Now Showing

Every Good Cowboy and Nate Baldwin. In the front space at Pirate, there’s an interesting collaborative show made up of neo-pop mixed-media pieces, most with a vaguely Western theme. The works on view include those done either by Matthew Doubek or by Samuel Mobley, as well as many others that…

Now Playing

The Catch. Ken Weitzman’s play explores the well-worn concept of baseball as a metaphor for America itself, but in new and interesting ways. In the hands of Darryl Love, the boastful, charismatic player at the center of the story, the ball itself becomes a symbol, its seams stitching over the…

Despite some intriguing touches, The Housemaid falls short

Fifty years after Kim Ki-young’s postwar hothouse original, Im Sang-soo attempts a sleek, breathless update to the tale of a household riven by a sexy domestic. This time around, instead of a family-man music teacher getting ensnared, a bored, feckless maid (Jeon Do-yeon) is seduced by a rich scion and…

Unknown cages the aggression of a badass Liam Neeson

To age brutishly is Liam Neeson’s apparent career goal — with Taken, Clash of the Titans, The A-Team and now Unknown, the actor continues to follow the Nicolas Cage path from respected thespian to big-budget ass-kicker. In this tepid thriller from Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan), Neeson is Dr. Martin Harris, who,…

Barney’s Version never finds a rhythm

The late Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, best known south of the border for the film version of his 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was a bellicose practitioner of Jewish fiction in the manner of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, with a mad helping of Joseph Heller. The joyfully…

A superb cast stars in the DCTC’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

It’s hard to get enthusiastic about another production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve seen so many oafishly boring and over-the-top Bottoms; puppet-like Hermias and Helenas; Demetriuses and Lysanders so generic you can’t tell them apart; annoying Pucks. And just what in hell is a director supposed to do with…

Westword welcomes its seventh class of MasterMinds

Seven years ago, Westword added a very special component to Artopia: the MasterMind awards. Recognizing that the local arts scene needed a little fertilizer to really get going, and growing, we created a program that every year honors five cultural visionaries — artists and organizations alike — working to change…

MasterMinds: Slam Nuba, Denver poets

When Slam Nuba was started four years ago by a small group of Denver poets fresh off a win at the Poetry Slam nationals with the team from the Mercury Cafe, there was some concern that the upstart group would cause some friction. The Merc was the established anchor of…

MasterMind: Sarah Slater, founder, Titwrench

The Titwrench music festival — built from the ground up three years ago as a way to highlight women in music and give a stage to “folks who don’t necessarily fit comfortably into any scene,” says founder Sarah Slater — is almost the definition of DIY: a grassroots, community-run project…

MasterMind: Tricia Hoke, clothing designer

Tricia Hoke does so much more than design clothes — but she does even that with an intense artistic flair. An excellent illustrator who teaches classes on the fine art of fashion sketching, Hoke creates clothing from the most cozy material on earth — sweatshirt — but the pieces magically…

MasterMind: Illiterate/Adam Gildar

I was probably one of your top-five worst interns,” confesses Adam Gildar. And he could be right, which means there’s absolutely no favoritism involved in this MasterMind award. “I was obsessed with Illiterate at the time and trying to put out another issue.” This was back when Gildar was a…

MasterMind: Tiffiny Wine, swing dance instructor

Tiffiny Wine knows how to swing — in the healthiest understanding of the term. “Dancing is a really, really important thing for people on a very human level,” she says. “We are all supposed to dance. I am of the belief that we all have some very mysterious but innate…

Photos: Artopia pre-party at Bar Standard, 2/11/11

Friday night marked the second of three pre-parties Westword is hosting in advance of Artopia, which goes down February 19 at five venues in the Golden Triangle neighborhood. (All the Artopia details, including available tickets are here: Artopia Denver.) Friday night’s party was at Bar Standard, 1037 Broadway. The next…

Mixed Taste on Ice kicks off at MCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s wildly popular Mixed Taste series kicked off its first ever Winter series on Friday. For the uninitiated: MCA Denver invites two speakers on unrelated subjects to lecture for twenty minutes separately and then answer audience questions jointly. This week’s juxtaposition was Adrian Miller on Chicken…

Colorado’s top skiers and snowboarders rock Winter Dew Tour in Utah

Breckenridge Ski Resort is getting a good return on investment from its Breck Freeride Team and its stepped-up park & pipe programs: Yesterday, Breckenridge snowboarders Eric Willett and Janna Meyen-Weatherby won the Men’s and Women’s Snowboard Slopestyle contests (respectively) at Snowbasin in Ogden, Utah, the final stop of the Winter…

Photos: Colorado Home and Garden Show

Part ocean-themed flower garden, part home accessory extravaganza and all Colorado, The Home and Garden Show opened this weekend at the convention center, beginning its annual nine-day run. Showcasing energy-saving windows, indoor waterfalls, chimineas and geothermal heating options, the expo helped connect over 600 vendors and contractors with do-it-yourselfers and…

Unsettling love: Mourning and human hair at Four Mile Historic Park

Love makes people do bizarre things. The acts we have come to recognize as the signposts of romance at its most fervent are nearly identical to the symptoms of mental illness: the racing thoughts, the gloriously inflated self-esteem, the nonsensical spending (compressed rock on a ring, anyone?), the promiscuity, the…

Tonight: Shel Silverstein gets “adult”

Though he’s almost universally known for his children’s books — the lineup of which included one of the best children’s books of all time — Shel Silverstein was, in the truest sense of the term, a renaissance man. Aside from his poetry, he was a prolific songwriter (you know Johnny…