Arts & Entertainment

The owner of Syntax Physic Opera, Jonathan Bitz, prefers the term "host" or "concierge" to "door guy," which tells you something about the attention to detail and ambience here. And indeed, inside you'll find medicinal herbs in the cocktails, portraits of frontier-era civil-rights heroes on the walls, pistols in glass cases and an eclectic array of offerings on stage. It takes a certain kind of patience and charisma to stand at the threshold of such a place, and Syntax's Yves Rhone has both in spades. You'll find Rhone there every Friday and Saturday night, stylishly dressed and setting the tempo. Finding himself with a sudden vacancy about a year ago, Bitz hired Rhone on the spot on the strength of some trusted recommendations, and Rhone has been all we could hope for in a host: conversational, unflappable, and more than capable of preparing you for what's beyond the atrium.

Yes, First Friday is often more about socializing than seeing art — but these free events are an undeniably good time, packed with artists and non-artists alike. In fact, First Friday has become one of the greatest date-night activities not just in Denver, but all along the Front Range. For a rowdy time, hit the Art District on Santa Fe; for more intimate explorations, try Navajo Street or one of the lesser-known arts districts. At any one of them, you're bound to be impressed by the level of talent in this town and inspired to attend other art-related offerings — or maybe even buy some art. As Colorado Creative Sarah Wallace Scott notes: "Being smart is sexy, and if you're already attending the First Friday openings with your date, then you should do yourself a favor and attend other art programs, too. Just think of how sexy you will be!"

Last September's first Denver Small Press Festival hit the ground running, spring-loaded by Dan Landes and his Suspect Press in collaboration with such groups as Leon Gallery, SpringGun Press, and Gregory Ferrari and Kaela Martin of Walled In Magazines. Indeed small but mighty, the fest showcased everything from zines to formal literary magazines with panel discussions, live interviews and vendor tables. Missed it the first time around? Look for a second fest to pop up again later in 2016 — dates and place to be announced.

With so many newcomers in Denver, it never hurts to have a side of history with your fun. The People's Fair dates back to the early '70s, when it grew out of a movement to protect the interests of Capitol Hill; by 1976, it had taken over the grounds of East High School, where tens of thousands of people browsed among vendors selling macrame and patchouli, and booths handed out information about gay rights and the nuclear freeze. In 1987, with interest and attendance exploding, the fair moved to Civic Center Park, where every June it celebrates an incredible array of local artists (the musical tryouts alone are great entertainment), local businesses and local causes. While many festivals these days are crass commercial ventures, the People's Fair continues to be organized by Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods and still focuses on the community — a community that now includes all of Denver, past, present and future.

When zine enthusiast Melissa Black moved to Denver, it didn't take her long to hook up with the Denver Zine Library, and not much longer after that, she discovered that the library's once-vibrant Denver Zine Fest had fallen through the cracks several years before. To the delight of DZL's Kelly Shortandqueer and the rest of the city's zine community, Black took steps to bring the fest back last summer with a big expo and trading floor, along with a couple of parties to kick it off and put it to bed. Does two years in a row make it a tradition? Find out when the fest returns on June 25, and keep up with news and developments on the Denver Zine Festival Facebook event page.

Every Wednesday, local comedy fans flock to the Deer Pile — a cozy arts space above City, O' City, a vegetarian restaurant and hub for artsy Capitol Hill residents — to watch some combination of Bobby Crane, Nathan Lund and Sam Tallent boogie into the room to the squeals of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen." The PBR-quaffing regulars, who deliberately arrive late to the frequently delayed showcase, recognize the ritual as the commencement of Too Much Fun!, a defiantly anarchic comedy experience unlike any in the city. While the show initially suffered a bit from the departure of founding gent Chris Charpentier, the remaining three members have bounded back by experimenting with something new on the stage each week.

Choreographed blood sport and standup may seem like unlikely ring-mates, but at Lucha Libre & Laughs, the two wildly different art forms are locked in an entertainment stalemate. Populated by outlandishly costumed characters and kept afloat thanks to hilarious color commentary, the brawny brainchild of producer Nick Gossert has cultivated a loyal audience of weed-addled nostalgists who share his twin loves of jokes and jawbreakers. And while the bi-monthly showcases at the Oriental Theater will keep going strong, Lucha Libre & Laughs will also begin doing regular shows at Ratio Beerworks and tour as a centerpiece for all three branches of the upcoming Crom Comedy Festival, including its Denver incarnation, Crom West. Lucha Libre & Laughs has been the reigning champion for two years running, and we'll suplex anyone who says that it isn't Denver's best comedy night.

For three years, the Boulder Comedy Show has brought laughter to the historically joke-barren college town on Sunday nights. Seated Viking-style in the consistently packed tap room of the Bohemian Biergarten, beery audience members might be fickle, but they reward good jokes with hearty guffaws. Produced and hosted by Brent Gill, a dab-besotted CU alumnus with the stage presence required to warm up the crowd each week — no easy feat during any sports season — the Boulder Comedy Show boasts some of the best lineups in the state. Lubricated by a wide selection of domestic and imported brews, patrons also have a toothsome selection of central European cuisine to fill their bellies with before shaking them with laughter.

Celebrated worldwide as the platonic ideal of a comedy club, the downtown outpost of the Comedy Works became a perennial Westword favorite simply by being better at what it does than anyone else. Beneath the well-lit hubbub of Larimer Square, the club unites its crowds in the boozy dark, cultivating the ideal environment for standup. Classic standup albums like Dave Attell's Skanks for the Memories have taken advantage of the venue's laugh-swaddling acoustics and hot crowds to capture the unique atmosphere of live shows, and the place has a reputation as one of Dave Chappelle's favorite spots for surprise drop-in appearances. Perhaps the Comedy Works' biggest gift to Denver, however, is nourishing the careers of local comics, from their first New Talent Nights to their television debuts.

Not even the geographical separation of co-hosts Christie Buchele and Haley Driscoll can put Empty Girlfriend in the corner. Resurrected thanks to the wonders of Skype, this fearless exploration of the intimate histories of local comedians, musicians and veterinarians is a fascinating document of how creatives seek and express love. Because of the highly personal nature of its subject matter, Empty Girlfriend is less joke-driven than traditional comedy podcasts — and while some episodes feature unflinching tales of heartbreak and despair, Buchele and Driscoll's quick riffs and occasional forays into sketch comedy keep things amusing and sometimes downright hilarious. So listen up if you dare: After all, any podcast with a recurring segment called "Obscure Sexual Fantasies" really ought to pique your interest.

There's no better guide to downbeat and noirish cinema than James Ellroy, the demon dog of American crime fiction (L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia). Since he relocated to Denver last summer, he and Alamo general manager Walter Chaw have been curating a dynamite monthly series, called In a Lonely Place, that blends the familiar and the obscure, from a quiet Kurosawa police procedural to a frantic 007 romp, from the much-revered Vertigo to the seldom-seen Man-Trap. Regardless of how hard-boiled you like your movies, Ellroy's rants and ruminations as he introduces each offering are worth the price of admission.

Filmmaker/carnival barker/world traveler/dapper fellow Davey B. Gravey (aka David Weaver) has spent the past few years delighting small audiences with his mobile Tiny Cinema, a trailer with four seats and a projector that plays short, silent 8mm films while Gravey plays a live score on a guitar. Not one to let the decline of Super 8mm filmmaking keep him from shooting a brand-new original feature, Moonglow, he premiered it for the teeny masses this year at Leon Gallery.

In the Sie's case, we're talking about multiple series. For instance, catching current performances of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain or the Royal Shakespeare Company without having to leave Denver is such a great idea that fans of National Theatre Live and Live From Stratford-upon-Avon are finding that they have to move quickly to snap up tickets to the upcoming "live" shows. Recent broadcasts have included Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet and Frankenstein and Rosalie Craig in As You Like It, presented in such grand scope that you feel as though you're in the rich folks' box. And, yes, a series of operas by leading companies will be broadcast to Sie patrons this spring, too. Too often, Hollywood lets you down, but the Sie? Never.

Last year's Best Bloodthirsty Host, Theresa Mercado, entered her reign without a horror series to call her own and a question mark as to when she would be able to once again affect the nightmares of Denver movie fans. To that end, Mercado met with the minds at the Denver Film Society and birthed Scream Screen, a quarterly film series that takes a stab at the deep cuts that make horror hurt more, including (to date) salutes to the giallo cuts of filmmaker Dario Argento, the blood-red side of French horror, and the subset of films known as "When Animals Attack." Mercado has stepped up her hosting duties, as well, with amazing full costumes and interactive bloody good fun with the audience.

With the arrival of the Denver Film Society's CineLatino Film Festival, Denver's celebration of one of its largest subsets exploded in new and creative ways. By its second edition, the fest had hit a solid stride and showed an impressive array of diverse programming — touching down in Mexico, Spain, Paraguay, Peru, Brazil and beyond. The experience was so great that the fest's co-founder, JoAnna Cintrón, was chosen as the 2015 Coors Light Leader of the Year. Along with the award, Cintrón and the Film Society received $25,000 to help take the festival to even greater heights. ¡Qué bueno!

For 38 years, the Denver Film Festival has been the strongest brick in the wall of Colorado film fests, and for very good reason. The Denver Film Society has always been intensely proactive in seeking out the very best movies from around the world, and pulls in over 250 of them for audiences to pick and choose from over a span of twelve days. In addition, almost equal numbers of filmmakers and actors come here to celebrate those works along with viewers, creating a world-class experience right here in the Queen City. Here's looking forward to the 39th edition and beyond.

When the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema put down stakes in Colorado, it took a while for locals to warm to the theater chain's food-at-the-movies concept and intense no-talking policies. With acceptance came an awareness that the Alamo has an even more intense love for movies, operating under the notion that programming from more than a century's worth of classics is just as important as showing new popcorn pictures. New creative manager Steve Bessette spent the past year successfully planting his feet into some big programming shoes, and executive chef Seth Rexroad was given carte blanche to expand his special movie feasts, which pair great films with original menus. Clearly, it's time to get with the (Alamo) program.

The food-at-the-movies concept has been around since the birth of the concession stand, back in the '50s, but the idea of eating a whole meal at the movies is still a relatively young one. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain has long been the leader of the pack in figuring out how to serve food to audiences while maintaining a great film-going experience — from a staff well versed in the art of ninja service to menus that cover a range of culinary tastes. And you won't soon forget the Alamo after trying one of its special-menu craft dinners or movie-influenced feasts.

In 2015, Regal Entertainment Group made a big change at the multiplex atop the Denver Pavilions: The company reduced the number of seats in the auditoriums and replaced them with ultra-plush recliners, at the same time ushering in an era of reserved seating at the theater. The new seats provide a level of comfort that you've probably never felt at a cinema before: At the push of a button, they recline to a near-lying-down position, while a little swivel table keeps your popcorn, candy and drink at a safe distance and out of your lap. Even a bad movie looks better from this angle.

The Black Actors Guild has been entertaining the Mile High City on stage and in classrooms since 2009, when a group of students from the Denver School of the Arts created the versatile theater company. Over the past half-decade, the troupe has produced full-length theater shows, taught youth acting classes and absolutely killed it on stage with its regular Show Ya Teef improv show, which has been running for more than two years. Recently, the Guild introduced some of its best work to date with the web series Behind the Smile. Addressing race, class, relationships and intimate connections between friends with subtle humor, Behind the Smile captures what makes the group so irresistibly watchable: its sheer amount of raw talent. The series is part reality show and part fictional behind-the-scenes look into the lives of these young comedians, actors and improv masters, who make up one of the best acting ensembles in the Denver spotlight right now.

