lambs. Re-creating the scene in which Buffalo Bill dances to the song for his own video, Samples didn’t go the Full Monty, but it was disturbing and hilarious enough for most people.

Pete Bell started going to Rhinoceropolis in 2010 to see non-mainstream music acts. As one of the few all-ages venues that didn’t cater to relatively well-known music, Rhino was a place that Bell could attend whenever his high-school schedule didn’t get in the way. Inspired by the anarchic spirit of the place and its focus on mostly experimental music, Bell embarked on making a documentary about Rhinoceropolis for his video class. The result was a snapshot of Rhino as it was mostly in the second half of 2011, with archival footage and photos from those who were there. Bell also interviewed many of the people who have lived at Rhino, in addition to those who have been active participants. In doing so, he pieced together an accurate and intimate portrait of an important living cultural landmark.

Now in its third year, Matt Sebastian’s Slicing Up Eyeballs has established itself as one of the best sources around, maybe in the world, for news about ’80s college, modern and indie rock. The blog’s name borrows from the Pixies song “Debaser” (which was inspired by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou), and there’s a good chance that if there’s any new Pixies news, or anything involving the likes of the Smiths, the Cure, Peter Murphy or New Order, it will be covered — and sometimes even broken — on Slicing Up Eyeballs.

With all of the buildup — from the buzz that Snake Rattle Rattle Snake generated almost immediately after forming a few years back to the breathless accolades the group continues to collect — there seemed plenty of room to be disappointed with Sineater, the band’s first full-length. Fortunately, Snake Rattle Rattle Snake delivered on all of its early promise. From Ravi Zupa’s stellar cover art to the ominous clouds these ten songs conjure up with their angular guitar lines, pulsing bass and powerful percussion propping up Hayley Helmericks’s enthralling vocals, Sineater is absolutely riveting from beginning to end.

Readers’ Choice: Sineater

Rhonda Brown has a terrific warmth and vitality on stage, and these qualities were evident in her portrayal of Linda in the Miners Alley Playhouse production of Fiction, Steven Dietz’s tricky Rubik’s Cube of a play. Linda, a writer and prickly intellectual, has been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor and has asked her husband — also a writer — to read her journal after her death. In return, she wants to read his — before her death, naturally. What follows is an entertaining mishmash of truth and deception, reality and falsification — and then it turns out that Linda’s diagnosis itself was an “oncological misapprehension.” But audiences had no problem navigating this maze of mixed meanings, because Brown led them through it with so much charm and authority.

Aaron Miller moved to Denver from the Western Slope a few years back and became part of the local musical community through some old friends. He established a small imprint called Clam Records that released tapes by friends including TekTone. But his real goal was to create a distro and label to support music that he believed in, one that was so far outside the mainstream, oftentimes so hermetic in its approach and distribution, that it could never be co-opted. The result was Bleak Environment, and Miller has since booked the first Iceage show in Denver, in addition to spreading the word about acts as obscure and inspiring as Raspberry Bulbs and Nuit Noir. Proof that big impact need not be big-scale.

When Alex Botwin parted ways with Pnuma Trio, the multi-talented musician focused on Paper Diamond, which took over the electronic airwaves, and he helped build up other artists who later found great success. This inspired him to form Elm & Oak Records, a store and label now based in Boulder that sells records from the imprint’s flagship artists as well as merch and other local retail items. With Two Fresh, Quiz, Cherub, Raw Russ and Paper Diamond on the label, Elm & Oak has steadily grown since 2010, and shows no signs of stopping in 2012.

When Jessica Austgen is on stage, she’s so full of life and originality that you can’t take your eyes off her. In Collapse, produced by Curious Theatre Company, she played one of those neurotic, crazy, needy sisters who upends a shaky marriage. Clad in vivid rusts and oranges that perfectly accentuated her red hair and eccentric persona, Austgen squirmed on the sofa, practiced her stretches on a mat, spouted new-age truisms, wheedled, threatened and talked about her cat, Camille Paglia. She was as intensely narcissistic as she was utterly disarming.

They admit the initial concept was, well, a little crackpot. For local filmmakers Andy Raney and Jeremy Make, the genesis of their movie was a Jäger-fueled discussion of how difficult it was to define American culture after a year of studying abroad. Cut to their bright idea: In order to capture the meaning of art in this country, the former roommates toured the United States in a decrepit, fussy red golf cart named Christine. During the hundred-day-plus trip, Christine broke down much more than a hundred times, but that just gave the two more time to ask the Americans they encountered along the way, “What is your art?” The answers to that question became the basis of the documentary kART Across America, which rated an NPR discussion with Michael Moore.

