It was certainly a surprise to find a museum-quality show in a run-down warehouse near the National Western Stock Show Complex, but there it was: Stephen Batura’s hEMLOCK rOW. For this show, Batura did paintings in casein on wood, with subjects found in old photos from the Denver Public Library,…
The husband-and-wife team of Tyler Aiello and Monica Petty Aiello has big dreams of establishing a full-tilt art center, with an exhibition space, classrooms, studios, foundries and even a coffee shop. Most of it is still pie-in-the-sky, but the couple already owns a large building and adjacent lot in a…
It’s early to really start crowing, since the doors of the Newman Center aren’t yet open to the public, but this building is a beauty, built for the ages from Indiana limestone and decorated with bas relief frescoes and a gorgeous carved-stone window. The crowning jewels of this new home…
After cutting her director’s teeth for a few years on a small storefront operation on Broadway, Jeanie King moved her Fresh Art Gallery over to the ever-changing Santa Fe Drive arts district. She’s created an enormous and smartly appointed complex that, in addition to a huge exhibition space, has half…
The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design recently announced that it is moving out of Denver, but the news is a lot better than it sounds. The school has been in a group of ugly buildings at the corner of East Evans Avenue and South Oneida Street, but in…
Foothills Art Center just celebrated its 35th anniversary, but the real milestone lies with the impending retirement of longtime director Carol Dickinson. When Dickinson took over Foothills more than a decade ago, the center was a genuine backwater; with little more than her will, she transformed it into something relevant…
The dust that lay mostly undisturbed for years in this old Federal Boulevard movie house has begun to fly. The Industrial Arts Theatre Company, homeless after the demise of its latest roost at the Denver Civic, is tearing down walls and reconfiguring seats in the eighty-something building in an effort…
Chip Walton and his Curious crew have already made a name for themselves as a troupe, consistently staging quality fare for Denverites seeking something beyond the offerings of the big boys at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. And now they’re making it even more enjoyable, with two-for-one Thursdays…
The DCTC knows its audience, and in a kind attempt to thank and keep its blue-haired patrons, the organization offers discounted tickets to selected matinee productions throughout the season. This year’s series included a diverse theatrical palette, from Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth to that old roasted chestnut,…
There’s no getting away from it. It’s not just that the Denver Center has the resources to ensure a certain level of consistency; it’s that the company also has the integrity to put on a solid roster of plays, including those of Shakespeare, Pinter and such modern wonder boys as…
We’re going to go out on a limb here. Any company that has the guts and vision to evoke the bleak, war-torn Europe of Family Stories: Belgrade, the sinister fairy world of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and the bad acid flashback that Manson Family Values represents is doing the kind…
In staging Bernice/Butterfly, the Denver Center did exactly what a major regional theater should do: It mounted an original play that, in part, celebrates the history of the West, cast it with respected local actors and asked the author to direct. The acting was superb, the technical values impeccable and…
This one-man show written and performed by the multi-talented Thaddeus Phillips was funny, soulful, brilliant and sweet as it followed a young tapper’s education, progress through life and enforced exile in Cuba. Phillips himself is a prodigious tapper, a terrific actor and an iconoclastic thinker. For Lost Soles, he used…
This play celebrates the kind of vanishing small-town eatery that once functioned as the heart of its community. Nagle Jackson’s script was smart, literate, absorbing and feelingful. But part of its success laid with the actors, Kathleen M. Brady and Jamie Horton, for whom Jackson specifically wrote the play as…
The LIDA Project developed this play through improvisational exercises, and the result was a hallucinatory and grimly humorous exploration of a feverish time in North American history and politics. You could see the months of rehearsal in the way the actors worked together on stage, strong in their individual segments,…
After a run at the Wave nightclub, the East German misfit who married an American G. I. belted out the borscht about the inequities of the rock-star life at the Climax Lounge, one of Denver’s newest independent music venues. Do those angry young men and women dancing in the aisles…
Usually when Americans mess with anything British, we ruin it. But this musical version of the award-winning 1997 film stayed true to what really is a generous-hearted fairy tale with perceptive and thoughtful things to say about the human condition. And among an excellent and well-seasoned cast, Christian Anderson was…
Mary Louise Lee’s evocation of doomed, legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday was the kind of performance that stays with you for weeks. She shouted out her jokes and awarded them her own raucous laughter. She communicated raunchiness, pain and vulnerability. Her voice was smooth as glass, her phrasing sinuous as…
We first met Geoffrey Nauffts when his character, Malcolm, was attempting suicide. Once resuscitated, Malcolm remained as swoony, strange, dreamy and off-kilter as when his car’s exhaust was working on him. And his coming-out love affair with a fellow worker melted your heart — at the same time it gave…
Charles Weldon gave Jim Becker, the uptight protagonist of August Wilson’s play about life in a cab company, paternal gravitas and a rare, generous smile that seemed to forgive the sins of the world. Then — just in case anyone thought this performance was a fluke — he seduced the…
Mare Trevathan Philpott is always a joy to watch, and in Skriker, she got to strut almost all her stuff in one evening. The Skriker is a strange, shape-changing, atavistic fairy creature who talks nonstop in a mix of puns, metaphors, rhymes and allusions. She manifests herself differently to each…
Harvey Blanks has given two brilliant performances in plays by August Wilson this year, and he wins for his work as the strange, affable, dangerous Turnbo in Jitney. Blanks can be incredibly funny or full of emotion. Whatever the sentiment, he gives it everything he’s got — heart, soul, voice…