Beginning last September, Denver's Warm Cookies of the Revolution civic health club took to the road to visit the city's neighborhoods and learn what issues people in different metro-area communities are thinking about as the region suffers through dramatic changes and growing pains. Each inroad culminates with a monthly Stompin' Ground Games neighborhood Olympics event that introduces attendees to each community's culture and concerns with a mix of performance and group problem-solving. The spirit infusing these events is strong, and each stop gets people talking. We can only hope the games will continue beyond the currently proposed yearlong stretch.

Local curator-at-large Cortney Lane Stell teamed up with RedLine founder Laura Merage to create a new model for art museums with Black Cube, billed as a nomadic museum that's ready to travel, unfettered by any adherence to place. The name refers to a shipping container that serves as the pop-up venue's gypsy caravan and portable shop, but it also refers conceptually to the museum's blank slate, where anything is possible. The nonprofit has no collection, but instead partners with artist fellows to craft personalized exhibits; in 2015, Stell collaborated with three residents to cast video-mapped imagery on the cliffs of Red Rocks during a ceremonial performance, raise a giant blow-up sculpture in Civic Center and launch a conversation-starter installation about bad architecture inside a construction site. In 2016, Black Cube is taking to the road; its first venture this year — Denver ceramic artist Stephanie Kantor's Mock Pavilion — is just ending a monthlong run in San Antonio. Visit the website to keep up with future developments.

Art museums shouldn't be scary places, but there's something daunting about one that's been devised as a temple to one artist. Though director Dean Sobel and staff have done much to ensure that the venue's changing exhibits offer fresh perspectives on Clyfford Still's vast legacy, some people respond better to more user-friendly incentives to visit. Last year, the Still tested those waters with a pilot program that included educational and public presentations with the price of museum admission, as well as totally free entry on Friday evenings. It was so successful that the museum will continue the freebies in 2016, enticing new audiences inside its handsome doors for lectures, concerts, tours and other events.

Denver artists flipped for MCA's new I'm an Artist program, which offered free membership cards to the first 1,000 Colorado-based creatives to apply. Wisely recognizing that working artists comprise a symbiotic and core user group for any contemporary art museum, MCA's act of kindness represents a rare give-and-take with the community. It might have worked too well, though, as there's now a waiting list for future applications. But chin up: Current cardholders must visit the museum at least three times in a year to be renewed. It will be interesting to see how many new spots open up next fall.

The History Colorado Center went through a shakeup last year, and in the process, some of its programming — which had thus far been failing to capture the public's imagination — was re-evaluated. Signs of the museum's fresh start began to pop up, including inexpensive Tiny Library Concerts in the intimate confines of the center's Hart Library and the Who Knew!? Everything Old Is New Again exhibit series, which unearthed hidden treasures from little-seen museum collections, including Colorado cannibal Alfred Packer's gun and stadium seats from the old Mile High Stadium. After all, a museum should be a place that one goes back to again and again for new experiences, and these are healthy signs that the History Colorado Center is back in the business of being just such a destination.

Colorado State University's already fine Avenir Museum fashion and textile collection kicked off the year in style with the grand opening of a spacious renovation that more than doubled exhibit, classroom and storage space. Four new exhibits are currently on view in the campus's world-class fashion showplace, including Mr. Blackwell: Artist of Subtle Witchery, a display of items from the museum's extensive Mr. Blackwell collection — the largest on the planet. The show runs through mid-August, but it's only the tip of the Avenir textile iceberg. Consider this an open call for Colorado fashionistas looking to be wowed.

The member-driven Art Gym constitutes a whopping 17,000 square feet of creative workspaces, including shared studios and tools for printmaking, metalsmithing, dancing, sculpting, performing and more, as well as a fully equipped commissary kitchen, a gallery space and an in-house coffee cafe complete with pastries by Lucille's Artisan Confections and healthy snacks from Wong Way Veg. For $100 a month, it's an artist's home away from home. Stop in to check out the digs at monthly gallery-show openings.

RiNo, love it or leave it: As an arts district, it's ground zero for the best and worst aspects of Denver's notorious growing pains. The district is still trying to find the balance between remaining a haven for artists and cautiously welcoming the benefits of gentrification — from choice eateries to new adventures in space-sharing. But at the same time that many artists and galleries are being pushed out of their studios and venues by grow houses and breweries, others are holding on — or moving to nearby Globeville, which might just be the next frontier. And with last year's voter approval of the RiNo Business Improvement District, some thought and care is being put into preserving affordable artist spaces and adding infrastructure to make the warehouse district more people-friendly to residents and visitors alike. RiNo walks a crooked line as it looks for answers, but it's up to the people to make it work.

You'd think that Youth on Record chief Jami Duffy wouldn't have much free time away from her main focus of empowering youth through arts and education. But surprisingly, when she is able to carve out some time for herself, she's interested in doing something more productive than lying on a beach. Enter the Sculpture Brunch, a community-minded way to hang out with friends as a means to an end — in this case, a group-produced sculpture built from recycled junk and thrift-store finds, created in a spirit of cooperation and shared ideas over food and drinks. Visit the Sculpture Brunch Facebook page to keep up with coming events.

The Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design's Visiting Artist, Scholar and Designer Program is an interdisciplinary lecture series exploring topics like the humor in art and the role of race, gender and identity in the art world. Open to students and non-students alike, the series is overseen by notable visual artist Gretchen Marie Schaefer, who brings a diverse array of established and up-and-coming creators to Denver. Under Schaefer's leadership, the program has heard feminist icon Judy Chicago discuss her decades-long career working in many artistic mediums, explored sexual politics within the music industry with Mykki Blanco, and stepped into illustrator Lynda Barry's magical world. The program continues to push the intellectual and inventive envelope by celebrating and exploring the work and words of artists from across the cultural spectrum.

DIY isn't necessarily age-sensitive, nor is it solely a bohemian approach. The idea of making things happen with your own power crosses all boundaries, and Counterpath, a Westword MasterMind and past Best of Denver awardee, has weathered gentrification and the test of time to keep rolling, both as a literary small press and as an anything-goes event space hosting free community art exhibits, poetry readings, avant-garde performances and other events powered by an older, wiser, working academic faction. This year, Counterpath is finding new life at a new location, on the eastern edge of Denver; look online for information about upcoming readings and projects, including a community garden in collaboration with Feed Denver.

Art couple Scott and Myah Bailey think lowbrow art's got cred, and to prove it, they've covered the walls of Sally Centigrade, their underground Larimer Square palace of pop culture, with highly collectible pieces, including original work and prints, from big genre names both local and national. If your taste in art edges over to the weird side, check 'em out.

Following the ever-changing tide of street art in Denver is a truly obsessive passion, and Project Colfax is that obsession personified. More than thirty artists were invited by Kentro Properties to paint the interior and exterior of the old Denver Car Wash, on what the artists say they were thrilled to find: virgin walls. Colorful art climbs the roofless structure and includes work by Yianni Bellis, Taste Burns, Ravi Zupa, Mike Giant, Jher, Pisto, Gamma Gallery, Mike Graves, Dread, Sandra Fettingis, Koko Bayer, Axiom, Chris Haven, Le Creep, Axel Geittmann, Girlie, Mario Zoots, Paige Madden and many more. See this piece of urban art while you can; its fate is still unknown.

The art collection at DIA is simultaneously famous and infamous, as exemplified by the best-known piece there, Luis Jiménez's "Mustang," which is both. Now the airport has added one of the region's most epic works of public art ever, Patrick Marold's "Shadow Array," an enormous environmental installation with a footprint the size of a building. The magnitude was necessary for the piece to even get noticed where it is, just south of the new Westin Denver International Airport and on either side of the adjacent RTD rail line flanking the station's long platform. The RTD tracks run in a valley, and Marold's creation lines its slopes with angled linear forms made out of joined logs from beetle-killed trees. The log elements have been arranged like a set of ribs, a pair of mirror-image radiating curves. "Shadow Array" takes advantage of its site, perfectly fitting the topography of the symmetrical slopes. The ribs create shadows when lit by the sun and via a lighting system at night, and those seemingly insubstantial reflections become as emphatic as the logs themselves. It's smart, sensitive and gorgeous.

The most unforgettable show from last summer was John Buck at LoDo's Robischon Gallery, the city's flagship contemporary outlet. The enormous multi-space venue was completely given over to Buck's monumental woodblock prints, carved wood bas-reliefs and freestanding sculptures, the kind of stuff that has made the Montana artist famous. But these expected components were just the beginning for this particular Buck exhibit, because overshadowing everything else were five gigantic automatons, setting up one showstopping moment after another in the exhibit. These automatons, made of wood and other materials, were digitally controlled and powered by motors so that they moved in complicated ways when viewers pushed a foot pedal. All of these kinetic installations addressed political topics, including colonialism and gun violence. Conceived by gallery co-directors Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran, John Buck was meant to be their response to the Biennial of the Americas, which was presented at the same time and which, by the way, it completely blew away.

Putting together a group show is a challenge, because the organizer needs to assemble participants whose works are compatible yet distinct. For the recently closed Unexpected Narratives at Walker Fine Art, Bobbi Walker selected four artists who met that assignment. There were two well-known abstract artists, Bill Vielehr and Ben Strawn, and two respected conceptualists, Bryan Leister and Roland Bernier, all of them represented by strong signature works. The Vielehrs were cast-metal bas-reliefs with scabrous surfaces like paintings, and they linked up with the Strawns, whose lyrical and richly colored abstractions balanced shapes and lines. Leister's pieces — such as his lenticular photos, which changed appearance when seen from different vantages — played with viewers' perceptions. Meanwhile, the Berniers were static, involving words spelled out in 3-D wooden letters in wall panels and sculptures. The four artists' works were installed in separate spaces, so that each display was essentially a solo — ultimately the secret to the show's success as a coherent quartet.

By any measure, the paintings, photos, videos and wallpapers that made up Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty — which filled all three floors of MCA Denver — were over the top, a combined consequence of the artist's accomplished technique, outrageous choice of subjects and effortlessly conveyed, spectacular visual impact. The exhibit, expertly curated by Bill Arning, director of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Elissa Auther, a guest curator at MCA Denver, surveyed Minter's oeuvre from the '70s to the present, charting the course of her career from early fame to later obscurity (as she fell into the sex-drugs-and-punk scene in the East Village in the '80s) and, finally, to her rediscovery during the past ten years. Throughout, Minter mined some unlikely sources — food, high fashion, hardcore porn and urban grit — to achieve her relentlessly sumptuous results. One of the secrets to Minter's success — and, ultimately, this show — is the way her works are simultaneously appealing and repulsive, compelling viewers to alternately look at and look away from them.

Christoph Heinrich, the Denver Art Museum's director but a contemporary curator at heart, took on the interim assignment of managing the museum's Modern and Contemporary collection during the search for a new curator this past year. Heinrich reinstalled level four in the Hamilton Building with Showing Off as a way to highlight art that's come into the DAM's permanent collection over the past several years — including gifts like the gorgeous Agnes Martin painting as well as works acquired from temporary exhibits mounted during Heinrich's tenure. The still-open show is dominated by works done by internationally famous artists: In addition to Martin, there's Nick Cave, Al Held, Glenn Ligon, Sol LeWitt and Vik Muniz. Of course, famous artists and their work are to be expected in an art museum, but what was less expected was that these art stars would keep company with a contingent of Colorado artists, including John McEnroe, Martha Daniels, Amy Metier, Maynard Tischler, Stacey Steers and Daniel Sprick — a combination that set this engaging show apart.