The Lotus Dream Emporium isn’t only (or, arguably, even mostly) an underground electronic-music venue. It’s also a women’s boutique with new and used clothing, home decor items, greeting cards, shoes, purses, jewelry, tea sets, art and much more. Owner and dreamer Melissa Enyeart opens the emporium for private events, and on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays for open-mike poetry sessions, movie screenings and some of the best club nights and after-hours parties in the area. It’s a lovely and relaxed atmosphere, where some of the city’s most talented mixers showcase their skills for little or no investment at the door. Did we mention the massage space, drawing classes and spa nights? It’s a place sweet dreams are made of.

Over the past year, Bar Standard has steadily risen to the top of the underground electronic-music scene. Although Vinyl and City Hall might be bigger venues that play to more mainstream crowds, the lush and lovely Bar Standard stands out for presenting some of the top names in electronic music today: Doc Martin, Mark Farina, Hugh Cleal, Lisa Shaw with Q-Burns Abstract Message and many more, including some of the best underground house, electro and straight-up techno spinners in Denver. Manager Brandon Gonzalez has his fingers on the pulse of the underground electronica scene, and given what he’s done in a few short months of programming, we can’t wait to see where he goes next.

Reggae on the Roof, the brainchild of Francois Baptiste and 3Deep Productions, has gone through many inceptions and DJs, but the Thursday-night party at Vinyl has never stopped. Attendees can expect to hear the hottest sounds and vibes courtesy of KDJ Above, who turns the place into an island dance hall with the sounds of the best reggae interspersed with the latest in mainstream hip-hop. Arguably the most consistent weekly party, Reggae on the Roof has held it down for more than a decade, and from the looks of the crowded dance floors, ain’t a damn thing changed.

A Touch of Spring is a romantic comedy of a fairly familiar kind — an American couple in Rome, a mild mystery needing to be solved, a charming young girl who rocks the stodgy American man’s world — and the most original thing about it is the character of Baldo. Especially in the Miners Alley Playhouse production. Playing the elfin, charming, smart and ambiguously sexed Baldassare Pantaleone, or Baldo, Michael Bouchard scampered off with the evening. His performance was filled with bravado and at the same time rather waiflike, authoritative and accommodating, full of fakery and grand gesture — and still very appealingly human.

Can you name any other club night that’s been going for as long as Lipgloss and has managed not just to survive, but thrive, despite the change in personnel? We thought not. Founded in June 2001 by boyhollow (aka Michael Trundle), Tyler Jacobson and Tim Cook, Lipgloss has become a Denver institution at this point, one that’s kept things moving by not straying too far from its starting point. Now helmed by boyhollow and option4 (aka Brennen Bryarly), Lipgloss continues to offer up fresh sounds and frequently brings in other kick-ass local DJs like Narky Stares and DJ Tower to keep the party amped.

We’d seen Jamie Ann Romero as a charming ingenue and a cute comedienne several times before, but it was never clear that she had the gravitas for a tragic role — until the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Romero’s Juliet was a lovely, playful child who grew before our eyes into a deep-souled woman. It was a tender, touching, radiant and fully realized performance.

It’s almost unheard of for a hip-hop club to consistently draw 1,000 people these days, but somehow, each and every Friday, the guys from Parlay Productions and 1600 Entertainment do just that. Whether it’s the alluring sounds of DJs Ktone and Top Shelf that continually entice the masses, or the club’s three-level setup, which is perfect for seeing and being seen, one thing is certain: Club Dreams owns the Friday-night hip-hop club scene.

The showpiece of Create Denver Week is the Create Denver Expo, a nuts-and-bolts day of workshops, business resources and networking hosted by Arts & Venues Denver (the city department that resulted from last year’s merger of the Division of Theatres and Arenas and the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs) specifically for local creative types — but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t get involved, too. That’s because Create Denver Week is also a vibrant urban showcase during which the creative community shares cultural experiences with the entire city, through a series of parties, art exhibits, video, concerts, markets and lectures given over the four-day event. Not only is it all about creativity and interactivity — from video screenings in the streets to fashion shows in alleys — but it’s also an active window into what’s happening in venues all over town. Don’t miss this year’s celebration, scheduled for May 10 through May 13, 2012.

Readers’ Choice: The Big Eat

To say that Cervantes’ is a clubhouse would be using a loose tongue, but to say that it’s the meeting point for all local talent would be totally spot-on. There’s a show here almost every night, and you’ll find local DJs mingling in the Ballroom or over on the Other Side, sipping drinks, sharing music or just taking in the scene. It’s nice to see so much talent congregate in one room and get along: The sense of community in the local DJ scene borders on family ties, and the vibe at Cervantes’ is refreshing.

AAMP has consistently produced a quality late-night party that surpasses all others and continues to leave lasting impressions. To keep things legit, a door guy is always there checking IDs, and security ensures guests’ safety by making sure nothing unsafe is going down. AAMP brings in the hottest dance acts, some of whom have never been seen or heard by many of the attendees, who simply show up because they know the party is going to run late and be a good one. These after-hours soirees typically don’t start until midnight, and they run well into the morning hours — or until people can’t party anymore. Should you find yourself in the late-night mode, this is the place to be.

