When Violet Weston’s husband walks off into the summer night, her three adult daughters and their families decide to return home to Oklahoma to comfort their wounded, vindictive mother. This is the premise of August: Osage County, a dark comedy that has won both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony…
Starting at Skyline Park and continuing through five checkpoints, the Urban Assault Ride is part bike race, part scavenger hunt and part elementary-school field day rolled into one healthy, fun-filled event. However, unlike your traditional bike race, all the checkpoints are available beforehand, allowing each team to plot its own…
Inside Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen, Westword food critic Jason Sheehan gets to talk about his favorite two things: food and himself. “They’re stories that I’ve never gotten a chance to tell in my seven years of writing almost exclusively about myself…
When Kirsten Wilson took on the task of molding a multimedia performance around the theme of Boulder’s Sesquicentennial celebration, she clearly chose the hard road, partly by studying the town’s formation in terms of its iniquities. The resulting work, Rocks Karma Arrows, strays in and out of Boulder’s 150-year past,…
Denver’s well-run Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, now in its ninth year, is still growing, and that’s good for us and all the thousands of people who flock there each year to taste the quality ethnic food, shop the vendor booths, take in the cultural performances and demonstrations and root for…
There are a lot of bonuses to summertime outdoor movies: the stars twinkling overhead, the soft grass underneath, the atmosphere of magic. Of course, that atmosphere is shattered every time a driver honks a car horn. And then there are the flies committing suicide in your beer and the sweltering…
Dancing has always been an integral part of the human experience, from tribal rituals thousands of years ago to the moonwalk — a gift given to us from the recently departed Michael Jackson — which defined dance for an entire generation. And when it comes to moving to the beat,…
Open your ears for a tasty midsummer double-up tonight at Swallow Hill Music Hall: Slaid Cleaves, an Americana keeper currently touring to promote Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, will offer up a platter of songs from the new Gurf Morlix-produced album on the homegrown DIY label Music Road…
Cherry Creek High School grad Matt Iseman has covered as lot of ground since leaving the Creek behind for Princeton, then med school at Columbia and a residency back home at CU. That’s when he pulled the old switcheroo and quit doctoring altogether to stand up and tell jokes in…
Group shows that include several artists in a gallery’s stable of talent are summertime standards in the art world. It’s easy for gallery directors to simply pull stuff out of the racks in the back room during the downtime of the dog days. But that doesn’t mean these exhibits aren’t…
In 1991, Russell Bay McKlayer — then known simply as Russell Bay, since he hadn’t yet added the made up “McKlayer” part — came together with Ken Petersen and Mark Brasuell to launch the Edge Gallery co-op, and he put on a solo exhibit there every year until he died…
The astronaut drama Countdown is a curio from both a historical and filmic standpoint. The movie, co-starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, both pre-Godfather, arrived in 1968, a year before the initial moon landing, but at a point when it was clear the United States was on the verge of…
For anyone who was around to witness the Apollo 11 lunar landing forty years ago on this date, the moment was unforgettable – a physical and visual embodiment of the nation’s collective desire to, well, fly to the moon. And the whole Neil Armstrong “giant step for mankind” sensibility was,…
The folks at CultureHaus, the Denver Art Museum’s social and educational group for a younger adult demographic, are always looking for a new way to raise money or have a good time, and the resulting parties never fail to raise the bar on hip entertainment. So expect their latest tony…
It’s back to basics this year at the annual Taste of the Nation benefit for Share Our Strength: thirty presenting restaurants, a compendium of sips from Colorado breweries and wineries from across the nation, a silent auction and some live entertainment. There’ll be no stuffy sit-down dinner, either; instead, you’ll…
“I’m not so interested in giving answers as I am in posing questions,” says writer/actor Evan Brenner about his one-man play The Buddha — In His Own Words. “The Sutras were originally an oral tradition, and I’m interested in the process of making these scriptures oral again.” In this ninety-minute…
Are you looking for love in all the wrong places? The Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life is here to help, with The Overdue Love Club, described as “a singles’ night for intelligent people.” And unlike some other singles’ nights, this one comes with a host perfect for breaking the…
There’s a surprise waiting at the sixth annual Latino Rhythms concert at Lincoln Park today. To catch a glimpse, stroll over to the La Alma Recreation Center at 11th Avenue and Mariposa Street for OFF the WALL — Urban Art Festival, a youth art competition designed to encourage kids to…
Today, video-game competitions are serious business, with tens of thousands of dollars in prize money at stake, sponsorship deals and all the other trappings of a big-league sport. But there was a time when video game competitions were much simpler – and probably a lot more fun, too. If you…
With six galleries, there’s always something eye-catching and thought-provoking at MCA Denver, and tonight the museum will unveil two exhibits at the same time. On the first floor, in the Photography Gallery, is Kevin O’Connell, a show curated by former MCA staffer John Grant. O’Connell is a well-known Colorado photographer…
Herb and Dorothy Vogel are not typical art collectors. They began quietly, buying works here and there in the early 1960s, when nobody was paying attention to the minimalist and conceptual artists littering the landscape. To continue growing their collection, they decided to live on Dorothy’s librarian salary alone and…
In the right hands, the Charles Busch formula – camp up a film niche, turn it into a simultaneous homage and parody, then throw in a guy in drag – is fail-safe funny for anyone already enamored with pop culture. Such is the case with a new production of Die…