Collin Parson is a booster for the value of Colorado art, and Art of the State 2016, a juried show open to all Colorado artists, is the latest proof of his commitment. Along with two local art experts, Gwen Chanzit and Michael Chavez, Parson conscientiously sifted through almost 1,500 submissions, ultimately choosing nearly 150 pieces. The show encompassed every style and medium imaginable by artists ranging from area favorites to complete unknowns, as well as scores whose artistic reps fell somewhere in between. With so much going on, it was hard to make sense of the show, but it did reveal certain things about the scene. First, it's apparent that there are many Colorado artists working with some kind of realism, including hyperrealism and even neo-pop art. Also, there are many artists interested in abstraction and conceptualism, and we have a vibrant photography scene. The show may not have been particularly cohesive, but the sheer numbers alone made it a don't-miss.

The largest art department in Colorado is at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and because of its focus, Metro — founded in 1965 as a state college — has played an inordinately large role in the city's art world. In fact, so many artists have graduated from the institution that a jury was required to cut down the number of those who qualified to fit into the (admittedly very large) Center for Visual Art, where the resulting Vault: MSU Denver Alumni Exhibition was presented. Leila Armstrong, an MSU graduate who teaches art history at Metro, and Matt Chasansky, another alum who works in art administration, served as the jurors. CVA curator Cecily Cullen took charge of the exhibition design, and in doing so, somehow managed to make sense out of the rather disparate lot. Many Metro grads have become well-known Denver artists — among them Phil Bender, Virginia Folkestad, Mark Friday, Jennifer Ghormley, Jason Lee Gimbel, Dania Pettus, Dave Seiler and Mario Zoots — and the show perfectly reflected what a significant contribution the school's former students continue to make to the Denver scene.

The McNichols Building in Civic Center is undergoing renovation and won't open again until this fall, but one of the last shows there before it closed was decidedly one of the best efforts of the year. Titled Trine Bumiller: 100 Paintings for 100 Years, the show celebrated the centennial of nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. Bumiller was an artist-in-residence there, and the idea came to her of doing 100 paintings to mark each of the park's 100 years. While living in a cabin during the residency, she created sketches of the scenery she encountered; back in her studio, those sketches led to preliminary watercolor studies for the final abstracted takes on nature. All of the paintings were 24 inches tall, but they had nine different widths, ranging from 6 to 48 inches. Each panel was numbered, with their order in the exhibit determined by a random-number generator. Bumiller installed them at the same height around the entire space so that they functioned as an eye-popping painted band wrapped all the way around the top floor of the McNichols. Like the park itself, the result was simply sublime.

Roland Bernier, who worked in abstraction and text-based conceptualism and had been showing his work at many of Denver's top commercial galleries and museums since the 1980s, died last summer. But it was his involvement in the alternative art world as a longtime member of the Spark Gallery co-operative that explains why members there overwhelmingly voted to mount a show to honor his memory. The group gave over all three spaces to The Seen and Unseen: Roland Bernier, an economical survey of his incredible output that was curated by members Sue Simon, Elaine Ricklin and Madeleine Dodge. Among the earlier works were an elegant '80s abstract and a sophisticated pattern painting based on graffiti from the '90s. The show was dominated, however, by his 21st-century pieces, wherein Bernier used words as his principal compositional device. In some, words were spelled out in 3-D letters, while others employed words appropriated from photocopied newsprint. This memorial exhibit only hinted at Bernier's tremendous range, because Spark isn't big enough to accommodate even a single sample of every kind of thing that he did.

John DeAndrea, who grew up on the west side when it was still "Little Italy," became a world-famous artist in the 1970s — fairly unusual for someone in Colorado. DeAndrea's signature style is hyperrealist figural sculpture, and his most famous work — and one of the Denver Art Museum's most popular pieces — is "Linda," an incredibly lifelike reclining nude woman in oil on polyvinyl with human hair. As important as it is, and in spite of the frequent requests that it be out on exhibit, it spends most of its time in a darkened, air-conditioned room because light and heat are slowly destroying it. Every so often, it's taken out of wraps and brought into a dimly lit gallery, as it was for the magical Starring Linda last summer at the DAM. For this show, Modern and Contemporary curator Gwen Chanzit put Linda together with two other DeAndrea sculptures — an older sculptural group and a recent female nude, both of which were perfectly complementary and provided just the right weight for this delightful show.

Michael Burnett, owner of Space Gallery, has a particular interest in contemporary abstraction — and as proof, he's made it the standard fare of the place. Last summer's Beyond the Plane was the third Space exhibit in a row that showed off separate groups of artists from the gallery's deep bench of abstractionists. The venue is so large that those participating were represented by entire bodies of work. There was even a solo that was both a part of and separate from Beyond the Plane, with its own subtitle, Fresh; it featured smudgy paintings by Patricia Aaron that she had done during a residency in Hawaii. Lewis McInnis was another star of this show, his elegant paintings perfectly juxtaposing hard edges with soft margins. The McInnis paintings worked beautifully with super-sophisticated Howard Hersh compositions that incorporated geometric forms. The show was rounded out with constructivist sculptures by Stephen Shachtman, architectonic assemblages by Duane Noblett and expressive paintings by Judy Campbell.

Denver abstract painter Mark Brasuell was the subject of a career survey last winter that included many of his wildly colored paintings as well as a bunch of his large drawings. So many Brasuell creations were crammed into Regis's O'Sullivan Gallery that it was an embarrassment of riches, but crowding was the show's only true shortcoming. Brasuell has been exhibiting his work in Denver since 1988, and since then he's been a major player in the city's alternative scene; he co-founded Edge Gallery with Ken Peterson and was the co-op's president for many years, and he's currently a member of Spark Gallery. For Brasuell, each painting or drawing series is infused with secret narrative content that he essentially paints over. One series might address a death in his family, another the struggle for LGBT rights, but regardless of the topic, there's an overall consistency to just about everything he's done over the past couple of decades.

The guys who run Point Gallery, Frank Martinez and Michael Vacchiano, have primarily focused on artists who work in one or another contemporary variant of good old-fashioned realism. That was the case with the drawings and paintings in Michael J. Dowling: Forgotten Scoundrels. Dowling's enigmatic portraits were inspired, at least in broad terms, by Italian old master Caravaggio, an artistic genius and a known rogue. This source of inspiration, both aesthetically solid and ethically disreputable, explains why Dowling's figures were expertly done but had a dark and edgy quality to them, especially in the handling of faces and garments. Dowling grew up in Colorado and studied with John Hull years ago, when Hull taught at the University of Colorado Denver, and the mentor's influence is easy to see in these works. Dowling also spent two years in Italy studying traditional painting techniques, and that is revealed in the work, too, partly explaining his creation of 21st-century works inspired by an artist from the sixteenth. It also neatly explains why he's such an expert at conveying the figure.

Bill Havu, owner of the eponymous William Havu Gallery, and Nick Ryan, the gallery's manager, organized the compelling Roadside Attractions, which included paintings by a quartet of contemporary realists. Well-known Denver artist Rick Dula was given the starring role in the festivities, as well as the lion's share of Havu's expansive spaces. Dula is a photo-realist who's made a career of depicting the built environment, either old industrial buildings in otherwise bucolic settings or urban buildings that are so new, they're not finished yet. The Dulas were supplemented by stylistically similar views of small towns by Lloyd Brown, while the exceptionally traditional-looking vistas in the unadulterated Western landscapes of Jeff Aeling's atmospheric paintings represented a shift in gears from both groups of photo-like works. The show finished upstairs, where expressive and simplified glimpses of contemporary rural life by Lori Buntin were on display, their abstract simplicity distinguishing them from the super-realistic depictions downstairs.

Boulder-area artist Teresa Booth Brown is best known for her non-objective paintings, but for this impressive solo at Ironton, she decided to do something different by presenting her distinct, if conceptually related, drawings. For most of them, she embraced an unusual process unlike ordinary drafting: Instead of making her marks with pencils, she did it with erasers. Brown began with found book pages that she chose based on their appeal to her; she then evenly covered the chosen pages with graphite powder, selectively erasing the graphite to introduce compositional elements. Put all together, the small works made a big impact. Sadly, though, this was one of the last shows at Ironton Gallery, which closed in January, though Ironton's studios remain up and running. Since 2004, artist Jill Hadley Hooper had run Ironton Gallery — with help from her partner, Hugh Graham — and invited some of the area's most interesting artists, such as Brown, to exhibit.

Nicole Banowetz does something kind of odd: She makes installations using inflated forms that have given her an easily recognizable signature. It's not like the medium is completely unknown, but it's safe to say that few artists anywhere work in this way, and in Denver, she's cornered the market. Her unusual approach was most recently displayed in Gentle Infestation at Pirate: Contemporary Art, with a unified installation of gigantic shapes that seemed to be abstract but were in fact representational, based on single-celled sea creatures called Radiolaria. Their complex forms were done in white-colored, plastic-coated fabric, with some elements suspended from the ceiling. In places, tiny white porcelain sculptures were visible through transparent acrylic portholes. These little shapes inspired the show's title, but the whole thing felt like an infestation. Big inflated forms are more likely to be used for holiday decorations than for any kind of art, but it turns out that Banowetz was inspired by such things when she learned to make them for the Museum of Outdoor Arts.

Although technically the pieces in a folk tale by Bryan Andrews were separate works, the artist orchestrated them in such a way that together they resolved into an installation. Andrews has long created pieces, mostly from carved wood, that come out of his own cooked-up set of myths, inspired by his study of the world's spiritual beliefs. For this show, the myth system was based on a metaphorical forest; the arrangement of the pieces was intentional, and began with one representing the courier who carried the tale. Next came three busts looking on from one side and a set of prints facing them, both types of works symbolizing the archetypal characters that played roles in the imaginary myth; it all culminated in a tall spire that marked the imaginary place where the tale had been planted. Andrews had previously taken a several-years hiatus from exhibiting his work in town, and a folk tale by Bryan Andrews marked his return to the scene — but he's now moving away, so in retrospect, it was also his fond farewell.

Every other year, a raft of Denver art venues mount shows as part of the Month of Photography, the brainchild of photographer Mark Sink. During last spring's event it was Sink's wife, Kristen Hatgi Sink, who stole the show with the engaging exhibit A Tented Sky: New Works by Kristen Hatgi Sink. Her subject was the female nude, and she posed her models tabletop, drenching them in honey and adorning them with cut flowers, sliced fruit, preserved butterflies and even an octopus. Typical of her exacting standards, Hatgi Sink spent many hours getting just the right shots. The finished photos, in oversized digital pigment prints produced by Ron Landucci, were richly colored, densely composed and perfectly executed. An installation of flowers, fruit and honey supplemented the photos and resonated with them, even if the organic matter started to stink before the show closed.

A couple of years ago, Glenwood Springs-based artist Andrew Roberts-Gray was interested in capturing the mountain scenery in paintings that were fairly traditional save for a few colorful and expressive abstract passages inserted here and there. Those paintings represented a contemporary spin on that old workhorse the Western landscape. The artist's oeuvre has changed considerably since then, and although he still claims to refer to the landscape, such reference was hard to see in his most recent work, which made up the solo After the Pale King: Andrew Roberts-Gray at Michael Warren Contemporary. The show was dominated by gigantic, post-minimal wall constructions made up of multiple panels that sometimes had geometric sculptural elements. Artists are often timid about changing course once they've developed a successful artistic formula, as Roberts-Gray had with his earlier, slightly altered landscapes, and it probably took courage to throw away that signature style. Fortunately, he found another one that is just as successful, if not more so.

