Gilbert and Sullivan are corny, I know, but as a child I was sung to sleep with songs from their operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. My family owned a songbook and a recording by the D’Oyly Carte opera company, and at a tender age I learned all about the romantic (and not)…
Nancy Norton has been out of the local stand-up circle for about two years. Once a regular act at Comedy Works and a national touring comedian, the Boulder-based riot-raiser left the scene to focus on adopting a boy from Nepal. She returns to the stage tonight at the Oriental Theater,…
Last year, Team Highland Pacific won the Denver Jax Fish House’s annual Oyster Eating Contest. “The four of them ate 116 oysters,” says Jax’s Bryce Clark. And Boulder’s individual winner scarfed down 95 all by himself. In fact, all this month, Jax is all about eating ridiculous numbers of oysters…
Ah, Vail. What did that chip-toothed pundit Lloyd Christmas say about the mountain town? “A place where the beer flows like wine, where the women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.” Oh, wait, that was Aspen. But ever since the Vail Film Festival began in 2004, Christmas’s description has…
We think Westword’s own Jay Vollmar is pretty slick: Our hardworking art director has a keen eye for what’s visceral and street, especially when it comes to his own fly images, made famous through the years on local concert posters and Westword covers alike. And now it’s Vollmar’s time to…
You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness,…
We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations, we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions — that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God most of us will never…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
Balletomanes are bound to adore Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s lavish documentary Ballets Russes (2005), which recalls the glory days of that legendary emigré dance troupe through rare footage of its opulent performances and interviews drawn from a 2000 reunion of its surviving stars, most of them in their eighties…
For its current exhibition, Robischon Gallery stitched together three solos and a duet to make something that looks a museum theme show. The shared subject is the Western landscape as translated by contemporary painters and photographers living and working in Colorado. The first up is Don Stinson: Shared Sky/Natural Forces,…
Many contemporary artists are still interested in providing a window on the world through their art. Some, like those currently showing at Robischon Gallery, look to nature, while others, such as Frank Sampson at Sandy Carson Gallery, are interested in their own unique fantasies (see review). Yet another group riffs…
Building Outside the Box. With the Denver Art Museum’s outlandish Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind taking shape at West 13th Avenue and Acoma Plaza, there’s a lot going on outside the place. Inside the gorgeous Gio Ponti tower, it’s a different story. Up until the opening of the Hamilton next…
Watching television with Isabelle, my crinkly-haired, adventurous, lemon-curd-loving Belgian anthropologist friend, was always a hoot. I’d explain to her the inexorable rules of U.S. television drama: No, House hasn’t arrived at the correct diagnosis because it’s 8:30 p.m., and that only happens at seven minutes to 9. She delighted in…
Although Man of La Mancha first opened in New York in 1965, I’d somehow managed to go all these years without seeing it. I had heard the songs, of course — who hasn’t? — but I thought of the musical as soggy and dated and had no intention of attending…
The Last Five Years. A bittersweet account of the breakup of a five-year marriage, a specifically New York love story, The Last Five Years is told with the kind of warm, neurotic, clever-rueful Jewish humor we expect from such stories. Catherine is a young actress looking for her big break;…
Somewhere between the time DJ Kool Herc got the party started in the 1970s and LL Cool J’s star turn on MTV Unplugged in 1991, hip-hop went mainstream. First it conquered the ‘burbs. Then it went global. Before long, kids in Tokyo were rapping. Along the way, hip-hop also muscled…
Wonder Showzen: Season One (MTV) On the surface, the way this MTV2 puppetfest explores adult concepts through a kiddie-show format seems fresh as a Nantucket limerick. But Wonder Showzen’s execution is so bold and frankly hilarious that it feels wholly new. Whether it’s exploring diversity with a forbidden homosexual love…
The Andy Milonakis Show: The Complete First Season (MTV) Another Public Enemy (Tartan) A Boy Named Charlie Brown (Paramount) Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (Sony) Doctor Who: The Beginning Collection (BBC Warner) Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (Mondo Macabre) Godzilla: The Series (Sony) Hot Wheels (Warner Bros.) I Love Your…
The Adventures of Brer Rabbit (Universal) Batman Beyond: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) The Billy Wilder DVD Collection (Paramount) Bukowski: Born Into This (Magnolia) The Busby Berkeley Collection (Warner Bros.) Capote (Sony) Chicken Little (Buena Vista) Crackheads Gone Wild (Xtreme Films) Dear Wendy (Fox Lorber) Derailed (Weinstein Co.) Dreamer:…
Every year, the foothills town of Lyons hosts a Whitewater Festival with races, water rodeos, food, games, beer and more. To enhance both the festival and the town’s reputation as a recreational destination, residents are raising money for construction of a world-class whitewater feature called the “October Hole.” The addition…
Summertime music festivals in Telluride are a staple of any well-rounded aural diet. But when the leaves turn and the snow starts falling, the ski town sometimes waits months for world-renowned artists to return with their rump-shakin’ tunes. Well, winter used to look musically bleak for Telluride, but things have…
Some historians believe that belly dancing’s isolated hip movements were used to strengthen the muscles needed for childbirth. These days, though, most women (and their male fans) get into belly dancing because it’s dead sexy. But Miles Copeland had music in mind when he created the Bellydance Superstars, a top-of-the-line…