When the dubstep craze started taking over Denver, there were so many random bass-heavy weeklies that we almost lost count. But then the Sub.mission Dubstep crew teamed up with Beta Nightclub and Reload Productions’ drum-and-bass squad to present a night, and the result was Bassic Fridays. Designed to cater to Denver’s true bass-heads, the dub-strong night brings in only the highest talent from the low-end sound spectrum, giving Beta’s Funktion-One system a chance to really show what it can do when pushed to the limits. Together with Sub.mission and Reload, Beta has set the bar high for a weekly night dedicated to bass music — in this case, one that shines above the rest.

Sub.mission introduced Electronic Tuesdays at Cervantes’ Other Side just over a year ago, and because of the massive crowds that come for this club night, it’s now been moved next door to the Ballroom. With local acts, DJ battles and competitions, Electronic Tuesdays have grown into a raging concoction of dubstep, house, drum-and-bass and anything else that falls under the ever-expanding umbrella of electronic music. On occasion, you get free access if you arrive before ten o’clock — but when Sub.mission brings in the big guns, you gotta pay to play. And when you do, you can count on the night being worth the price of admission.

Readers’ Choice: Beta

We’ve seen domineering Petruchios, and Petruchios so glossily movie-star sexy that it’s easy to understand why their Katherines fall for them. But in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, John G. Preston’s Petruchio was sort of rugged-tough and sort of ham-fisted and sort of dopey-dusty all at the same time — and he managed to own the stage. He was so high-spirited that the usually unpleasant scene in which he beat Grumio came across more as masculine horseplay than bullying, and it was fun watching his bemusement at Katherine’s ill-tempered sarcasm change slowly to respect, admiration and, ultimately, love.

This building at 28th and California used to be inhabited by anarchist punks and folkies, some of whom were involved in Food Not Bombs. It was called the Pitchfork House back then, and you would see bands like the Fainting Fansies and others of that ilk playing there. Today the punk spirit remains, and the guys who live here now have, perhaps against their better judgment, thrown shows in their living room. Sometimes that means a completely obscure experimental or pop band from far afield, other times it’ll mean a hardcore or metal show or something equally loud and hectic. House shows used to be a bit of an institution in Denver, and Mouth House is keeping that experience alive and well — in a welcoming environment, to boot.

In the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, Robert Sicular played Katherine’s much-put-upon father, Baptista, with silver-haired dignity. He showed us the man’s blind fondness for prissy Bianca, and just how painful it was to have crazy, angry Katherine as a daughter. Baptista has to speak a lot of not-particularly-inspiring dialogue that does nothing much but carry the plot forward, but Sicular did so with clarity and insight — while still managing to be funny.

Mercutio is one hell of a role, with some of the best speeches anywhere in Shakespeare. The trouble is that with all the productions of Romeo and Juliet, we’ve heard them all before. A lot. How does an actor make the long description of Queen Mab’s nocturnal dream visits sound new? How does he approach the death scene, with its famous description of his wound — “not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve: ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man” — as if no one had ever done it before? In this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, Geoffrey Kent’s rendition of the former was a superb piece of playful invention, and rather than playing Mercutio’s dying comments as a gallant attempt at humor, he forced the words out through progressively weakening bursts of rage and frustration. All in All, Kent’s performance was a tour de force.

You know you go to movies too much when you notice the new seats. But that’s just what happened at Colorado 9, home of blockbusters-and-popcorn fare, where chairs worthy of Jean-Luc Picard’s ass await. There’s spring in the cushion and push-back in these seats, so much so that even after sitting through a two-hour-plus film like 2011’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you won’t get restless. If you’re going to a stadium-seating theater like Colorado 9, comfort and luxury is what you expect. And starting with the seats, this place delivers.

In the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Romeo and Juliet, Leslie O’Carroll’s Nurse was a tough old peasant who was more than a match for a group of rudely teasing young aristocrats, but was also properly obsequious before Lord and Lady Capulet. She was also a woman who loved her charge, Juliet — but not so much that she’d give up job and security to defend her. O’Carroll brought a rough-edged humor to the show, filling her scenes with bawdy and sometimes poignant life.

When Yellow Feather opened its doors, it was the kind of coffee shop that offered not just solidly great coffee with a choice of milk and milk substitutes, but a community-minded space, as well. While not a traditional music venue, Yellow Feather has hosted touring artists along with local bands looking to have their release shows at an intimate venue where people of all ages could go and feel welcome without the pressure of alcohol or ticket sales. The shop has also hosted classes through Free School Denver, and its relaxed environment on an otherwise busy street is welcoming to crust punks, artists and businesspeople alike.