Last winter, Robischon Gallery presented a suite of environmental shows that zeroed in on the topic of water, an urgent subject in the West. A standout among these strong exhibits was Stephen Batura: Floodplain, and although the entire show had fewer than a half-dozen paintings, the experience was just this side of transcendental. That's because the exhibit was anchored by a single spectacular work: the title piece, "Floodplain." Measuring forty feet across and rising twelve feet high, it was a highly expressive but nonetheless convincing rendition of rapidly flowing water. The casein-on-board painting relates to the many that Batura has done over the years on the subject of the South Platte River, including those times when it has flooded. In terms of size and charisma, "Floodplain" demands to have a big wall to hang it on. And it deserves to: It should be on permanent display in a local open-to-the-public lobby, or even a museum.

The idea for the ambitious group show Learning to See Color at the University of Denver's Vicki Myhren Gallery was sparked by a Josef Albers portfolio in DU's collection. Albers did the prints in the '70s as a retrospective of his fifty-years-long obsession with color. Free-associating from the images in the portfolio, co-curators Dan Jacobs (the Myhren director) and Jeffrey Keith (a noted Denver artist) went beyond just exploring color to examining how color illuminates the nature of art itself. They rounded up an array of works that showed how color can indicate mood, narrative, composition and other visual-art features. The show included many notable works by internationally famous artists, such as Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler, and many pieces by Colorado artists, including Sushe Felix, Monroe Hodder and Kate Petley. The only down note had nothing to do with how well the organizers put together the exhibit or how interesting their many inclusions were, but rather with an anonymous crime: Collin Parson's "Night Sight/Night Site," a multi-part installation, was repeatedly vandalized and ultimately removed. In spite of this terrible hit, the show still held together as one of the season's top attractions.

Back in the '70s and '80s, painter Fritz Scholder was a hot property, riding the Southwestern craze of the time — but then, about twenty years ago, he fell out of favor. Recently, though, perceptions of his efforts have started to change, and a good indication was the wildly popular Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980, a show that looked at the artist's highly idiosyncratic depictions of American Indians. In retrospect, these paintings revolutionized the public perceptions of Native American art and liberated American Indian artists from the limitations of their traditional practices. It could accurately be said that there is Native American art before Scholder and after Scholder — the changes he wrought were that big. Curated by John Lukavic, from the Denver Art Museum's Native Arts department, the show was anchored by the many Scholder pieces in the DAM's collection, including a trove of ten major works only recently donated by mega-collectors Kent and Vicki Logan. It was intriguing to notice that as Scholder's paintings have gotten older, they've started to look newer, and even seem contemporary right now.

As director of the Clyfford Still Museum, Dean Sobel relentlessly comes up with new ways to present the artist's accomplishments — a most pressing assignment, considering that the CSM is exclusively given over to the exhibition of Still's pieces. To keep visitors interested, Sobel can't just present the same old chronology over and over again; luckily, he's been great at brainstorming new ways to showcase the enigmatic artist. The most recent example of this was Repeat/Recreate: Clyfford Still's "Replicas", mounted this past fall. Still was one of the pioneers of abstract expressionism, America's earliest claim to being an art powerhouse. The romantic idea of the style is that paintings of this type are the result of an artist staging a unique battle with paint on canvas. But Still didn't paint that way, and instead of his paintings being one-off encounters, he sometimes made multiple copies of the same painting. To pull off this fabulous show, Sobel and CSM consulting curator David Anfam gathered paintings and their copies from around the world, displaying them with their companions for the first time.

Put together by co-curators Donald Fodness and Geoffrey Shamos, Jokes of Nature was a large group show meant to explicate RedLine's theme last year, "Play It Forward." The curators chose pieces in which the grotesque plays some kind of role, and they included things that they felt encompassed the diabolical, scatological, pornographic, dreamlike, carnivalesque, uncanny and caricatured. You get the picture: The exhibit was all but a freak show. But to the credit of the curators, they kept the teenage gross-out stuff to a minimum — though it must have been hard to resist that temptation, considering their themes. Although artists from around the world were represented, the show was also chock-full of the work of current or former Colorado artists, such as Stephen Martonis, Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Xi Zhang, Laura Shill, Martha Russo, Amber Cobb and Kristen Hatgi Sink, among many others. Fodness is an artist who works with a funk vocabulary, while Shamos is a recently minted art historian; they made a great pair of opposites, and we're hopeful they'll team up again.

Although the Museum of Outdoor Arts is mostly about sculpture in public spots around metro Denver, it also maintains a set of indoor galleries at its headquarters in Englewood. This past winter, Joel Swanson: Polysemic was installed in these inside spaces, along with one additional outside piece: a billboard titled "Respectfully" that was erected in the MOA's Sculpture Alley, next to the building. "Respectfully" referred to the common closing salutation, which Swanson freed from its context and meaning — and that's what he did with everything inside, as well. The show opened with three installations presented as one; in each, Swanson had taken a source — product packaging in the first, Zapf Dingbat symbols in the second and envelopes in the third — and then stripped it down to its basic form, in the process changing its meaning. He's particularly fascinated with language, and a wallpaper installation and a suspension piece were both based on palindromes, words spelled the same way forward and backward. Don't be fooled by all this heady content, though: Swanson always ensures not only that his work is about ideas, but that it's beautiful, too, so you can just look at it without worrying about what it means.

Looting the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genre painting that depicts Western expansion in America, then crossing that reference with one that relates to Ed Ruscha's post-pop taste for text and irony, was the formula for the exhibit Shawn Huckins: The American __tier, presented last spring at Goodwin Fine Art. For this dazzling show, Denver painter Huckins created a body of very accomplished and witty conceptual-realist paintings, expertly copying famous historic paintings — like those by George Caleb Bingham — and defacing them, so to speak, with words spelled out in block letters running across the pictures. The words conveyed messages that were sourced from found tweets and text messages. Interestingly, Huckins masked off the parts of the image in which letters appeared before he started to paint, even though it appears as though the messages were tacked on afterward. The dialogue between the images and the words contrasts the quieter times of the past with the hectic pace of life today, but for Huckins, they also equate the way that people at that time, as now, faced an uncharted future.

Critical Focus: Monique Crine filled the lower-level gallery at MCA Denver with big, beautiful portraits of big, handsome guys. The paintings, all of which were specifically created for this exhibit, depicted recently retired professional football players who had been sidelined by injuries. The show was part of the Critical Focus series of exhibits at the MCA, which were meant to highlight the accomplishments of selected emerging artists; this one was put together by curator Nora Burnett Abrams. Crine’s paintings are so accurate in their depictions that at first they look like photos, so it comes as no surprise that she initially photographed the men, then used the resulting shots as preliminary studies for her finished paintings. The photographic quality of the paintings is reinforced by their utterly smooth surfaces, with Crine having expertly manipulated the thinned-out pigments. These portraits, many of them monumental in size, are part of an ongoing Crine series called Eden Prairie, examples of which are currently in a national traveling show.

Colorado has a world-famous Wild West history that has provided the ideal setting for innumerable novels, movies, TV shows — and even art exhibits, such as last spring's Outpost, featuring recent work by New York artist Paul Jacobsen. Born in Colorado, Jacobsen maintains a studio in Rico, near Telluride. Ruminating on the state's past, Jacobsen concluded that legalized marijuana has put us right back on the frontier, at least metaphorically: Just as we were once at the edge of the wilderness, Colorado is now at the edge of a new era. Jacobsen set the mood for his show with installation elements that included a large archway made of repurposed wallboards weathered to a gorgeous gray. Similar wallboards are seen in the backgrounds of his photo-realist paintings, lyrically taking on the topic of legal weed via meticulously done renderings of marijuana leaves in floral arrangements. Area pot tycoons, take notice: These paintings would look great on the walls of your dispensary or office.

In the '60s and '70s, Colorado was a jewel in the crown of hippiedom. Communes popped up, granola and grass were available — and then there was the regional capital, Boulder. Is it why we were the first state to fully legalize marijuana? Maybe — but one thing is certain: It launched Denver's alternative art scene, which is still going strong. In 1979, a bunch of Boulder bohemians rented a storefront in northwest Denver that became Spark Gallery, the city's first artist cooperative, and in the intervening decades, those kids with disheveled hair became veteran artists. RetroActive: Founding Spark recalled those early days; it was presented at Pirate: Contemporary Art (another early co-op that opened right after Spark) and mounted by Rule Gallery — precisely the kind of community-mindedness the hippies promoted. Among those included in the show were Clark Richert, Jerry Johnson, Richard Kallweit, Charles DiJulio, George Woodman, Andy Libertone, Paul Gillis and Margaret Neumann. Denver's vibrant contemporary-art world of today owes a big debt of gratitude to this groovy crowd.

Last summer was Matt Scobey's season. Not only was his floor piece in Denver's Biennial of the Americas one of the genuine standouts in the event, but his solo at Leon Gallery, The Essence, was one of the strongest shows of the year. In it, Scobey played with art history in a set of chaste post-minimal boxes and a group of brutalist totems. Each type of work employed cast concrete as its principal medium. The boxes, titled "Vibe Transmitters," were placed on wooden stands of different heights. They had three separate parts: a transparent colored acrylic sheet through which light emitted was sandwiched between a concrete base and a concrete top. As good as these were, they were overshadowed by Scobey's even better non-objective totems, also in concrete. Some of them were made from casts of discarded items, like soda bottles or cut-up basketballs, but surely the best were those composed of purely geometric shapes, including pyramids, cones and solid rectangles. In these, Scobey consciously referred to Brancusi's "Bird in Space" and "Endless Column," and he clearly couldn't go wrong with that.

Last summer, the new mobile exhibition venue Black Cube was launched by Laura Merage, the founder of RedLine, who chose Cortney Lane Stell to run it. Black Cube plans to sponsor pop-up events beyond Denver; the goal is ultimately to travel the country in a big black box. A standout among the initial Black Cube offerings was Derrick Velasquez: New Brutal, a captivating architectonic installation last winter. For New Brutal, Velasquez erected a tower in the gutted interior of the under-construction Stanley Marketplace, at the east end of Stapleton. The tower, which rose to 25 feet, was made of two-by-fours covered with fake wood panels adorned with plastic ornamentation. Open voids standing in for windows allowed viewers to see into the lighted interior. During the course of the show, Velasquez added more and more details, making the cheaply built tower even more pretentious by the end than it had been at the beginning. It was something like a parody of a Venetian palazzo by way of Home Depot, effortlessly ridiculing the pompous and tawdry new buildings now changing the face of Denver.

The Colorado Photographic Arts Center has gone through a number of ups and downs since its founding in 1963 as an advocacy group for fine-art photography, but things have probably never been worse than they were six months ago. Two things were happening: The organization had been told that it needed to vacate its cramped and unworkable space in Highland, with the property owner wanting to go in another direction, and then CPAC director Rupert Jenkins announced that he was leaving town and giving up his post. So CPAC had no space to move to and no director to help find one, though boardmembers were already looking. In September, CPAC brought on a new director, Samantha Johnston. At that time, the word was out that Ironton Gallery would be closing, and the handsome space it occupied was up for rent. You can see the happy ending coming: CPAC unveiled its much more serviceable headquarters in the former gallery in February. And there was even a bonus, as an artist in an adjacent studio had moved out, allowing CPAC to take over that space for its offices.

Just over ten years ago, in 2005, Design Council, a support group for the Architecture, Design and Graphics department at the Denver Art Museum, launched an annual fundraiser held in the dead of winter called Design After Dark. Almost immediately, it became an absolute must-attend event for Denver-area architects, designers and artists, as well as many of their clients. This year's version, titled "Amass" and held last month in an empty roller-skating rink on South Broadway — yes, weird locations are a standard feature of the event — attracted a huge, glittering crowd heavily larded with the hip and the impeccably dressed. Organizers had invited artists and others to contribute works, some of which were spectacular, to be sold for the fundraiser. Participating artists included the likes of Ravi Zupa, Matt Scobey, Jeanne Quinn, Jaime Molina, David Kremer, Blanca Guerra and Phil Bender. The stylishness of the DAD party would seem to reflect the stylishness of the department's curator, Darrin Alfred, but he passes off credit for the event's success to the hardworking Design Council committee charged with putting it together.

