Catherine Breillat hitches her wagon to the hottest of European stars, Asia Argento, in a highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s mid-nineteenth-century novel Une vieille maîtresse — once notorious for its treatment of a young libertine’s erotic obsession with a homely 36-year-old woman. Set on the cusp…
I couldn’t help worrying when I heard that End Days, the new play being mounted by Curious Theatre Company, featured Stephen Hawking, Jesus Christ, a goth girl and a teenage boy who dresses as Elvis — not to mention 9/11. Such a semi-hip assemblage seemed to signify a young playwright…
The king in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine…
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Director Gavin Cameron-Webb has set this production in a summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917, just before America’s entrance into the First World War. The proceedings open with a long mime sequence, showing the flirtatious Jaquenetta being courted by her two swains — the absurd…
Cydney Payton, outgoing director and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver (1485 Delgany Street, 303-298-7554, www.mcadenver.org) has been something of a one-woman show, overseeing just about every aspect of the place (see column, page 43) for years. And in addition to all of her other duties, she lines up…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
In the acoustic-music realm, über-mandolinist Chris Thile needs no introduction, but some of his Punch Brothers bandmates, regrettably, might. Guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Greg Garrison, banjo player Noam Pikelny and violinist Gabe Witcher, who join the erstwhile Nickel Creeker in the musically adventurous sideshow (which includes their masterwork, The Blind…
The feature film Where God Left His Shoes deals with an issue many people don’t like to think about: family homelessness. “It really helps people understand what it’s like to be homeless when you’re a family,” notes Dana Smith of United Way. “And I think the really different thing about…
With the dog days of summer upon us, it’s tempting to strip down to your skivvies and sit at home sipping a cool drink with the A/C cranked up to full blast. Venturing out can require a lot of careful planning if you want to look and feel good, but…
Explore the sounds of Eastern Europe filtered through a contemporary lens tonight when the Swallow Hill Music Association brings the sounds of Luminescent Orchestrii, Los Lantzmun and Fishtank Ensemble to Denver. These groups represent three distinctive, vibrant takes on traditional folk music of the Balkans and beyond — traditional Gypsy…
The lineup for the musical act Tijuana Sweetcakes reads like a who’s who of Denver’s cabaret scene: Kim Franco on vocals, piano and percussion; Dario Rosa on vocals and guitar; Jon Gray on vocals, piano and trumpet; Paul Mrozak on vocals and bass; Zack Littlefield on drums; and Jefferson Arca…
For Colin Shattuck, it all started with ska music. The founder of Sportique Scooters had always loved the rude-boy lifestyle, and when he grew up, he wrote the book on it: Red Eyes, Whitewalls, and Blue Smoke: The Story of Scooters in America. Shattuck is also one of the grand…
I love beer. Ales, stouts, pilsners, lambics — I love them all. In the summer heat, my love affair with beer evolves into something like a full-blown obsession. Lucky for me, I live in Colorado, where a great many folks share that obsession, so I get to go to lots…
Eddie Izzard’s heady and manic standup routines ramble like some Ritalin-popping offspring of a transvestite and my favorite Baileys-and-coffee-swilling professor. “Someone’s killed 100,000 people,” said Izzard in Dressed to Kill. “We’re almost going, ‘Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can’t…
“Nathan’s has its contest on the Fourth of July,” notes Steve Ballas of Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs. “They have official competitors eating 65 hot dogs, and they’ve been doing it for 35 years. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have an event here in Denver that can grow into…
Italy has always enchanted me. I was twenty when I first floated through the canals of Venice at dusk, and the magic of the twinkling Rialto bridge was enough to draw me back to the country to study the language and cooking when I was 22. I lived in an…
I think the world is going to shit. And not in that new-age, Nostradamus, Mayan-calendar doomsday-silliness sense — in the we fucked-ourselves-and-we’re-not-doing-anything-about-it sense. What pisses me off the most is that we had to sit back and watch eight years of a belligerent administration that hasn’t bothered to hide its…
How Gregorio Alcaro and Trinidad “Trini” Gonzalez — cousins whose family members started the Casa Mayan restaurant in Auraria in the 1930s and maintained it into the 1970s — managed to find a way to link their enduring family history to the approaching Democratic National Convention is a story almost…
Mike Judge is a deeper guy than you might have thought. That’s the only way to explain why The Animation Show 4, the latest in a series of independent animation anthologies the Beavis and Butt-head auteur curates by his lonesome, is so unexpectedly sophisticated, showing off an international flavor and…
When veteran groups release albums long after their commercial prime, they’re routinely described as new. But this last word usually belongs in quotes — a point proven by Saints of Los Angeles, the most recent platter by Mötley Crüe, joined at Fiddler’s by Buckcherry, Papa Roach, SIXX:AM (Nikki Sixx’s other…
For those who pine for the days of their carefree youth but don’t want to sacrifice their booze, New Belgium Brewing Company is offering a happy compromise: the Urban Assault Ride, a scavenger hunt on bikes followed by a beer-centric after-party. Our fair city — one of eight chosen to…
The British sometimes call cupcakes “fairy cakes.” Maybe that touch of magic explains the recent cupcake renaissance — which you’ll have noticed unless you’ve been hiding your head in the sand for the past two years or so. The term “cupcake” actually began in the nineteenth century, when cupcakes weren’t…