Okay, we admit it: We fell in love with Maggie Sczekan’s Christine in the Boulder’s Dinner Theatre production of Phantom. When she was on stage, we were mesmerized. When she wasn’t, we waited impatiently for her to return. So many musical-comedy ingenues are annoying: pretty, simpering puppets whose sweet, shy gestures could never come from a real, breathing woman, but Sczekan is a real actress. If her gestures were charming and pretty, they were also sincere; her voice was rich and expressive, with all the range and musicality the score required; and her entire performance showed individuality and spine. Sczekan has star quality, and we’ll be surprised if we’re able to keep her in Colorado much longer. Here’s hoping.

Fort Collins has had its own vibrant art and musical community going back decades. Its existence has resulted in various DIY venue experiments over the years, as well as the scene’s semi-legendary progressive shows. For those, one band would play in a certain location, and the next band on the bill would play in a second location whose whereabouts were only revealed to those who were at the first one, as a way of keeping the shows from getting shut down. GNU: Experience Gallery is one of the latest and most active sites of that tradition. Not only does the GNU host the work of some of the most interesting artists and musicians connected to Fort Collins, but it opens its arms to regional talent as well. Kris Smith and Brandton Manshell clearly have a significant institution on their hands.

The character of Coalhouse Walker towers over the musical Ragtime, a panoramic take on the history of the early twentieth century based on the E.L. Doctorow novel. We are shown Walker’s patient and ultimately victorious courtship of Sarah, the mother of his child; his pride, the insults he endures, and then his violent radicalization. When the actor scheduled to play Walker developed throat problems, understudy Tyrone Robinson took over the role of Walker a short time before Ragtime opened at the Arvada Center for the Arts. Tall and imposing, cocky and vulnerable, he gave full expression to the character’s fierce tenderness and ambiguous morality, and his powerful, expressive voice commanded the stage.

Barb Reeves is a veteran Boulder’s Dinner Theatre performer with a number of strong characterizations to her credit. But in this BDT production of Slow Dance With a Hot Pickup, a gentle-hearted musical about a group of people competing to win a truck, she put something into her portrait of a harried waitress that we’ve never seen from her before. Her Marie was strong-minded but completely unsentimental. Reeves displayed a singing voice that could rock the house, but also a low-key sincerity that stayed with you long after the lights went out.

Though these days Boulder is mostly high-tech ventures and other moneyed interests mixed in with the university, remnants of the best part of its hippie past remain in place. Chrysalis Co-op is as its name implies: a communal living space where people not only live together, but grow food and share ideas and creative ventures. The co-op has also reached out to the community well beyond Boulder to host events, including avant-garde musical performances and poetry readings. By sharing food with everyone involved in the performances as well as the building’s inhabitants, the good people of Chrysalis provide a unique and intimate experience, the spirit of which infuses every happening hosted. While not as active as a more traditional DIY venue, this place has been an oasis of underground art in Boulder.

When you’re doing a show about Maria Callas giving a master class, it helps if there’s a genuine diva around to play the role, and for this Miners Alley Playhouse production of Master Class, director Robert Kramer scored a coup when he cast local mezzo-soprano Marcia Ragonetti — even though she didn’t get to sing very much. But watching Ragonetti explain technique for the very talented performers who did sing, you understood that she knew exactly what she was talking about. And when she demonstrated at one point just how to make an entrance, it was mesmerizing — and pure diva. RuPaul, eat your heart out.

Unit E got started when the guys from Rubedo and some friends rented out part of a building so that they could have a gallery and a place to hold shows and have complete control of the environment. It has since grown into the kind of place where underground bands of all stripes play alongside art shows, all reflecting the good and wide-ranging tastes of its curators. The clean, intimate venue bridges the gap between a warehouse space and smaller bars. You might not always know what you’re in for when you go there, but it will always be worth your while.

Kelly Tobin’s appearance in Vox Phamalia: Quadrapalooza made you question the essential meaning of art, and the line between acting and simply existing — with revelatory truthfulness — on a stage. As part of this series of skits and songs about disability, Tobin stood on stage to tell you about hers. She had a lovely, spunky, warm presence, but you could see that talking about her life was hard; at one point she forgot what she was saying for a few moments, because in addition to truncated limbs, she has suffered a traumatic brain injury. But she told a wonderful story about deciding to save a doomed foot in formaldehyde after amputation — complete with the three toenails she and her two daughters had defiantly painted in different colors — and keeping it under the bed. You could have clustered her account with those crazy-inspirational stories about women who tattoo the spaces left on their chests after a mastectomy, or show up for chemo in sassy, sky-high heels, but her performance wasn’t show-offy that way. It didn’t make you think that Tobin was braver than anyone else, or funnier, or more colorful. You didn’t say to yourself, “Oh, isn’t she wonderful? Look at how she can laugh despite all she’s been through.” Though her warm, melodious voice never faltered, she made it clear that nail polish doesn’t begin to assuage the shock and sadness of amputation. What she gave us in the end was life straightforward and unadorned, and the understanding that hers was the human condition — just as surely as your own.