It may be a coincidence, but many top companies staged one-act evenings in the past year. These ranged from the hilarious Murder for Two at the Garner Galleria — which specializes in lighthearted, after-work entertainment — to the wistful one-woman musical Tell Me on a Sunday at the Avenue. There was also the Denver Center's Fade, a thoughtful play about class, race and identity in Hollywood, and Edge's heart-stopping production of the tragedy Medea — which definitively proved that you can get as much emotional, poetic and intellectual punch from a short evening as you can from a long one. If you're looking for a cheerful night out, something thoughtful to chew on or a jolt of culture that still leaves enough time for a late-evening drink or dinner — or just an early night at home — the theater world has you covered.

It's getting absurdly hard to park your car when visiting downtown theater venues. There are evenings when you find yourself racing to the Denver Center from a faraway parking lot, only to arrive ten minutes late anyway. Parking is even tight these days for more far-flung venues like Miners Alley in mellow downtown Golden. But somehow it's never necessary to leave home extra early for a play at Curious. Get there on time or only a little early, and you'll find parking comfortably close in the lot opposite the theater.

The narrow strip mall outside is unappealing, but once you've walked into the Edge Theater itself, you're in a different world — brightly colored, with original works of art displayed to your left and a busy bar to your right, the entire lobby milling with cheerful people. Behind the desk, there's often an actor or director you recognize who seems to know every patron by name. Your fellow theater-goers tend to be equally friendly. You can start a conversation with something as obvious as, "Do you come to the Edge often?" or, "What have you seen here that you liked?" And if you're so inclined, you can continue the discussion over a beer at intermission.

Cabaret wouldn't be a risky choice for most theater companies — the show has been around a while, and its shock value has faded. But for Phamaly, composed of actors with a variety of disabilities, this musical about the dissolute life activities in Berlin's Kit Kat Klub in the years leading up to World War II represented a huge challenge. Performers were asked to writhe, pose, embrace and strut their sexiest stuff on stage in skin-baring costumes, and they did it with beautiful, no-holds-barred panache.

The Avenue Theater is a part of Denver history, a friendly, cozy, well-situated venue that's been around for over twenty years. But for several seasons there's been a sense of drift, and the offerings on stage have been wildly uneven — serious plays, comic sketches, shows that didn't seem to know whether they were serious or comic. John Ashton ran the place from 1990 to 2005 — overseeing a period when it changed location — then sold it, but remained involved in various capacities. And now, after a period of churn, Ashton has taken over as executive director. His first season began with a professionally produced rendition of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Tell Me on a Sunday, and the rest of the year looks just as promising, with David Mamet's hilarious — and very aptly timed — political sendup November; and Bakersfield Mist, a hit on Broadway that starred Kathleen Turner, about an unemployed bartender who thinks she's found a genuine Jackson Pollock painting and the arrogant, erudite art expert sent to authenticate it.

Several local theaters provide openings for new plays — contests, readings and full productions for a handful of local playwrights. But opportunities are thin on the ground, and autonomy is close to nonexistent for writers. Dirtyfish (the group's website warns you not to look up the name in the Urban Dictionary, and how right they are!) comprises seven of our best and most productive playwrights: Tami Canaday, William Missouri Downs, Lisa Wagner Erickson, Ellen K. Graham, Leslie C. Lewis, Nina Alice Miller and Jeffrey Neuman. These writers decided, as they state, "to combat the trend of endless staged readings that all too often do not lead to full production." Instead, they stage their own works as a collective, as well as generally broadening opportunities for Colorado writers. They introduced Dirtyfish to the world early this month with a group of fully produced short works — one by each of them — collectively titled Wedding Cake Vodka.

We grieved when the long-lived and much-loved Heritage Square Music Hall troupe said goodbye a couple of years back with an energetic evening of songs and jokes. We left the theater that night mulling memories of fine voices, zany antics, skilled musical numbers, men in drag, and audience members being dragged onto the stage. We wondered if we'd ever see those true comic originals Rory Pierce, Annie Dwyer, T.J. Mullin, Johnette Toye and Alex Crawford in a performance again. We're happy to report semi-regular appearances by at least three of them. Dwyer's Frau Bleucher in Young Frankenstein brought down the house at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center and won her a Henry Award. She went on to star in Miracle on 34th Street at Johnstown's Candlelight Dinner Theater alongside Mullin as Kris Kringle. Rory Pierce showed up in The Odd Couple at the Barth Hotel, and charmed the audience in Songs for a New World at Miners Alley, where he also has a position coordinating the children's program. Welcome back.

The Lone Tree Arts Center mounts a variety of interesting events, including concerts, ballets and lectures, but it's the venue's rare theater productions — one or two a year — that make a visit worthwhile. This year's ridiculously funny offering, The Explorers Club, revealed what happens when a woman invades a stuffy Victorian male sanctuary demanding admission. "Your science is adequate," she's told, "but your sex is weak with sin and led astray with diverse lusts." The mayhem that followed was carried out by some of the area's best actors, including Sam Gregory, Mark Rubald, Stephanie Cozart, Rob Costigan, Erik Sandvold and Randy Moore, and under the direction of Randal Myler, the tech — costumes, set, lighting — was brilliant. Keep an eye out for LTAC's next dramatic gem.

The Boulder-based Catamounts is one of the wittiest companies around, so when the Dairy Arts Center became unavailable due to construction, they improvised as only the Catamounts can. For A Public Reading, they took over a large room at Madelife — a Boulder store and gallery intended as a launching pad for artists and entrepreneurs — and brought in risers and chairs, hung lights and installed a movable bar serving drinks. The result was one of those unexpected, welcoming, off-the-beaten-track playing spaces that make an evening at the theater feel like an adventure. And in case all of that wasn't enough, audiences were treated to after-show craft beer and excellent snacks.

Chris Kendall has been a quietly fine and reliable mainstay on area stages for several years, but this year he came into full focus with several stellar performances: a bullying father, F, in the Edge Theater's Cock; Leonato in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's Much Ado About Nothing; Tony Reilly, a wonderfully nasty old crank, in the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company's Outside Mullingar; and — perhaps best of all — a dying Freud, wise and sad and too tired to continue in the quest for truth, in that same company's Hysteria. Given Kendall's versatility and the non-flashy truth of his acting, it's no wonder so many of our best companies request his services.

Emma Messenger dominates any stage whenever she's on — not with big bravura performances, but with a strong, warm groundedness and an always-present vibe of hidden depth. She brought these qualities to varied roles this year: a strangely secretive and defensive mother in Edge Theater's Exit Strategies; a brilliantly vicious and vulnerable Martha in the same company's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and an oddly uncompassionate though politically committed doctor in The Normal Heart at Vintage Theatre.

There are a lot of rumors surrounding Walt Disney — that he spied for the FBI, that he was a racist and an anti-Semite, that he crushed unions. In Lucas Hnath's inventive play, all this is true, and Disney is also a monster of ego, who manipulates and betrays everyone around him and tries to shape the entire world to his own specifications. Paul Borrillo communicated the sheer, unmitigated awfulness of this American icon with calm, lofty authority and held the audience spellbound.

In Hysteria, a strange and fascinating mix of tragedy and farce, Michael Bouchard played Salvador Dalí — he of the astonishing waxed mustache, melting clocks and surreal landscapes. Bouchard was everything you could wish for in this fabulous role. He minced, he smirked, he rattled and pranced, he took off his pants and donned them again, he understood precisely the line he needed to tread between realism and farcical lunacy, and he enjoyed himself so thoroughly that you couldn't help laughing at his every move, becoming slightly disappointed when he was called on to be serious.

In Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Johnny "Rooster" Byron has collected a bunch of disaffected teenagers for a booze- and drug-soaked party. He's a braggart, liar and tall-tale teller — on the literal level, a bone-headed loser. But metaphorically, he's a far more significant figure, a manifestation of the Lord of Misrule appointed in ancient times to upend law and custom during winter festivities. It's a huge role, and Augustus Truhn filled it hugely, bringing Rooster to life in all his richness and ambiguity, grandeur and moral turpitude.

Robert Schenkkan's All the Way is a smart, thoughtful look at a slice of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, his impassioned fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a bill he politicked, bullied, bribed, strategized and manipulated through Congress. One of his foremost adversaries was Senator Richard Russell, a onetime patron and cunning son of the Old South who routinely opposed civil-rights legislation. As Russell, Philip Pleasants presented a complex portrait that conveyed all the man's oily courtesy and dishonest charm, as well as his genuine, residual warmth toward LBJ himself. In one of the largest casts assembled on the Denver Center stage in years, Pleasants's portrayal stood out and made an indelible impact.

No contest here. Benjamin Bonenfant was magnificent in the role of Henry V, one of those complex figures that can be interpreted in many ways. Henry's been played as a hero on a white horse, the embodiment of England's patron saint, St. George. But that ignores some of his uglier actions, as well as the unnecessary war of conquest he initiates. Bonenfant managed to embody all these contradictions fully, and it was enthralling to watch him going through the king's changes of mind and heart. Bonenfant's Henry was so original, right, tough, supple and intelligent that he made the role entirely new.

Geoffrey Kent's Iago was hands down the best reason to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's Othello last summer. Iago is the epitome of slithering, whispering evil, the barely human creature who brings down the majestic Othello and his innocent wife, Desdemona. Kent made him complex, living the role moment by moment in front of our eyes, showing an infectious joy when his manipulations were going well and displaying honest puzzled calculation when he met an obstacle. Shockingly, he charmed the audience so thoroughly that we almost forgot how hideous Iago's soul was. "It's like working on a suicide-prevention hotline, as volunteers in Seattle once did," we wrote at the time, "and discovering that the nice young man working beside you is Ted Bundy."

Shakespeare is known for his amazing women — women of strength, wit, humor, clever calculation and steadfastness in love — and Rosalind, the heroine of As You Like It, may be the pearl among them. Sent into exile by a scheming duke, she disguises herself as a youth and courts Orlando, the man she loves, by pretending to advise him on women. Speaking not in verse but in a quicksilver prose that rushes and eddies like a running brook, she soon has him dazzled. Graceful and lovely, Carolyn Holding did this brilliant role proud. On her tongue, the speech felt at home, and she alternated between giddy girlishness and natural dignity.

Phoebe in As You Like It is an unattractive, self-deluding country girl, held up to scorn by others for her rejection of the faithful shepherd Silvius. She provides one of those comic Shakespearean interludes that sometimes mildly amuse and sometimes irritatingly interrupt the main action. Not when Emily Kron played the role, though, taking it in both hands and shaking it to vivid life. With her dark hair and blazing eyes, Kron's Phoebe was unforgettable: blindly and stupidly in love with herself, impermeable to insult or rebuke.

Karen Slack's performance in the title role of Medea was large enough to allow for myriad interpretations. She was alternately achingly human and vulnerable and profoundly evil. There are few actors around with the power to fully embody a role as large as this, but Slack's power felt almost boundless. Sometimes her Medea was almost pleasant, even mildly funny, but periodically a huge rage rose, possessing her mind and body and consuming those around her. She's filled with sorrow for the children she feels compelled to kill, but she's still the same woman who coolly planned her escape following their deaths. When Medea stands on a platform with the children's corpses at her feet, her hands gloved in blood, and Jason — her faithless lover — laments having brought a barbarian into a civilized place, you note the essential racism, but in that terrible moment, you fully accept the description.

