Arts & Culture

Lonnie Hanzon, Wizard in Residence at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, will be making magic again at Hudson Holiday, the annual festival that MOA sponsors at Hudson Gardens. Spread throughout the grounds, this is a light show for the ages: lavish and excessive, psychedelic, funny as hell, beautiful, whimsical and…

Amid the relentless commercial onslaught of the holiday season, it can be hard to find a middle ground between advertiser-approved sentimental treacle and sneering hipster cynicism. And while the Bovine Metropolis Theater holiday production Real Housewives of the North Pole would seem to lean toward the latter, director Eric Farone…

“Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…well, okay, maybe a rat,” says Nancy Smith, founder and artistic director of Boulder’s aerial dance troupe Frequent Flyers Productions. “In our version of The Nutcracker, the Rat King wins and Clara goes flying through Rat World. Instead of interacting with the…

The holidays can be a downright stressful, terrible time of year for some people — and the best remedy for that might very well be some filthy humor. That’s the theory, anyway, behind Chuck Roy & His Naughty Little Elves, a holiday extravaganza set to make you re-think the very…

The Hyatt Regency Denver, 650 15th Street, will roll out the red carpet — and the priority sleigh parking at the hotel’s porte cochere entrance — when three very important visitors touch down from 1 to 5 p.m. today (and again tomorrow and Sunday). And this is no humans-in-mammal-costumes affair:…

KushCon II will turn the Colorado Convention Center into the largest head shop in the country this weekend, with more than 340,000 square feet of bongs, grow-light setups and girls in bikinis hawking dispensary fliers. The only thing missing will be actual kush. This is the second Kush Convention in…

They just don’t make ’em like they used to — and thanks to Scrooged, Bill Murray’s paradigm-defining 1988 reinterpretation of A Christmas Carol, they’re making them better than they otherwise might. You don’t have to look far to see the influence of Scrooged on current, big-budget comedy fare; from the…

Pat Milbery longed to ride with the professional snowboarders he looked up to when he was a kid in Minnesota — but they all made tracks for the Rocky Mountains the first chance they got and never looked back. So after Milbery turned pro and moved to Colorado himself, he…

During the holidays, “we spend so much time thinking and talking about Mary and the baby Jesus,” says artist Heather Doyle-Maier. “But Joseph only gets mentioned a little.” Doyle-Maier has changed that with Considering Joseph: Fathers After Feminism, the show she curated for Edge Gallery that includes both abstract and…

Many religions have significant celebrations this month. December 21, which is the first day of winter and the longest night of the year, is also known as Yule or Solstice to those who worship nature — but there’s no need to wait until next week to mark the date, since…

It’s hard to think of a more politically apt metaphor for immigration than the story of the birth of Christ: Mary and Joseph, away from their homeland, suffer rejection after rejection as they look for a place to give birth to their son, the savior of all humanity. Interestingly, the…

For Colorado authors Jesse Bullington and Stephen Graham Jones, no season — much less the holidays — is exempt from horror, weirdness, blasphemy or a little twisted humor. And so the two will read from their work tonight, head-to-head, in an event dubbed a Book-Signing Grudge Match to the Death…

If you follow Talking Shop on Westword’s Show and Tell blog, you already know about the 24 Days of Christmas at Talulah Jones, the well-grounded, half-children’s, half-girly boutique at 1122 East 17th Avenue, where Robin Lohre has been hosting trunk shows featuring local artisans every single night since December 1…

“With every passing year, we grow more and more mad,” says Reyna Von Vett, whose alter-ego, Cora Vette, emcees BurlyCute burlesque shows. “We keep trying to top ourselves.” Which means that this year’s Naughty Noel show is not to be missed, because 2009’s edition was pee-your-pants hilarious. “We have different…

The members of the saucy, all-female acoustic trio Gristle Gals usually refer to their music — a blending of gypsy jazz, Americana and rock — as “gypsy grass.” But soon you can change that to “steamphunk,” which describes music that’s modern and edgy, but with an old-timey feel. That’s because…

Danse Etoile is not your average ballet company. As proof, consider this year’s holiday production, a double feature of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The pairing might seem odd, but as Marie-Jose Payannet, the company director, points out, “It’s very new and very…

You suck at wrapping presents. It happens every year: You pick out that perfect gift and take it home with every intention of doing it up all nicely with fancy bows and nice crisp edges, but somehow it gets out of control. The tape sticks to your fingers. The paper…

It’s 2010. We demand a solution to our seasonal movie needs that doesn’t require leaving the house. Netflix Instant Streaming is our usual go-to in these sorts of occasions, but holy crap, have they dropped the ball on this one. There is no convenient way to browse what’s out there,…