Caitlin Wise was a student at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ now-closed National Theatre Conservatory, and audiences first saw her in smaller roles at the Denver Center Theatre Company. This season, she rose to prominence in a trio of performances, starting with her portrayal of Hermia in the DCTC’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A comic in the zany, irrepressible tradition of Lucille Ball, Wise has huge, startled eyes and upspringing red curls, and her gift for physical comedy became clear when, as a rookie cop in Creede Rep’s Unnecessary Farce (performance at the Lone Tree Arts Center), she had to navigate a room while gagged and bound; she also had problems with handcuffs, self-defense, guns and pretty much everything else — except for doughnuts — that your average cop encounters. And as Cecily in the Arvada Center’s The Importance of Being Earnest, she showed no deference at all to the classic status of the play or the elaborate English manners it so cleverly spoofs, but gave the role an entirely contemporary freshness, playfulness and bounce.

While other punk film festivals feature such predictable fare as The Filth and the Fury and The Clash: Westway to the World, capitalizing on the bands and the stories everyone has already heard, Mid-Winter Punk Film Festival organizers Sarah Slater and Molly Zackary embraced the true DIY nature of punk rock and gave us something completely unexpected yet ultimately delightful. Offering films like Downtown 81, Kill All Redneck Pricks and Born Into Flames, this series presented gems that had slipped through the cracks of history, only to be located by two true believers willing to forgo a commercial audience in favor of attracting those truly interested in discovering something new. Oh, and it all went down at the best little record distro in the city, Growler.

Readers’ Choice: Boulder International Film Festival

Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul was a gutsy choice for Curious Theatre Company — not least because it began with a one-hour monologue in which a conventional Englishwoman clutching an outdated travel guide to her breast expressed her longing to see Afghanistan. She cited facts from the guidebook, embellished them with her own imaginings, and contrasted these ideas with her own safe and comfortable existence in London. She mused on the passage of time, played passionately with language. This Homebody was an essentially unhappy woman who was also somehow filled with curiosity and joy — and Dee Covington made her fully and achingly human. After the monologue, the Homebody disappeared for the rest of the four-hour play, but her spirit stayed with us.

If you’ve ever seen The Taming of the Shrew, you remember the tamed Katherine’s final speech, the one in which (at her husband, Petruchio’s, request), she exhorts the other women in the play — and, by extension, all women — to be obedient to their husbands. The speech is moving and eloquent and really, really hard for most of us to sit through these days. Directors and actors play all kinds of games to deal with the problem, but Kathleen McCall’s approach in this year’s Denver Center Theatre Company production was the best we’ve seen. She spoke the words sincerely, even choosing an unexpected recipient for one of the most telling passages — her father — and yet she never abased herself. This wild woman was clearly crazy for her equally wild husband, and she made us understand that any yielding of will was mutual. In her hands, this unpleasant passage became a heartfelt tribute to the transformative power of love.

Katie Ulrich was all verve and warmth as leading lady Janet Van De Graaff in Boulder’s Dinner Theatre’s production of The Drowsy Chaperone, a daffy, sweet-cynical tribute to ’20s musicals. Van De Graaff was forced to choose between an acting career and love, and explained her choice in a sizzling number called “I Don’t Wanna Show Off No More” — demonstrating her lack of interest in stardom by strutting, sashaying, blowing kisses, turning a somersault and throwing a few perfect cartwheels. Some of them one-handed. And all the while, she sang quite beautifully.

Everything seemed to be going so well for Paragon Theatre Company. The small but ambitious group had celebrated its tenth year in 2011, and early this year moved into a new space specially constructed to its requirements. On this stage, Paragon had just opened a production of Miss Julie that earned excellent reviews, and we were looking forward to a season that included Martin McDonagh, Lanford Wilson, Conor McPherson and Denver playwright Rebecca Gorman O’Neill. And then came the sudden announcement that Paragon was closing its doors because it was stretched too thin financially and couldn’t handle one more hassle with the city over codes and permits. And with that, another serious, important company was lost. We hope to see all of Paragon’s talented performances back on local stages during the coming year, and until then have our memories — among them a sizzling Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; Neil LaBute’s evil-minded take on 9/11, The Mercy Seat; local playwright Ellen K. Graham’s brain puzzler, How We May Know Him; some amazing Harold Pinter; the dreamy, eerie beauty of David Henry Hwang’s The Sound of a Voice; and artistic director Warren Sherrill’s performance in just about any role he ever took on.

The life of the Vic — a 75-seat theater in the basement of a Victorian house in northwest Denver — was closely interwoven with the history of the city. The venue was created by a Shakespeare-loving tuberculosis patient named George Swartz, who moved to Denver for the climate and loved reading the plays to his friends. In the 1950s, Paul Willett took over the space, transformed it into the Gaslight Theatre, and ran it for almost twenty years. After his death, it became the Denver Victorian Playhouse, and then, after its purchase by Wade and Lorraine Wood in 2005, the Denver Vic. In this venue, the Woods staged everything from an evening of Tom Lehrer to John B. Keane’s searing The Field — but they never figured out the formula for keeping the place solvent. Early last year, they put the building that housed the Vic up for sale, and the buyers turned it back into a single-family dwelling. And so that creaky, ghost-ridden, venerable old landmark of a theater — where Swartz’s friends once gathered for Shakespeare evenings and contemporary audiences sipped tea and nibbled cookies during intermissions — has slipped into the history.