Kate Finch played a young woman brought up by deaf parents in Tribes, an insightful play about hearing and deafness, loneliness and family. She brings Billy — a young deaf man with a hearing family — out of the isolation he's suffered by teaching him sign language, and the two fall in love. Meanwhile, her own hearing deteriorates, and she finds herself unable to play the piano as she once did. Finch's Sylvia was convincing, real and so very much herself. She not only brought a rare warmth and authenticity to the action, it turns out she's a triple threat: In addition to her acting chops, she signs fluently and is a talented musician whose skilled fingering when Sylvia plays for Billy's family perfectly matched the recorded Debussy, lending authenticity to a profoundly moving scene.

Vera in 4000 Miles is a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, but at 91 she's far more preoccupied with the constant indignities of advanced age than politics: difficulty getting around, loss of sensory acuity, and the way the words she needs keep eluding her — surely one of the hardest trials for a brilliant intellectual activist. She exchanges nightly phone calls with an elderly neighbor she professes to despise, each checking that the other is still functional and alive. Deborah Persoff fulfilled the requirements of the role brilliantly. She deliberately subdued her usual vivid on-stage persona to communicate Vera's age and the unique mixture of resignation and rebellion with which she handles it, providing all the woman's complexities, temper flare-ups and moments of tenderness without a jot of sentimentality.

Jenna Moll Reyes played Amanda in 4000 Miles, whom protagonist Leo brings home for a quick roll in the hay. She's a rich, eccentric young Chinese woman, wonderfully embodied by Reyes as a full-out hilarious little flake — except for the genuine pain and horror that show on her face when she realizes that Leo's grandmother, Vera, is a Communist. "I hate Communism!" she exclaims, and for a fleeting second you see past the frivolity and understand how much her family must have suffered in Mao's China. That was the second that made Amanda more than a cartoon, and fully human.

While the twelve disciples waver and argue in The 12, Mary Magdalene erupts into the room. The men despise her as a woman and a prostitute, but she is the strongest among them, and shares none of their religious uncertainty. Christina Sajous has an amazing voice and presence, and she was so filled with power and passion as Mary that when she sang, "Where were all of you when he hung there and died?," she seemed to evoke all the cruelty and suffering in the world.

Elizabeth, the fiancée of Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, is by her own description an adorable madcap, glamorous and lively but — alas, poor Frederick! — intensely touch-averse. In short, she's one of those vamping, narcissistic Hollywood-style divas who's a gift for any actress to play. Cashelle Butler played her to the hilt, gifting the role with a fine voice and a lovely, rich vitality.

Scott Beyette is in many ways the heart of BDT Stage. He acts, sings and dances. He directs. He choreographs. He can play leading men or weird, eccentric characters with equal conviction and aplomb. And in Mary Poppins, he showed he could fly. His Bert was a more shaded character than Dick Van Dyke's cheery Cockney in the famous film. Sure, Beyette's Bert was chipper, but there were depths and shadows to his interpretation, and it seemed clear that he understood with sadness that his quiet, unstated love for the magical nanny could never be requited.

The funniest bit in Young Frankenstein is an inspired version of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz," in which the Monster — convincingly played by TJ Hogle as a big, green, howling, blubbery-voiced mess — learns to dance with the help of several other characters. He becomes more suave and lithe with every tap-dancing step, and here begins his transformation into a smooth, English-accented sophisticate, worthy of a lady's love. Hogle handled the transformation beautifully and sang of his "Deep Love" in a fine, melting tenor.

Directed and choreographed with crackling energy by Nick Sugar, with musical direction by the peerless Donna Kolpan Debreceni and ingenious costumes, set design and special effects — not to mention a fabulous cast — the Town Hall's Young Frankenstein was silly, funny, high-spirited and an all-around good time. We'd put it up against the New York revival — for which tickets ran as high as $450 — any day.

We've enjoyed an unusually large number of fine, interesting, new and unorthodox plays in area theaters this year, but images from one production keep recurring in memory: Terry Johnson's brilliant Hysteria. It's a hilarious farce complete with multiple doors, unexpected exits and entrances, ridiculous misunderstandings, silly accents, a man without his pants and a naked woman in a closet. But it's set in London just before World War II; the protagonist is a dying Sigmund Freud, and a strange young woman presents him with an accusation that may invalidate his life's work. He also receives a visit from Salvador Dalí. So naturally, all kinds of absurdist and evocative imagery gets introduced. Snails and mucus. Sex and touch aversion. Salt, semen and bird shit. Phallic statues. Swans and starlings. And, of course, a melting clock, a roaring train and solid objects that turn to rubber. There are levels on levels of meaning here, but the play isn't dense or hard to watch; it's funny, surprising, moving and absorbing throughout — as well as deeply sad. Michael Stricker directed with a sure hand, the cast was terrific, the set beautifully detailed and the special effects mind-boggling. Hysteria did exactly what theater is meant to do: It set the imagination soaring.

The Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Company deserves accolades for its light, airy and beautiful As You Like It alone, as well as for All the Way, a fascinating dissection of Lyndon B. Johnson's struggle to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress (and a play that should be required viewing for everyone who intends to vote this fall). But those weren't the company's only fine achievements. There was also Theresa Rebeck's clever, provocative and entertaining The Nest, a play about a venerable bar inspired, in part, by Denver's legendary My Brother's Bar. Robert Schenkkan, who wrote All the Way, also had the daring idea of creating a musical called The 12 depicting the gathering of the disciples after the crucifixion, and the company gave it a stunning production. Another historical piece, One Night in Miami, imagined Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, singer-entrepreneur Sam Cooke, and famed NFL running back Jim Brown celebrating in a hotel room after Clay's victory over Sonny Liston; the two-person one-act Fade told the story of the difficulties faced by a Latina hired as a Hollywood television writer and her friendship with the janitor who cleans her office. And then Tribes, which had a partially deaf protagonist, explored profound questions about communication — verbal, silent, physical, written — and the function of sound in our lives, as well as the meaning of family and community. Artistic director Kent Thompson has been supporting new work, creating on-stage diversity and hiring women and minority playwrights since his 2005 arrival in Denver, and year by year his vision solidifies and bears more interesting fruit.

The Denver Actors Fund was created in 2013 by John Moore to support theater people experiencing situational medical needs with modest amounts of money and volunteer help that ranges from pet-sitting to construction to meal delivery. So far the fund has distributed around $15,000. It's hard to pick only one example from the group's many good deeds, but one of the year's prominent success stories involves talented actor-singer Daniel Langhoff, who most recently starred in Next to Normal at Town Hall and Miners Alley's Pump Boys and Dinettes. Langhoff, diagnosed with colon cancer a few months after his wife, Rebecca Joseph, gave birth to their daughter, Clara, incurred costs that weren't fully covered by insurance. The fund approved a gift of $2,000 to help with bills, and photographer Laura Mathews Siebert raised an additional $1,500 with an all-day shoot. "So many thanks are owed," Langhoff wrote on the DAF website. "And I'm happy to spend the rest of my life giving them."

Hillary Clinton's presidential run has sparked a lot of discussion about feminism, with many younger women defecting to Bernie Sanders and older ones accusing their younger counterparts of betraying the cause — all of this accompanied by oft-anguished attempts to define just what feminism is. The Nest, Theresa Rebeck's play about the fate of a fabled bar, was written a year ago — it began life at the New Play Summit — but it's very timely. It begins with a man and woman arguing (actually, he's mansplaining) until the temperature rises and the woman tosses her basket of fries at the man's face. As soon as the couple leaves, bar regulars start bickering about who won the quarrel, and it's clear the men see it entirely differently than do the women. The Nest is a terrific conversation-starter, passionate but not didactic, very clever, and as funny as it is thought-provoking.

Female-identified kids ages eight to eighteen are embraced at Girls Rock Denver, a summer camp aimed at teaching young people to play music together. Campers learn to play an instrument, create a band, write a song and then perform together on stage — all in the short span of a week. The camp is extremely successful at teaching the art of putting a band together, but through informative workshops, female-centered music-history lessons and guest appearances by local and national rock stars, Girls Rock Denver has also become a place where feminism starts early. This summer camp is truly like no other: Future rockers and beatmakers learn directly from local musicians, rappers, DJs, venue owners and audio engineers who are out working in the music industry every day, and the campers bring that experience back in the form of lessons, games, workshops and conversation. At Girls Rock Denver, first-time musicians get to learn how to play an instrument and are given the tools to smash gender stereotypes, all in the same place.

It's easy to throw a bunch of performers on a bill and call it a show, but Boombaptricks isn't about the quick route. The curated monthly gathering intentionally blends comedy, music, fashion, activism and art on the same stage in an effort to bring folks together and get people in the audience talking — to each other and about social-justice issues. Conceived by production company 52Eighty Entertainment's LaRae Martinez, musician ILL Se7en and Corin Chavez of local theater company the Black Actors Guild, Boombaptricks began last October and has already seen great success, with national comics, local fashion houses and internationally known DJs and MCs taking part in the interactive show. Although co-founder Chavez passed away unexpectedly last October, just before the first edition of Boombaptricks, his collaborators marched on in his honor. A continuing tribute to the hardworking actor and teacher, Boombaptricks is already living up to its mission to be a bridge between entertainment and community activism.

Denver composer Nathan Hall was given a unique commission opportunity by the Denver Theatre District last summer. Over the course of two weeks, the composer took over Boettcher Hall with his Ghost Light installation, a sound collage meant to be experienced from within, right on the stage, while the musical and vibrational elements float around the listener. On special dates, Ghost Light also incorporated live performances, but the goal was always the same: to give audiences a chance to hear music the way players in an orchestra do. What a way to catch a vibe.

Though Blow Pony events originated in the Pacific Northwest, this inclusive party made its way to Denver just in time for PrideFest. Denver DJ and event organizer L.A. Zwicky joined forces with Blow Pony co-founder and DJ Airick X to launch Blow Pony Denver, a safe, judgment-free space focused on creating parties for the radically minded. Elevating the art and people of the global queer community, this shindig goes bigger and brighter than your average dance party, with genre-bending performances by up-and-coming superstars. Blow Pony Denver has billed itself as the place for "bears, cubs, chubs, dykes, hawks, cocks, twinks, pillow biters, club kids, queens and you." So what are you waiting for?

For fifteen years, Felony Misdemeanor (aka Theariale St. Cyr) has been honing her craft as a drag performer; twelve of those years have been spent here in Denver, far from her El Paso roots. In that time, her Colorado legs have grown strong (and shapely), and she shines as the gold standard for what a queen should be. With hair, makeup, body, costumes and heels always on point, Felony is confident, humble, irreverent, hilarious, beautiful, sexy, professional and, most of all, never boring. Her name may sound like trouble, but she's a blessing in disguise for our drag community.

When you're a firecracker, you start with a spark and go off with a bang — and one cherry bomb in particular rolled onto the Denver drag scene this year: Jessica L'Whor. Busting in like a young Madonna Ciccone, Jessica made short work of a long year, putting in the time and effort — not to mention the blood, sweat and mascara smears — to leave just as big of an impression on our town as a certain Material Girl left on the '80s. There isn't a stage in Denver that Jessica hasn't placed a high heel on, so where does a fiery, fresh face go from here? The sky's the limit.

When Kai Lee Mykels took over as show director for the Sunday-night spot at Charlie's — where a few other legendary shows have lived over the years — she made it her own with some sweeping and positive changes. These included a new name, stylish curtains, a proper stage, better seating for the audience, and an intimate monthly twirl with some of the stars of RuPaul's Drag Race. Most important, Mykels, a self-described "good Christian woman," secured one of the best casts of Denver queens to hit a stage.

