It’s hard for me to review Suddenly Hope, currently playing at the New Denver Civic Theatre. On the evening I attended, the auditorium was filled with people who looked and sounded like my New York aunts and uncles or my cousins from Israel. Also, the musical celebrates a concept of…
Four years later, the Columbine massacre (and school shootings elsewhere) leaves more questions unanswered than resolved, despite the relentless efforts of psychiatrists, social commentators of every political stripe and baffled law-enforcement officers to explain them. In his remarkable first feature film, Home Room, writer-director Paul F. Ryan declines to analyze…
Many observant Jews in Israel and America are outraged by writer-director Eitan Gorlin’s brash first feature, The Holy Land, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not every day you encounter a film about an uncertain rabbinical student who falls in love with a Russian prostitute — in the holy…
Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is not just one of the world’s great fantasists; he’s one of the most painterly filmmakers alive, and a vivid thinker who revels in taking chances with moods and spells and narrative experiments. Princess Mononoke was the first Miyazaki film to enjoy great acclaim in America,…
“For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Albert Einstein said that, but Peter Barton lived it. And exactly a year ago, the legendary entrepreneur, sports enthusiast, rock-and-roll fan, husband and father of three escaped the boundaries of time altogether, dying…
Thursday, September 11 Local photographer Nanette Martin made five trips to Ground Zero between September 2001 and May 2002 to chronicle the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. The result is a new photo memoir, The Thousand-Mile Stare: Images From Ground Zero, and a subsequent photography exhibit. Thirty-three black-and-white…
Karen Finley is in the middle of what she describes as a “star-studded week.” No longer fighting Jesse Helms and the National Endowment for the Arts “decency clause” in front of the Supreme Court, Finley’s overbooked calendar calls for performances with Lou Reed, a video shoot with Sonic Youth’s Kim…
SUN, 9/14 Soon You’ll hear a tune That’s gonna lift you out of your seat It could be sweeter But then the meter Was written especially for your feet — Irving Berlin, “Everybody Step” If the term “tea dance” evokes visions of grannies a-go-go shuffling their walkers to elevator music,…
SUN, 9/14 Chuck Trujillo raised a lot of eyebrows in the competitive running community four years ago when he announced plans for a regular Denver marathon. Plenty of these epics already clogged the fall calendar in places like New York, Chicago and even Minneapolis. But all of those places had…
FRI, 9/12 One expects art galleries to cater mainly to grownups, but consider little Quetzalli, 928 West Eighth Avenue, a gallery that’s committed to exploring cultural roots through art. Its current show, Rastros (Traces), featuring works by Eric “Elfego” Baca and Robert Lopez Dussart, appeals to adults by offering different…
TUES, 9/16 Maxine Hong Kingston was born into war in 1940; her refugee mother, a doctor who had run a hospital in a cave in China before joining her husband in Stockton, California, talked about it all the time, in firsthand detail. Even then, Kingston felt an overwhelming responsibility to…
WED, 9/17 The horrors of 9/11 left many Americans grasping for meaning. New York journalist Anne Nelson was one of them, and when she was asked to assist a fire captain in writing eulogies for eight of his finest who died, she composed a commemoration for each. In the process,…
Miners Alley is a brand-new theater company with a decade-long pedigree. After years in Morrison, artistic director Rick Bernstein recently moved the group to Golden, housing it in an intimate, brand-new theater above the Foss Drug Store. There, he mounted an interesting production of The Elephant Man last month. The…
Hollywood has always been an easy target, especially when it turns the gun on itself. The makers of New Suit, a new wiseass movie-industry satire, include a French director, Francois Velle, who never has made a U.S. film until now, and a young screenwriter, Craig Sherman, whose most notable previous…
Strange as it sounds, political theorists and trained economists may get an even bigger charge out of Tycoon: A New Russian than admirers of great movies like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, which chronicle the rise and fall of ambitious men. Directed by Pavel Lounguine from a barely fictionalized novel…
Talk about weird cinematic experiences: The German department at Colorado College is presenting a series of ten Third Reich-era films this fall under the rubric “Between Entertainment and Propaganda: Popular German Films of the 1930s.” These largely forgotten works all come from the so-called Gleichschaultung period (1933-39), when Adolf Hitler…
The musical’s name is a shocker: Urinetown. Mark Hollmann, a New York musician, appreciates that. After all, even Hollmann was a wee-wee bit skeptical when Greg Kotis, an actor he’d worked with previously in an offbeat troupe, approached him with a concept he’d come up with on a European backpacking…
Thursday, September 4 Puttin’ on for dogs: Audience members willing to plunk down a few bucks tonight will be treated to an evening of partying down with Denver-area bands, but down-on-their-luck canines will be the main recipients of Music for Mutts, hosted by Camp Bow Wow as a benefit for…
Classical music is a hard sell almost everywhere you go these days, but that hasn’t deterred the Colorado Symphony Orchestra from trying harder. On the brink of a new season, the CSO is also at a crossroads, anticipating the eventual loss of Maestra Marin Alsop and those new directions that…
SAT, 9/6 Ever wonder how to create your own ristra — the strands of dried red chile peppers that are hung near the entrance of a home to symbolize an abundant harvest? Well, this is the weekend to learn, and the place to master the art is the Chile Harvest…
SAT, 9/6 Ten years after being banned from competing in the city’s public facilities by a skittish city council, the ultimate warriors of the World Cage Fighting Championships return to Denver for a “Global Domination” event that goes to the mat tonight at 7 p.m. at the Pepsi Center. Part…
FRI, 9/5 Kurt Zimmerle graduated in 1997 from tiny Principia College in Illinois with a job offer any third-grader would envy: official LEGO MasterBuilder. An art student with a knack for self-promotion, he’d come to the building-block maker’s attention in 1992 after sending them a video of his scale LEGO…
