For last year’s inaugural Great American Sing-Along, Tom Riis and the American Music Research Center crew ran off 100 programs, confident they’d be recycling more than a few of them. Then 400 people showed up. “We were blown away,” says Riis, director of the AMRC. “People were walking out really…
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, in all its interminable, rambling brilliance, inspired — even defined — a generation of teens and twenty-somethings suffocating under the tyrannical stronghold of nuclear families and spirit-stifling routine. But baby boomers weren’t the only ones who clocked out of structured, civilized life one day and…
Any buckin’-bronc fanatics worth their salt know that the Fourth of July holiday is the biggest and best time of the year for rodeo. And there’s a darn good reason that the roughest, toughest names are all appearing at the Greeley Stampede. “This is our 85th annual Stampede,” explains marketing…
Kim Franco thinks big. Or, as it turns out, bigger than she thought: In the eight months that the former Cabaret Diosa songstress Franco and her Company Ink creative compadres spent shaping their new musical comedy, Ciao Eden!, the two-hour biblical-burlesque romp has taken on a life of its own…
Featuring food and produce vendors from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., works by local artists from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. and the Hot Sounds concert series at 5 p.m…
The story goes like this: When reporters in New York asked Molly Brown to what she attributed surviving the Titanic disaster, she replied, “Typical Brown luck. We’re unsinkable.” And while Molly Brown will always be remembered best for her unsinkability, her life story goes far beyond that ill-fated voyage. This…
We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to. It’s tricky, but it works.” So declares Michael Moore in the midst of his new documentary, Sicko. Moore could be riffing on the war in Iraq, to name only our most recent intervention, but he’s actually referring to U.S…
Still an all-American bloodhound after all these years, Bruce Willis’s Detective John McClane begins Live Free or Die Hard by sniffing around a Rutgers-Camden parking lot and busting the frat boy trying to cop a feel off his daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Oh, Dad! Since much of the ol’…
Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick flick, Lajos Koltai’s Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot’s beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrest meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts,…
Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” So goes the personal mantra of the late celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau, whose disembodied spirit materializes — Jiminy Cricket-style — to guide the rodent hero of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille toward his goal of gastronomic excellence. He also seems to be…
It takes Bruce Willis a while to get warmed up. He’s always just a bit below room temperature — a cool brother, dig, dating back to his Moonlighting days as a private dick belting out “Tighten Up” while going undercover as a man of the cloth in Wayfarer shades. He’s…
Dinner theater is an odd phenomenon. Emerging pretty much from nowhere in the early 1960s, the genre flourished through the ’70s, when it often employed television stars, and began fading in the next decade. Dinner theaters tend to be associated with steam-table food and bland, smiley-faced productions; they draw a…
People used to talk about Cirque du Soleil as if the company’s productions were somehow transformative, as if taking in the brilliant spectacles, pondering the ambiguous plots and thrilling to the performers’ beautiful and impossible feats would somehow bring clarity and enlightenment to their own lives. As Cirque grew into…
Every Secret Thing. Judy GeBauer’s Every Secret Thing deals with the effect of McCarthyism on a group of high-school teachers, and it couldn’t have premiered at a more fitting time. The play is based on GeBauer’s memories of a civics teacher in her high school who was called before HUAC…
It’s hard not to notice all the public sculpture that’s come on line in the past few years. As I drive around, it seems like I’m always spotting something new. That’s what happened when I found myself out in Lakewood the other day. I was looking for an important mid-century…
Some very sad and shocking news came out of Boulder last week: Noted Colorado artist Jim Colbert was found dead in his Boulder home, an apparent suicide. Colbert, a contemporary realist painter with a political bent, had exhibited widely throughout the state since first coming to Colorado thirty years ago…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Black Snake Moan (Paramount) The best place to see Craig Brewer’s mash-up of blood-boiling exploitation elements would be a Mississippi drive-in circa 1972. His tale of a black bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) who chains up a seething, scantily clad cracker nympho (Christina Ricci) would’ve had the lot under martial law…
Everyone’s got a different sense of what makes a killer party. For kids, maybe it’s whacking a piñata and overdosing on cake. For adults, it could be sticking a beer bong down your gullet and declaring yourself Mayor of Schlitz City. But since 1999, the Mario Party series has served…
The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3: The Complete Series (Shout!) Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Anchor Bay) Dead Silence (Universal) Echo & the Bunnymen: Dancing Horses (MVD) Film School (Docurama) Frankenstein Conquers the World (Tokyo Shock) Going Under: Unrated Version (Blue Underground) High School Musical: The…
Emily Francis is turning 27, and she wants everyone to know it. The road perma-buddy — she’s a career tour manager, working for acts like Planes Mistaken for Stars and These Arms Are Snakes — celebrates getting older today with a big-ass birthday fiesta at 3 Kings Tavern, complete with…
I’m from Detroit. Not a whole lot gets by us, but after my latest discovery, I feel a bit daunted. Because even after living in that incredible music city all those years, I was stunned when I first set foot in my new favorite record shop, Twist & Shout, at…