Seven years ago, the galaxy's greatest drag performer, Nina Flowers — fresh from her near-win on the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race — gathered the best drag talent in town for a little show called Drama Drag, which wasn't your average drag show. Over the years, the show morphed into Drag Nation, moving into the large side of Tracks in order to handle capacity crowds, adding the sweet backup moves of Denver Dance, and creating the country's best and largest landing strip for Drag Race royalty to make guest appearances. Drag Nation has become world-famous in its short life, but as Nina Flowers exclaims after each show, "This is the top of the nation!"

In the gay pantheon, the circuit party is legendary. A weeklong tribute to sweaty bodies writhing to the hot beat of a master DJ, this type of party has never been big in Denver, for some reason — until now. Enter Circuit Saturdays, a monthly tribute to the circuit events of yore featuring all of the touchstones: scorching world-class DJ? Check. Hot, shirtless bodies? Check. Fun themes that beg for attendees to dress up (or down)? Check. Beautiful drag hostesses to keep the party moving? Double-check! Plug into this circuit, hunties.

We're lucky to have a selection of gay bars in town for every taste and color of the rainbow, but when it comes to charm and chill, you owe yourself a visit to the R&R Lounge. The R&R's classic neon sign and rainbow-colored door have been lighting up the building at 4958 East Colfax since 1977. Barfly regulars are here to enjoy a drink, play darts, talk about the Broncos and, oh, yeah, cruise some dudes — or just relax within the gay community. Don't expect a rip-roaring good time as soon as you walk in the door, but come around enough and everyone just might start to know your name.

If we're counting, Blush & Blu is Denver's only lesbian bar, but the owners go out of their way to stress that that isn't the label they're clinging to. B&B welcomes everyone into the fold, and it does so by offering lots more than just a cold beer or a shot of whiskey. The whole Colfax community can join in for open-mike comedy nights, drag shows, art shows, yoga classes, karaoke, dancing, improv — you name it, B&B has it in spades. Go ahead and get your groove on, Stella.

Part of what makes a great jukebox is how it fits into and reflects its surroundings. At the decade-old Horseshoe Lounge — a retro and remarkably friendly hangout in Uptown outfitted with tufted vinyl bar seats and booths, a pool table and knickknacks from that '70s basement — the jukebox feels integral, as if this all-around-appealing bar would be a different space without it. Part of the reason is that staffers put their stamp on the vibe by inserting their own mixes into the disc-style jukebox; their homemade CDs — complete with photos to identify the source — offer an array of compelling compilations that include both local (King Rat, the Limbs, the Pitch Invasion) and national (you name it, it's there) acts. The jukebox holds 100 discs, but employees rotate them frequently, focusing on everything from old hip-hop to new country to good ol' rock and roll. Adding to the fun: While you listen to your songs (four for a dollar), you can play pinball on the AC/DC-themed machine.

No, Virginia, drag queens don't pop out of a cabbage patch ready to slay a runway on four-inch heels. Ultimate Queens are made the old-fashioned way: by battling it out in a fourteen-week competition, where the stakes are high and the drama can get as thick as an old tube of mascara. But over those weeks, audiences get to watch performers' transformation into the icons they've always dreamed of portraying — fierceness included.

Rosie's is a real 1950s-style diner, a stainless-steel modular built in New Jersey by Paramount — the last diner-construction firm still standing — and shipped to Aurora in pieces. And it feels like you're back in that time period when you drop a quarter (for two songs) into one of the tabletop jukeboxes and start flipping to find a good tune — a pretty likely outcome, since the hit parade marches from the '50s ("Rock Around the Clock") to today ("Just Dance"). As you play DJ for the patrons of this colorful and authentically detailed neon-and-metal eatery — named for Rosie, the hash-slinger in the Bounty commercials, which were filmed in a Paramount diner — take down one of the seventeen flavors of milkshake and a blue-plate-special-style meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. There ain't no cure for the "Summertime Blues," but it's tough to be sad at Rosie's.

The nonstop construction around the city can be overwhelming — but one step inside the Mercury Cafe is like a step back into a calmer time. That's not to say that the restaurant and multi-stage venue's packed calendar of live concerts, lindy-hop lessons, movie nights, dance parties and theater productions isn't just as wild as the world outside. Settle into a wooden booth in the Rose Room for a piano-bar cocktail-hour experience, wander upstairs for a tango class or grab a table in the Jungle Room for a poetry performance; whatever kind of entertainment you're into, the Merc's got it. A fortress of good feelings and a kinder, gentler Denver atmosphere establish the decades-old Merc — and its owner/operator/Jill-of-all-trades Marilyn Megenity — as part of Denver's root system, which keeps the city firmly planted even as it soars as one of the country's hottest destinations.

For nearly two decades, the folks at Dazzle have finely honed the art of running a great jazz venue. Sure, bringing in high-caliber national acts like Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Regina Carter and Kurt Elling is part of Dazzle's success, but the place hosts some of the finest local jazz talent seven nights a week, too. Hailed by DownBeat magazine as one of the world's top 100 jazz clubs, Dazzle continues to be the king of the city's jazz scene because of top-notch talent, a great listening room and a first-rate food lineup and cocktail program.

Ziggies has been a frequent Best of Denver winner, and for good reason. Even when some upstart new spot comes along to try to snatch the award away, we always come back to the unassuming Ziggies. Why? Well, for starters, live music seven nights a week from local and national blues acts on a solid system (and no cover on weekdays) — including the long-running Sunday-night blues jam. Also, inexpensive drinks (craft beers and well-made mojitos among them). An odd and unpretentious selection of snacks that are trashy in theory but delicacies in the middle of a shot-and-a-beer kind of night (think Red Baron frozen pizza and Marie Callender's chicken pot pie). Periodic poetry jams (and a house poet) that keep the Beat vibe alive. Open pool tables between music sets. The most important reason, though, is that everyone is welcome here. And we do mean everyone.

Gaining momentum last year through a series of monthly after-hours parties hosted by James McElwee in a converted house basement, 1010 Workshop has grown into a compelling destination for underground electronic and dance music. 1010's self-determined ethos and practice helps the venue circumvent the glossy, overpriced sheen of Denver's corporate club culture, with McElwee bringing in more challenging national acts while supporting locals — including affiliates of the Deep Club label, who push the dance-music envelope.

Don't want the weekend to end? Head to Lola Mexican Fish House, which ups the ante on its Sunday happy hour by offering free shows by local bands (members of the Congress were regulars before they went off on tour) that often feature guest appearances by visiting musicians craving good margaritas and more intimate settings. In good weather, when the curtains of the patio are rolled up, this is as close to a beach party as you get in Denver.

One of the most fun ways to relax on a Friday night, Ominous — also known as goth night at Tracks — is an awesome excuse to indulge in music, drinks and good times. Tracks is a GLBT club, and while the monthly dance night is definitely alternative-lifestyle-friendly, you'll find couples of every persuasion — including just plain straight — out on the floor. DJs playing classic and modern industrial music are accompanied by coed dancers on the stage. There's also a monthly theme, and everyone is encouraged to dress up (this is Denver, after all!). Underground-music fans, mainstream dance fiends, true goths and more are sure to find something to love at Ominous.

With decor and ambience inspired by the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange, Milk Bar caters to an eclectic crowd Wednesday through Saturday nights. Perhaps best known for its goth-oriented nights — explicitly so on Goth Wednesdays and less obviously so on Saturdays with Mixtape (which has a New Wave room) — Milk harks back to a time when EDM and its antecedents didn't completely dominate the playlists. Because of this, it attracts one of the most diverse crowds of any dance club in the city. Though completely legitimate, Milk feels like a speakeasy — the entrance is in the alleyway behind 1037 Broadway — run by benevolent weirdos with good taste.

What's a great rock club but four walls and spilled beer? Yet therein lies the formula for facilitating live-music magic, which is just what happens at Larimer Lounge. Rather than assert a dominant personality or aesthetic, the Larimer appears to be little more than a hodgepodge of humble pieces. Its back-room venue isn't temperature-controlled, which encourages crowds to pack together even more tightly, and its low stage increases the feeling of intimacy. You can run into your favorite musicians in the upstairs bathroom — and now would be the time to say hi, because bands that play the Larimer are on their way up and soon graduate to larger venues. The club's energy leaks out the doors and into the bustling neighborhood nightlife, and with a revamped food cart in front and a new music festival happening on the block this spring, the Larimer proves that a great rock club transcends its four walls.

It may have no stage, no bar and not the best sound system in the world, but it's what happens inside Mutiny Information Cafe that matters. This bookstore/record store/venue/hangout on South Broadway stacks its calendar with film screenings, lectures, concerts, comedy shows and live podcast tapings. Basically, if you're not into what's happening at Mutiny, wait an hour and something else will inevitably pique your interest. There's also a pinball machine, a coffee bar and your friendly neighborhood conspiracy theorist hanging out between the books and records, just waiting to share his theories on global warming. The best part? It's the only all-ages venue on the strip, and events are donation-based, meaning Mutiny Information Cafe is a place where anyone can come along for the wild ride.

The building at 608 East 13th Avenue housed the venerable Snake Pit for nearly two decades before the Beauty Bar took over in 2010. When that venue closed last June, co-owner Mike Barnhart and manager Tucker Schwab spent the next few months transforming the space into a super-cool dance club and music venue on one side and a neighborhood bar on the other. Pearl's hosts the ever-popular Motown Thursdays — with free chicken and waffles — as well as other weekly and monthly dance nights.

As a talent buyer for Syntax Physic Opera and a resident of Denver DIY treasure Rhinoceropolis, Madeline Johnston has a serious stake in the local music scene. Unafraid to mix it up, she takes venue booking to the next level, curating shows based on raw sound rather than genre. A typical Johnston bill might include an experimental electronic act, a jazz quartet and a hip-hop artist all sharing the stage (or floor). Johnston's intentional soundscapes provide an atypical experience for show-goers — bar crowds and warehouse regulars alike. An active musician who also runs cassette-tape label Tinyamp Records, Johnston is fully immersed in the music that's happening right now, allowing her to put together some of the freshest and most interesting concerts in the metro area. Fans might go to a show to see their favorite rock band and discover a noise artist they've never heard of — all because of this promoter's ingenuity.

While the Denver Botanic Gardens' summer concert series is a decades-old tradition, Swallow Hill, which took over booking, producing and promoting the concerts there in 2010, has helped turn the series — which also includes a few shows a year at the DBG's Chatfield location — into a universally sold-out affair. The 2015 series boasted a wildly diverse lineup that included local legendary bluegrass outfit Hot Rize, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Boz Scaggs, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, Culture Club, Melissa Etheridge, Ziggy Marley, Gipsy Kings, and a stop on Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club's final tour.

Throwing an inaugural local-acts-only music festival into the middle of a festival-saturated summer is a daunting task, but no one pulled it off better than the Bluebird District Musical Festival. Highlighting the wonderful, tiny venues lining the Bluebird District along East Colfax Avenue, the BDMF provided a weekend that was the perfect antidote for music fans already suffering from festival fatigue. It was casual and curated with care, with every stage offering eclectic, talented local acts.

Grabbing the mike for karaoke is usually something that requires one more shot of tequila or the loss of a bet — unless, of course, you're at Armida's. The Mexican restaurant has been a Denver favorite for over twenty years, drawing huge crowds for karaoke seven days a week. While the more "professional" karaoke singers take the stage upstairs, patrons can expect drunken Salt-N-Pepa renditions and Backstreet Boys impersonators on the main stage. With two happy hours a day, Armida's provides the perfect atmosphere to let your hair down and pretend you're Selena — if only for one night.