In his decade on the job as theater critic for the Denver Post, John Moore helped transform the local scene. He saw just about everything. He was a tireless advocate who fought for more print space and also made innovative use of every other medium at his disposal. On the paper’s website, he posted photos of productions as well as chunks of script, videos, live podcasts and a rolling log of current productions, and wrote a blog called Running Lines. He Tweeted. He posted on Facebook. Mindful of the next generation, he created a forum called Standing O to cover high-school dramatics and draw school kids and their families into the arts scene. He organized the Post‘s annual Ovation awards and helped the Colorado Theatre Guild formulate their Henrys. John was everywhere around town where theater was happening. As a result of his work for the Post, he was named one of the country’s twelve most influential critics by American Theatre Magazine and won a Westword web award last fall. Although he took a buyout from the Post, he still occasionally writes for the paper — and is now at work on his own play, which could be quite a consolation prize for those of us who miss his regular presence.

They might be split personalities, but neither Reyna Von Vett nor her on-stage alter ego, Cora Vette, is a plain Jane. One of the strongest — and sassiest — personalities in Denver burlesque, Vette’s creatively coy sex appeal lends itself to rowdy and raunchy rotating themes — planned by Von Vett and other organizers of Black Box Burlesque, and scheduled the third Friday of each month. In March, the leaders and their coed troupe channeled ’80s nostalgia for “My Teen Angst Bullsh*t,” taking on both teen-dream John Hughes hits and the easy target that is Risky Business. At Bar Standard, Black Box’s current home in a long roster of Denver sites, fans can order bottle service and get their drink on as the costumes come off.

Readers’ Choice: Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret

Artist Dorothy Tanner uses light as her medium — along with water, plastic, fabric and her imagination. The sculptures adorning the walls and fountains on display at Lumonics are psychedelic and mesmerizing. When Tanner and her talented crew open up Lumonics for an event (which is at least every weekend), there’s almost always a light show filling an entire wall, courtesy of guest videographers and designers or the Lumonics experts themselves. The space contains several rooms and display areas, with secure spots to stash coats, shoes and jaw-dropping art (don’t miss the pyramid installation). Shows range from intimate world-music journeys to bass-heavy dubstep lineups to DJ workshops to ecstatic chant and dance. For an illuminating experience, there’s no substitute for Lumonics.

Leave it to local burlesque madame and emcee Cora Vette to start a nationwide revolution in boylesque. She’s been traveling the country over the past year to perform at boylesque shows, talking about why men putting on fabulous costumes and then taking them off is awesome and generally advocating for the concept. And Denver has definitely benefited from her efforts with the monthly revue, now at Bender’s. Featuring Cisco Yocisco, Phoenix Rising, Nite Fury, JoJo Justin Tyme, token lady Ophelia P. Cocque and assorted guests, the show is wild-and-crazy eye candy of the (mostly) male persuasion. You’ll see everything from a clothes-shedding Zorro to sexy football players to really sexy cowboys to strip-poker numbers. The next one takes place on Thursday, April 19; if you caught this crew at Artopia this past February, you got a peek at what to expect. If not, hold on to your jockstrap!

The space formerly inhabited by Muddy’s Coffeehouse and later known by a variety of names — Club Evolution, the Loft, Gallery 22 and Club Ra, among others — has found new life as an electronica and hip-hop space with two dance floors and a spacious outside patio. The venue, which has brought in an array of acts, from Lee Foss and Little Mike to Punisher and Matthew Dear, has also hosted the summer-long Sunday-afternoon tidbit On the Way Back Down to help ease the return to the work week, as well as a stellar New Year’s Eve party and assorted Burning Man-related events. With decent cover prices and free parking across the street, 2200 is the perfect place to see top locals and big names in electronic music in an intimate, relaxed setting.

Connoisseurs of live music will tell you that something is lost when an artist becomes popular enough to perform in an arena. While this may be true at some places, it’s certainly not the case at Broomfield’s 1STBANK Center, where the sound is pretty well dialed in virtually anywhere you sit. The venue, which sits halfway between Denver and Boulder, hosted a variety of acts in the past twelve months, from Radiohead to Portishead to Kelly Clarkson; the Black Keys will grace its stage at the end of April. At 1STBANK Center, shows of this caliber somehow feel far more intimate than you’d expect.

