Topdog/Underdog features two brothers in a dingy, inner-city room. Lincoln and Booth — their names were given to them by their feckless father as a joke — tell tall tales, spar and play tricks on each other. For a while their bickering seems lighthearted and affectionate. Lincoln, an expert at…
Summer Lovin’, at Heritage Square Music Hall, is a string of songs held together with a thin thread of plot. A traveling troupe arrives at an old theater planning to stage a play, only to discover that the place is closed while the theater board contemplates converting it into an…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
DC Comics has kept its superheroes locked in a fortress of solitude for almost a decade, forcing the likes of Superman and Batman to warm the bench while longtime rival Marvel Comics’ Spider-man, the Hulk, the X-Men and Blade galloped up and down the playing field. Not counting Catwoman, which…
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn’t rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching…
Michael Wranovics’s well-meant documentary Up for Grabs, about the absurd legal battle over the ownership of the baseball Barry Bonds hit for his season-record 73rd home run back in 2001, is instantly overshadowed by other events: the steroids scandal, the allegations of Bonds’s apparent mistress, the possibility that his career…
Ah, Father’s Day, when all patriarchs become Clark Griswold on vacation and all filial conversations become sentimental diatribes: “Enjoy this, kids. Someday when you have families of your own, you’ll wish you had several hours together in the back of a cop car like this, just to sit and talk.”…
Thursday, June 16 Nobody can say for sure where the Food Network’s hit program Iron Chef is filmed. Conventional wisdom suggests that the show is put together in studios in Los Angeles or New York, but it’s possible that it’s actually filmed in Japan, with chefs flown in from all…
Lisa Olken has never eaten menudo. She’s a guera (“white girl”) who doesn’t speak Spanish and has never been south of the border. The traditions involved in quinceañeras and Mexican weddings and funerals are foreign to her. But that didn’t stop her from producing, directing, writing and editing La Raza…
THURS, 6/16 Remember Rumpelstiltskin, that funny little fairy-tale guy who taught the miller’s daughter to spin gold from straw? Well, Rumpel’s not the only one with those powers. Dumpster-diving sisters Kathleen Hackett and Mary Ann Young didn’t get an assist from a tiny man, but they did have a remarkable…
THURS, 6/16 I am not a Sporty Spice. I don’t voluntarily play, attend or view any sporting event unless coerced by friends or a date, and not without the promise of a generous supply of alcohol. When I hear the word “golf,” my first thought is usually of windmills and…
SAT, 6/18 For most kids, summer isn’t over until their bucket of sidewalk chalk is reduced to unusable nubs. You might think you’ve outgrown the pleasure of creating powdery masterpieces on cement, but the third annual KeyBank La Piazza dell’Arte on Larimer Square will prove you wrong. “It’s all about…
FRI, 6/17 Arcos Azules Theatre company is confronting the same publicity dilemma faced by other troupes that have staged Shopping and Fucking, Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play. Posters make generous use of asterisks to lessen the initial shock value of the title of this adults-only work. But the play itself pulls…
I think it’s easy to comprehend why artists have been so taken with the ethos of abstract expressionism. As the late philosopher king Andy Warhol once noted, it’s easier to be sloppy than it is to be neat. Well, that explains abstract expressionism’s appeal to painters, but not why it’s…
The other day, Jim Peterson, who runs DEN Gallery (757 1/2 Santa Fe Drive, 303-507-6100), called to me from across the street. Ordinarily, this would annoy me. But if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known that DEN was open, because the chief access to it is through Space Gallery, which…
Amish Quilts. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the women in Amish colonies in the East and Midwest produced quilts as utilitarian and ceremonial articles. They eschewed printed fabrics and used only solid-colored ones, especially in darker shades, to carry out their bold compositions made up of simple geometric…
This is one of those reviews that finds me struggling as I sit at the computer: Imagine the classic movie scene in which the protagonist has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering persuasively into an ear. Or think of this as a battle…
The set is spare and symmetrical, an apartment dominated by a bank of gray-lit windows and furnishings in varying shades of black and gray. This is downtown New York, ash-covered in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. We hear the sound of a plane engine getting louder and louder, newscasters’…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg — and the dictates of the summer-movie marketplace — the battling Smiths of the title…
Before there was School of Rock, the 2003 movie in which Jack Black awakened a class of subdued elementary-school kids with lessons in America’s loudest subject, there was rock school. Students of the Paul Green School of Rock Music in Philadelphia have been worshiping at rock’s altar — and learning…
Although they’re exceptional, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late 1970s and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant Stateside release. There is…
