Dots, Blobs and Angels. Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting an enormous solo that is dedicated to the late David Rigsby, an artist who played a big part in the local art scene in the ’70s and ’80s. The exhibit was organized by director Cydney Payton, who installed it…
I’d like to write one of those judicious “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” reviews of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Antony and Cleopatra. I’d like to draw attention to sparks of life and ingenuity, fine moments in the major performances and interpretations of the smaller roles…
Cabaret. Cabaret is grim and distressing, and there’s not a hint of redemption anywhere in it. Quite the contrary. But this is a bloody good production, the kind of production that could — and should — attract all kinds of people who might never think of setting foot in a…
Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It’s a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of…
Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s biopic De-Lovely. “It’s a musical –…
Long before he made masterpieces like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers, Sean Aloysius O’Feeney — better known to us as John Ford — directed a silent movie called The Iron Horse (1924). It’s an archetypal early Western, in which a man seeking revenge for his father’s murder…
Mayor John Hickenlooper will really speak up for the arts on Thursday, July 22, when he narrates Peter and the Wolf. The presentation kicks off the fifteenth season of Theater in the Park. The series of free outdoor performances will be staged this summer at the newly remodeled Greek amphitheater…
Thursday, July 22 It’s a night to trip the light fantastic in City Park, where free poetry and art will intersect gracefully in the evening hours. First, it’s the Robert Burns Statue Centennial Celebration, hosted by the Colorado Center for the Book in celebration of the Scottish poet, whose bronze…
A book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band has the sound of a great gag gift — and if someone purchases it for that reason, freelancer Steve Knopper, who co-authored the tome with music-biz veteran Mark Bliesener, won’t complain. “Hey, as long as their credit cards work,…
What do ‘zines, pirate radio and hacking all have in common? For one thing, they all have subversive underpinnings, and for another, the folks who are into such things tend to like trading information: in cyberspace, by snail mail and under the table, in print and blogs. So when you…
SAT, 7/24 After Beavis and Butthead triumphantly save the world at the conclusion of Beavis and Butthead Do America, then-president Bill Clinton awards the cartoon heroes with honorary memberships in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “Yes! Fire, fire,” Beavis squeals with delight. Indeed, it is hard to imagine…
FRI, 7/23 By nature, the curved, concrete, fly-away world of skateboarding simply flips off the literary world. It’s tough to imagine, after all, how a seat-of-your-pants extreme sport embraced predominantly by fourteen-year-old males and few tough, old hardcore adults in baggy shorts might have anything to do with the written…
Writer Joseph Campbell spent his life examining the archetype of the “hero,” and his concept of the hero’s journey in mythology is indelibly etched into our culture through vehicles such as Star Wars. The gang at Arts Street’s Comedy Theatre used the idea as the basis for (in)EXPLICIT: Parental Advisory,…
There are a number of noteworthy changes under way at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Now, surely I’m not the only person in the area who cringes when the word “change” is used in the same sentence as “Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.” Others will recall, as I do,…
In the intimate gallery at the front of Artyard, (1251 South Pearl Street, 303-777-3219), Kansas artist Marc Berghaus is the subject of the solo Linguistic Utopias, #1. Berghaus has been exhibiting his sculptures in the area for a few years; just in the past few months his work has been…
Dots, Blobs and Angels. Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting an enormous solo that is dedicated to the late David Rigsby, an artist who played a big part in the local art scene in the ’70s and ’80s. The exhibit was organized by director Cydney Payton, who installed it…
Joel Fink’s Romeo and Juliet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival could have been called The Nurse and Mercutio Show, because those two characters almost romped off with the play. Okay, that’s a bit reductive. The production had other strengths and floated a few good ideas, but the climax wasn’t heart-wrenching,…
There’s the occasional salacious gesture in Cabaret, a vanishing flash of naked butt, a blurring of sexual “isms” — homo, tran, pan, hetero, who cares? — a lost and libidinous leading lady who has an abortion. But I don’t think that’s what is keeping much of the regular Boulder Dinner…
Born to Be Loud. Born to Be Loud consists of a string of songs from the late ’50s to the ’80s. Some are sung straight, some satirized, some clearly intended as an homage to a particular band or performer; they’re stitched together with all kinds of humor and hokum, and…
If you’re wondering how Hollywood could possibly adapt Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of similarly themed short stories bound together by the most slender of common threads, the answer is that it didn’t. The credits for I, Robot read “suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book,” but the canny sci-fi fan…
Fair warning: If the behavior of camels in the Gobi Desert during the spring birthing season is not high on your things-to-learn-about list and you don’t hunger to know everything about southern Mongolian herdsmen, then The Story of the Weeping Camel probably isn’t your kind of movie. Saying they were…
Those in the mood for a bit of authentic swordplay (sans Tom Cruise, that is) would do well to catch Zatoichi #4: The Fugitive this Saturday night. In this 1963 episode of the renowned Japanese film series, the legendary blind samurai Zatoichi arrives in the village of Shimonita (in America,…