As the head of Lotus Concepts, Francois Safieddine has carved out a niche in the Denver club scene with Suite Two Hundred, 24K and the Oak Tavern. His newest venture, Chloe, is a lot more than just a chic discotheque; it’s also a lounge, and a restaurant that serves Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine. Named after a fictitious jet-setting fashionista, the space definitely has a worldly feel, and the disco has a European vibe from floor to ceiling, as well as a 22-foot LED wall. Attracting its share of local celebrities and trendsetters, Chloe might just be the most stylish spot in town.

Readers’ Choice: Chloe Discoteque and Mezze Lounge

Boasting two Funktion-One systems — one on the main floor and the other on the second level, in the Beatport Lounge — Beta’s sound is unrivaled by virtually any club in North America, much less Denver. With more than 100,000 watts of power being pumped into the main floor speakers and a constant tuning process that tweaks the sound system for maximum output, Beta and its Funktion-One system have been among the top five nominees for Best Club Sound System in America at the International Dance Music Awards since 2008. It’s not hard to see — or hear — why.

Stepping into Glob on the first Friday of any month is like falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Gender roles are checked at the door, and inhibitions disappear in the time it takes to strut onto the dance floor in the big warehouse space. Created by longtime Denver dance proponents Lauren Zwicky (DJ Narky Stares) and Israel Rose Oka, the wild monthly night started as a safe space for queer dancers, and now, almost a year into its tenure, has become a raucous escape from the mainstream for anyone who simply enjoys a good time.While donations are suggested, the post-bar, pre-diner party is open to anyone with moves.

On the eve of the Oscars, the line for The Artist at Landmark Chez Artiste reached well into the parking lot. The film would go on to win Best Picture the next night, and one of the only places to enjoy it in Denver was at this theater tucked into a strip mall off South Colorado Boulevard. Chez Artiste offers exceptional programming throughout the year, and its patrons know it. But even if you only visit in order to win the Oscar pool, don’t worry: The staff at the three-screen Chez Artiste won’t judge you.

Readers’ Choice: Mayan/Esquire theaters (tie)

Not only has Beta become a prime destination for the local dance scene over the past four years, but the venue was also named the top club in North America and fifteenth in the world by DJMag.com. Beta earned the honors by hosting a succession of national acts such as the Crystal Method, Deadmau5 and John Digweed and having them perform on the mind-blowing, super-bumping Funktion-One sound system. Add in a killer lighting setup, HD projection, go-go dancers and a Krygenifex cooling system, and you’ve got one hell of a dance club.

Whatever “Boulder’s Home of the Blues,” as Blues & Greens is known, might lack in atmosphere, it makes up for in talent. The club, housed in Boulder’s Outlook Hotel, not only brings in a regular roster of top-notch local talent like Otis Taylor, the Delta Sonics, David Booker and the Lionel Young Band, but it frequently welcomes well-known national acts, too, such as Big Bill Morganfield (Muddy Waters’s son), Tommy Castro and Bernard Allison. And with blues jams on Sundays and Tuesdays, there aren’t many nights when there isn’t something happening.

At Brown Sugar, you’re likely to hear anything from deep soul house to Jill Scott, mixed over a hip-hop beat. Party-rocking DJs SD and KDJ Above flex their neo-soul muscles every week for a laid-back crowd while Funky Buddha provides the sexy atmosphere. As the drinks flow and couples huddle together in dark corners, enticed by the sounds, party-goers get down on the dance floor to their favorite soul cuts or live performances. Consistent and diverse, Brown Sugar has become a mid-week destination.

The Nerd Prom, a party/concert that went down at the Gothic Theatre in January and was put on by Denver funk ‘n’ soul band Bop Skizzum, drew current, former and never-were nerds. There were seafoam-green tuxedos, light sabers, Chewbacca masks, “Kick Me” signs and taped-up glasses. (Stop us if this sounds like something Stefon would list on SNL‘s Weekend Update.) Because when it comes to proms, nobody should want to step out of a white limo with doves flying out from behind them. Even if you celebrated Nerd Prom years after your real one, you could think of it as therapy — with legal booze.

Originally started a few years back by guitarist Cole Rudy, who was looking to re-create the backyard jams he enjoyed with music-school friends, the weekly Monday jazz jam at the Meadowlark is still the main place in town to catch some of the city’s finest young players. While some jams might attract a lot of one particular instrument, here you’ll see horn players, bassists, drummers, keyboardists and guitarists cycling through every few songs. Yep, they do standards, but they keep them fresh, fiery and exciting.

The basic blues formula is fairly simple — but to really get a good handle on it, you’ve got to play in a live setting with other musicians. And what better way to hone your chops than jamming at the legendary El Chapultepec with guitarist David Booker, a Brit transplant who’s been in Denver since the ’80s and has performed with Bo Diddley, Solomon Burke and Rufus Thomas? The jam, which Booker started in October 2009, gets a steady stream of regulars that includes a fair amount of guitar and horn players.

