Untitled, oh, how we’ve missed you. When the Denver Art Museum put you to bed for the winter, a spark went out of our lives. Though we continued to visit the DAM, it just wasn’t the same as viewing art during one of those accessible, wacky final-Friday happenings that were…
Every fall for dozens of years, the City of Boulder has planted 15,000 tulip bulbs that begin to peep their heads above the ground each spring, heralding the end of winter. And since 2002, downtown Boulder has hosted Tulip Time, a celebration of the blooms that culminates each year in…
From the start, the totally temporary Denver Community Museum has been a one-woman operation, and nobody knows it better the woman herself. Jaime Kopke invented, opened and mostly financed the venue herself, easily devoting 25 to 30 hours a week to the museum, which she ran on a shoestring, without…
Denver art takes off As devil horse inspires us to write Mile Haiku The first time Rachel Hultin saw “Mustang,” Luis Jiménez’s gigantic blue horse sculpture outside Denver International Airport, she nearly drove off the road. “I was shocked, jarred,” says Hultin, a real-estate broker and developer. And when the…
It’s getting hard these days to tell one cirque from another, but the French Canadian circus Cirque Éloize has a pedigree that’s taken it all the way to Broadway. It all points back to a lasting partnership with acrobatic troupe Teatro Sunil and its founder, Daniele Finzi Pasca, a multi-talented…
Art history is full of compelling side trips, including the story of the complex relationship between transitional painter Edouard Manet and impressionist Berthe Morisot, a unique friendship not unlike that of their contemporaries Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Manet was both friend and mentor to Morisot, and, after she married…
Actress and singer Lotte Lenya has long been an object of fascination for physical theater artist Sondra Blanchard, whose mentor lent her a biography of Lenya ten years ago. But it wasn’t until the talented graduate of Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre moved to Boulder to complete her MFA…
When photographer Tom Parsons began conceptualizing portraits to shoot of his friends and family, he decided to play with gravity: He placed large frames on the floor, mounted his camera twelve to fifteen feet above the frames and posed his subjects within them. “By having someone lay on the floor…
It has been said that music is the universal language. It goes beyond borders, and there’s been quite a lot of cross-pollination of cultures within genres over the years. Take young local saxophonist Aakash Mittal, for example. On his debut album, Possible Beginnings, Mittal tapped into jazz’s history as well…
The men of Spinal Tap — Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — have been walking the fine line between clever and stupid for 25 years. Now, in the finest tradition of KISS without makeup and countless MTV Unplugged appearances by hair-metal bands, the trio is mounting a thirty-city…
Ivar and Karen Zeile hail from Salt Lake City, but in 2001 they opened a gallery in Denver that was originally called Cordell Taylor and is now known as Plus. Despite leaving Utah behind, the Zeiles have maintained relationships with many of the artists from their old home town. One…
Strangely enough, throughout McCoy Tyner’s storied career, which spans more than five decades, the jazz pianist has rarely performed with a guitar player — something he more than makes up for on Guitars, his fittingly titled recent effort. The outstanding disc, which features lauded fretmen Bill Frisell, John Scofield (see…
There couldn’t be a better way to celebrate spring than by attending Opera Colorado’s perfectly timed Così fan tutte — roughly translated, “women are like that” — an opera that shows Mozart at his most playful and lighthearted while retaining all the deep beauty of his melodies. The story is…
The end of the Lab, as we know it, is nigh. And nothing could make that more apparent than a garage sale, where, yes, everything must go! But count on Adam Lerner to take his little Lakewood contemporary art museum out with a bang, before proceeding to restructure and merge…
I’ve long felt that Judith Cohn was one of the top ceramic artists in the region. Her specialty has been sculptural installations made up of components based on classic ceramic forms, mostly vessels. That’s why Thicket, at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200, www.sparkgallery.com) was a surprise. It comprises…
Collective Nouns. Metropolitan State College isn’t just one of the city’s major institutions of higher learning; it’s also the state’s largest art school. The most obvious evidence of this is the college’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo, a mini-museum. A more subtle indication of the importance of art at…
Eurydice. Playwright Sarah Ruhl has created her own magical, eccentric, gutsy and entirely original interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, one in which the Lord of the Underworld is a comic-fearful shape-changer, ruling over a place populated by people of stone; Eurydice’s father, already dead, longs for her from the Underworld…
The inaugural Scandinavian Film Festival is a modest affair in terms of numbers — just four films, only one of which is feature length. But it makes up in freshness what it lacks in width and breadth. The centerpiece flick, You, the Living (pictured), from director Roy Andersson, was described…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonelyheart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’s sweaty,…
It isn’t strange that in 1942 a major American playwright would be concerned with the possible extinction of humanity and pondering what it would take to save the human race, but it is odd that Thornton Wilder chose to do all of this in a comedy. Luckily, The Skin of…
Sunsets and Margaritas is so energetic, jolly and good-natured, and presents such an appealing political and familial viewpoint, that it seems coldhearted not to like it, like kicking away a friendly puppy as it darts at your feet. But there are too many unfunny jokes and plot turns in this…
