What keeps a man alive? He lives on others. He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole if he can Forgets that they’re supposed to be his brothers That he himself was ever called a man. — Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera Suzan-Lori Parks has set Fucking A…
Meshuggah Nuns is the kind of show that seems to have no real reason for being. It’s inoffensive and even amusing in spots, but it also feels like something created for the sole purpose of filling up time on stage. And in a world full of musicals with witty scripts…
Almost Heaven. Director Randal Myler has assembled a group of terrific musicians and a winning, uniformly strong cast. Each member brings a distinct and interesting sensibility to the music. The show is intelligently written and directed, and the production values are impeccable. A large screen at the back of the…
Two years ago, Harvey Weinstein, who runs Miramax Films with an iron fist that no doubt smells of cigarettes and meat, bought a Hong Kong-made movie called Hero for $20 million. That is an extraordinary amount of money for a foreign-language film made by a director, Zhang Yimou, relatively unknown…
Surf’s up. Palm trees sway invitingly in the breeze. The sparkling beaches are amply decorated with bikini babes and hard-body surfer dudes. Everybody has a nice cold drink with a wedge of fresh lime in it. Viewed that way, The Big Bounce is as alluring a midwinter pitch for the…
Behold a tale of true love (between a boy and a bicycle), of tireless courage (from a bitty grandmother with a clubfoot) and of a very shocking new definition of “sexy” (three wizened matriarchs who ravenously slurp down frogs). This is The Triplets of Belleville, an animated extravaganza of Gallic…
The great silent comedian Charles Chaplin’s political troubles with the United States government probably didn’t begin with the release of Modern Times in 1936. But this brilliant satire of American factory automation, the depersonalization of workers and the social ills of the Depression got a cold reception in the U.S…
When local businessman Chris Frésquez opened his first Palabras Con Sabor Coffeehouse, at 22nd and Welton streets, in 2000, it was something to be proud of. First and foremost a bilingual bookstore dedicated to promoting Latino authors, it grew into something more: a coffeehouse/Internet cafe/meeting place to provide a safe…
Thursday, January 29 Performances by the Takács Quartet, resident string quartet at the University of Colorado for a good twenty years, are still among the toughest tickets to come by in Boulder, where their annual series sells out season after season. It’s because the ensemble is no well-kept secret: Acclaimed…
I like movies as much as the next person, but I’m not certain how I’d fare in next month’s Independent Film Channel’s Ultimate Film Fanatic competition. After all, I enjoy watching Ben Stiller, but don’t ask me his shoe size. Still, this trivia tussle is tempting. The champ will earn…
SUN, 2/1 Joe receives a ticket to the Super Bowl, but when he arrives at the stadium, he discovers he’s in the last row. Then he spies an empty fifty-yard-line seat. After getting past security, he sits down in the choice spot and asks the gentleman next to him if…
SAT, 1/31 Talk about your frosty al fresco. Folks in laid-back Crested Butte will bundle up tonight against the midwinter Rocky Mountain twilight, ski along luminaria-lit trails from bonfire to bonfire and sample some of the finest offerings from the town’s best restaurants. It’s called the Progressive Bonfire Dinner, and…
SUN, 2/1 Ask any griot: Stories and drums have a history together. Before people wrote stuff down, they not only talked and sang about it, but they often beat it out in rhythm. So the combo seemed like a perfect fit for Sondra Singer, a Lakewood storyteller and drum enthusiast…
FRI, 1/30 While graffiti and tagging are most commonly seen in alleys and on the sides of buildings and highway overpasses, the spray-paint works showcased in Rhythmic Chaos: Graffiti As Art, will hang on the walls of the Longmont Museum & Cultural Center. The exhibit, which opens today, is the…
SUN, 2/1 The title says it all: Fred Hess’s new quartet CD on the Tapestry label, The Long and the Short of It, displays the entire breadth of the local saxophonist/composer’s musical abilities, which draw simultaneously on the traditions and the broken rules of jazz. As Hess himself has said,…
The Robischon Gallery sets the standard for art exhibitions in Denver. Whatever’s going on there, it’s always as good as — or better than — anything else around. There are two reasons for this: First, the selections are always intriguing, and second, every piece is perfectly situated in Robischon’s chic…
The oldest of the city’s alternative spaces is Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street, 303-455-4435), which is in a charming storefront in the historic Big Chief Block on the western edge of the Platte Valley. Spark has two dozen members but only two small exhibition rooms. That means it’s pretty packed…
I arrived at A Streetcar Named Desire at the Denver Center with high expectations. Israel Hicks has directed almost all of August Wilson’s plays for this theater, mounting layered, pitch-perfect productions and, in the process, creating one of the finest acting ensembles you’ll find anywhere. When he proposed using the…
As Mercy of a Storm opens, an elegantly dressed middle-aged man is moving about a nautical-looking and rather cluttered place that turns out to be the pool house of a country club. Snow falls outside the window. It’s New Year’s Eve 1945, and the man is apparently preparing for a…
Some acts of courage command everyone’s respect: the firefighter’s return to a burning house to rescue a child, the infantryman’s sacrifice of self for a wounded comrade, the weary black woman’s refusal to yield her seat on a segregated bus. Sometimes, though, courage can feel clouded — especially when it’s…
There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real, like the original punk or goth movements or Australia’s…
The new film by Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi (who gave us the superb tale of mountain smuggling and pursuit A Time for Drunken Horses) has a most provocative title — Marooned in Iraq — and addresses a crucial contemporary subject: the slaughter of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s regime and…