Sure, you’ve got thousands of songs at your fingertips on those Internet jukeboxes, but the old-school CD jukes just feel like they’ve got soul — or at least character. When you’re flipping through the pages of 3 Kings Tavern’s Rock-Ola Legend, which seems like it’s at least a few decades old, the selection process is much more tangible, whether you’re hunting for AC/DC, Crüe, Stones, Skynyrd, Big Black, X’s Live at the Whisky a Go-Go, or one of the stellar mix CDs. And since a stream of local acts plays at 3 Kings, it’s not surprising that the juke is also stocked with a fair amount of the city’s finest punk bands, including King Rat, Frontside Five and such dearly departed icons as Planes Mistaken for Stars.

Readers’ Choice: Sancho’s Broken Arrow

The first Friday in May is National No Pants Day, and last year the Denver Flash Mob and Denver Fun Times came up with the bright idea of hosting a No Pants Party at the Ginn Mill. Not surprisingly, the 2011 party turned out to be a fabulous time, with free admission (and a reasonable pants-check fee of just $2), drink specials, costume prizes, a Pants Off Dance Off and more. The proceeds went to help DenverWorks, an organization providing assistance for job seekers; there was even a pants donation station at the party. The No Pants Party was organized by the same people behind the Denver No Pants Light Rail Ride, which you might have spotted this past January. Here’s hoping another iteration of the goose-pimpling party is in the works for this May. Bottoms up!

Looking through your old journals can be fun, but reading from them while you’re on stage in front of a room full of strangers somehow makes the experience incredibly awesome. From first-period nightmares to tales of selling kids fake LSD, the true stories keep spilling out during the monthly My Teenage Angst, each one more painfully true than the next. Host and organizer Megan Nyce sets the tone by kicking off each installment with a revealing chapter from her own teenage diaries, as well as notes from a middle-school sex-education book that serves as the perfect icebreaker. My Teenage Angst might be the most fun you’ll have at a bar without having a drink. It’s definitely more fun than being a teenager.

If you’re itching to sound off, the best karaoke nights in town are at a spot hidden away on a Westminster building’s backside (thus the moniker, we presume). But with its elevated stage, overhead screen displaying the words from your choice of thousands of songs, and an enthusiastic audience of friendly, easygoing neighborhood regulars, the Rear Inn is way ahead of the rest of the karaoke pack. And since not everybody knows about this every-night-of-the-week karaoke night (yet!), you’ll have plenty of opportunity to play the rock star that we know you are.

Readers’ Choice: Armida’s Restaurant

A grawlix is a sequence of typographical symbols used to represent a non-specific profane word or phrase, like this: #@$%*! But there’s nothing that coy about Grawlix, the monthly alternative-comedy night formerly known as Los Comicos Super-Hilariosos that features Ben Roy, 2012 MasterMind Andrew Orvedahl and former Westword staffer Adam Cayton-Holland, with frequent special-guest comedians from across the country. The night is rude and it’s raw, and it’s also super-hilarious. Between monthly humor injections, you can get an additional taste of the comics on their on Grawlix videos.

Readers’ Choice: Comedy Works

A gal can always use a good guffaw, and Ladies Laugh-In makes sure that she can get it at least once a month. Comedians Heather Snow and Chella Negro are the hostesses of the monthly showcase at Beauty Bar, and while the featured performers are mostly women — everyone from Lori Callahan to Nora Lynch to Alicia Jacobs — there are often a few men in the mix, too; both Adam Cayton-Holland and Ben Roy have joined the ladies on stage. Now in its second year, Ladies Laugh-In is not only a guaranteed good time, but it benefits a good cause: A charitable component has been added to the show, with suggested door donations going to various nonprofits each month.

Free refills on fountain drinks. Beer. Fancy chocolate. And popcorn. Oh, the popcorn. It’s the type of popcorn that makes people stop in to buy it, then leave without even seeing a movie. The food and drink at the Denver FilmCenter on Colfax is hands-down the best in Denver, not just for the quality selection, or for the comfort in which you’ll consume your snacks. There’s also the price factor, which can be pretty important after you plunk down $10 or so for a movie ticket. So let’s say it again: free refills.

Readers’ Choice: Mayan Theatre

The Aurora History Museum is puny compared to the gleaming History Colorado, set to open in Denver this spring. But what it lacks in size, it more than makes up for in honesty — and accessibility. Not only is the museum free to visit, it’s also very free with the facts. Its exhibit about the city’s founding, for example, is accompanied by explanatory plaques that reveal how cows would block traffic on “the dirt track that was Colfax” in Aurora’s early days, and why an early-1900s town marshal assigned his pet parrot the job of protecting Aurora’s only buckeye tree from “marauding children.” The best plaque, however, could be the one that describes former Mayor Dennis Champine: “Rising from humble roots to become a successful businessman in Aurora, his term was marred by a minor criminal record, an investigation into nepotism and inappropriate behavior. In 1979, he punched the City Attorney in the face.” Now, that’s an honest plaque — if not an honest way to govern.

Readers’ Choice: City Park Jazz