There really is no other place in metro Denver quite like the Buffalo Rose. Because the Rose is hidden away in Golden, you really have to want to get there — but on the plus side, parking is easy. The venue generally hosts either rhythm-and-blues gigs or hair-metal shows put on by local group Wolfpack Productions, and it's all perfect. The guy working the door looks like he's spent some time in biker gangs, the bar staff wears the same leather gear they wore in 1988, and there's a dude propped up against the wall in cowboy boots and leopard-print pants who just might have been in Pretty Boy Floyd. The place is a joy: The sound is spot on, and you get a good view of the stage from just about anywhere. And where else do you get to see bands like Faster Pussycat, Danger Danger and motherfucking Winger?

The thing about glammy, sleazy hair metal is that in 2016, it's just about the least-cool genre of music you can be involved in. Hell, in 1993 it was the least-cool genre of music that you could be involved in. That's why, in our book, the musicians who have soldiered on while trends have risen and fallen — all the while spraying that product into thinning hair and keeping that gut in check — should be applauded. Grind Cat Grind still opens for just about every former Sunset Strip idol that comes our way, and is still killing it night after night. Some of the members even moonlight in a hair-metal tribute band called Mr. Steak, offering double the fun. Shame on you for laughing: Grind Cat Grind's set is chock-full of excellent anthemic rock and roll, and the bandmembers don't give a crap about what's charting. Gentlemen, we salute you.

At this point, everybody in Denver should know how talented Kalyn Heffernan is. The MC with the sharp wit and sharper tongue has got flow for days, and she's an artist first and foremost. Yet it's impossible to ignore the fact that the rapper's also got a keen eye for an outfit. We even ran a photo gallery in 2014 of every outfit Kalyn wore at SXSW, and each one was a head-turner. Whether she's rocking a glamorous dress, a pair of jeans with a tattered jacket and a porkpie hat or Adidas high-tops and a baseball cap, Heffernan makes it work.

With matching leather jackets stitched with "Denver Rock City, USA," songs about Kitty's South and lyrics like "We'll play the hi-dive until the day we die," there's no band that shows more love for its adopted home town than Bud Bronson & the Good Timers. The punk rockers are all too aware of Denver's bro-and-beer culture, and they manage to both embrace and mock it (see "Vapedemic" and "Beer Commercial") with love. Denver-centric songs may not be the path to national success, but then again, Bud Bronson has never wanted to win over the country — just the rowdy South Broadway crowds.

The best music video this year was also probably the bloodiest. Hard rockers the Yawpers released American Man this year, which garnered national attention and the insane video for the single "Doing It Right." The video starts with the main character slitting his wrists, and from there it goes to a cut-off penis, a car chase, and a cameo by Absolute Vinyl owner Doug Gaddy. It's violent and intriguing, and it perfectly represents the Yawpers' balls-to-the-wall attitude. Oh, and the song itself is top-notch, too.

There were many amazing albums this year. But only one band — with its debut record, at that — managed to sell out Red Rocks, sing the national anthem at a Broncos game, tour Europe and play The Tonight Show...twice. This band of Denver musicians let the world in on a long-kept city secret this year: Nathaniel Rateliff and crew are seriously talented. This is the band that played on its own rooftop at a backyard party. That produced an album that had Denverites singing along months before it was released. That sold out Syntax Physic Opera and the hi-dive in under three hours, then heard a packed crowd chant along to "S.O.B." at both. Yeah, there were many amazing albums released in 2015, but Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats was the best, and now the world knows it.

Every few months there's a song that becomes a cultural force and is played so often, you feel like you can't avoid it. For the past few months, that song has been "S.O.B.," by Denver's own Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats. It was performed on The Tonight Show, it was in an Apple commercial, and it even made an appearance in a strange Internet video in which Britney Spears writhed around seductively to it. (The response from Rateliff nearly broke the Internet.) While the song is a phenomenon and a carefully crafted pop gem, it could be argued that it's not even the best song on the Night Sweats' self-titled debut album. "Howling at Nothing" is at the other end of the soul spectrum and is a mid-tempo, Otis Redding-style ballad, capable of making existing and prospective couples hold each other close and dance long into the night. While "S.O.B." is what propelled the Night Sweats into the international spotlight, it's Rateliff's depth and diversity on songs like "Howling at Nothing" that should ensure his success long after the buzz dies down.

Luke Thinnes of French Kettle Station showcases songwriting that's almost cunning in its ability to traverse moods. Bitterness cross-fades with hope, and melancholy with an almost anthemic optimism, as his deadpan tenor voice counterbalances bright synth lines that twist through unpredictable but catchy melodies. Live, Thinnes lets his freak flag fly a little more freely, literally hanging from the rafters or screaming into the faces of his fans — poised, like the music itself, between confrontation and camaraderie.

Denver's population boom has made things more difficult all around. The roads are congested, parking is a challenge, and it's hard to get a table at a restaurant without a really long wait. The influx is not all negative, though, as the boom has brought with it a slew of talented musicians, including a few already formed bands that decided to relocate from other states. Rootbeer and Mermentau, from Lake Charles, Louisiana, sits at the top of the pile of artists who decided to leave their home state in favor of, in this case, snowier pastures. The two-piece garage-rock band combines the throwback fuzz of glam rock with the contemporary swagger of bands like the Strokes, performing with the energy and fervor of groups more than twice its size. While new and exciting acts like this should be considered a positive for a growing city, it's also a warning for all longtime Colorado bands to step up their musical game.

As one of the flagship indie-pop bands of the '90s, the Apples in Stereo helped define an influential style and aesthetic. The group certainly had an impact on Candy Claws and its current incarnation as Sound of Ceres. Before Claws became Ceres in 2014, John Ferguson, Ben Phelan and Robert Schneider of the Apples had become friendly with the project, recognizing a similar creative spirit and sound. The two acts' shared gift for tapping into a nostalgic otherworldliness places their music outside the trap of being a mere throwback. Sound of Ceres collaborated in 2015 with Schneider, Phelan and Ferguson — as well as Jacob Graham of the Drums — to produce this year's Nostalgia for Infinity, one of the most transporting albums in recent memory.

Under the mentorship of active Denver musicians and artists, students at Youth on Record get firsthand experience in the world of music-making. From the songwriting desk to the studio, Youth on Record walks avid players, MCs and songwriters through the process of making music while connecting them with local and national acts who have seen great success in the industry. It's become a model for similar programs across the country — programs that nurture young musicians' self-worth along with their budding talent. The work these kids do in the studio and on stage is a direct reflection of their teachers' dedication to creating the next generation of informed, active members of the creative community.

Before he regularly sold out comedy clubs, and before he wrote and starred in his own TV show, Ben Roy was an engaging and energetic frontman and singer. Roy — whose television show Those Who Can't just got greenlighted for a second season by truTV — fronted bands like the 29th Street Disciples and the Fire Drills for years. These days, despite his busy and burgeoning career as a comedian and television star, Roy still finds time to gig, and still approaches it with the same exuberance and abandon he's always shown. His current band, SPELLS, is his best yet, and is in the midst of preparing to release its first full-length. While fronting a punk band and starring in a television show may seem like polar opposites, Roy's genuine approach to both crafts makes them appear seamless.

When David Castillo of Pizza Time and Panaderia launched Bummeroo in 2015 — a music tour that took place only on YouTube, with live performances of bands in settings of their choosing — it seemed like an idea whose time had come. For Bummeroo 2, Luke Thinnes of French Kettle Station decided to take his performance not just out of his bedroom and into the street, but to the Cherry Creek mall, where shoppers were treated to a high-energy performance of upbeat post-punk pop. Filmed by two friends, Thinnes unleashed his raw enthusiasm for music on the unsuspecting audience, taking the concept of the festival and of confrontational performance to a whole new level. Mall security politely turned off his amp once the nine-minute show was over.

A$AP Rocky and Tyler, the Creator are both on major labels, but their roots are firmly in underground and alternative hip-hop. The ability of both artists to bring their 2015 tour to Red Rocks with like-minded artists Danny Brown and Vince Staples may not have signaled a major change in the world of hip-hop, but their elaborate set designs were on par with what you might see at any large-scale concert, short of those by monster acts like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead or Miley Cyrus. It felt as though experimental hip-hop had finally arrived.

Steely Dan apparently bears the curse of heavy rain during appearances at Red Rocks, and while this proved problematic for anyone trying to actually get into the venue on July 6, 2015, it was not without a certain fascinating quality. In fact, the whole evening seemed like a dream: Banks of thick fog obscured paths and at times imbued the stage with an opaque quality. After the show, the fog cloaked walkways and roads, making visibility tricky at best. But like most concerts at Red Rocks, it was an unforgettable experience that can't be replicated at any indoor venue.

In 2015, more so than in years past, video artists were involved in local shows. Active video artists from VJ Dizy Pixl and Orchidz3ro to Mark Mosher, Kim Shively and Chris Bagley are adding an immersive element to largely experimental music shows. One of the most active is 75 Ohms, a team that comprises Ryan Peru and Cheyenne Grow. Using a combination of digital and analog equipment, 75 Ohms always seems to tap into the vibe of the performers, combining video collage, abstract visuals and live stage-camera imagery to produce a truly unique experience every time.

Bob Rob Medina grew up in Aurora, was exposed to punk rock as a preteen, and started playing in his own punk band by the mid-'80s. Medina took in the significance of the movement and noted that you didn't need to be from someplace special for your version of punk to be special. For a few years, he wrote a blog about his experiences, sharing illustrations he made from photographs and memory. Eventually the blog included interviews, and Medina had on his hands a bona fide oral history of Denver punk in the '80s, which he turned into Denvoid and the Cowtown Punks, a handsome and essential volume on the subject.

D'Angelo held his universally acclaimed Black Messiah hostage for some eleven years, crippled by his own perfectionism. Ultimately, the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement convinced him to submit his revolutionary R&B for the record. He and his band (the Vanguard) took their show on the road, and for the first time in forever, the world's greatest purveyor of auditory foreplay came to Denver. He and the Vanguard put on a capital-S Show, with every note in its place and every song played like it was the first time. D'Angelo served as conductor, guiding band and crowd alike through peaks, valleys and hairpin turns. Let's hope the wait for his next visit won't be measured in decades.

While Denver continues to solidify itself as a music hub, it still lacks the infrastructure and opportunities of larger cities like New York and Los Angeles. Because of this, we sometimes lose talented and serious musicians who hope to take their careers to the next level. Marshall Gallagher honed his style in the Denver scene for many years, playing in underground acts like Solar Bear and establishing himself as one of the best guitarists around. Recently, Gallagher made the move to Los Angeles and continues to flourish as a guitarist, songwriter, performer and vocalist there. Fronting the incredible bands Swing Hero and Teenage Wrist, he also tours regularly with 3OH!3 and has recently started penning songs for other artists, including Sophia Scott. Gallagher's progression after leaving the Mile High City is proof that sometimes, taking the boy out of Denver might be the best thing after all.

Denver lost the Sidewinder Tavern, but it got quite a consolation prize with Globe Hall, a barbecue joint/live-music venue that Jeff Cornelius opened last fall in the circa 1903 lodge and union hall in the heart of Globeville. While the barbecue smokes out back, the casual, 200-seat venue smokes with musical acts designed to make the Globe "a little bit of a hybrid," Cornelius says, with "really accessible, fun, danceable music."

When Casselman's opened in RiNo in 2009 in the 9,000-square-foot building that had been Shakespeare's pool hall (and a distribution warehouse for the May Company in the '40s and '50s), it took a little while for the 1,200-person venue to get its sound and lighting system fully dialed in. But over the next six years, Casselman's morphed into a full-fledged music room. And while it brought in a number of national acts during that time, including Warrant, Skid Row, Anvil, Lynch Mob, Too $hort and Raekwon, Casselman's also hosted an assortment of local bands and nonprofit and corporate functions.