In 1939, German-Jewish artist Max Lazarus came to the United States from Trier, Germany, where he was that city’s most important expressionist painter. Prominent in the Jewish community, Lazarus was commissioned to paint a mural on the ceiling of Trier’s main synagogue. But the 1930s was not the best time…
In 1980, a group of friends opened an alternative art space in a then-rough part of town and gave it the difficult and unconventional name of Pirate: a contemporary art oasis. But the co-op’s name perfectly reflected the difficult and unconventional work that has so often found a home in…
You have to hand it to the folks who strive to try something different, and the Other Side is just such an effort. Rather than being just another artist cooperative, it’s more of a true collective, where artists not only share studio and gallery space (and daycare), but attempt to…
Hair today, gone…well, you know the drill: When local artist/entrepreneur Lonnie Hanzon decided to cash it all in, sell his workshop and auction off nearly everything in it, he also decided to drop his three-foot tresses, what he liked to call his “greatest work of art,” and put them on…
They used Colorado Yule Marble for the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In fact, anytime someone wants to make something look grand, they call for the sleek stone that’s quarried in the town of Marble, near Aspen. At the Marble Institute of Colorado’s MARBLE/marble XIV classes…
Who can argue with a tradition that’s been handed down for centuries, has its origins in a mystical fertility ritual, and involves grown people dressed in white holding antlers on their heads? That’s the core of the solemn annual rite known as Abbott’s Bromley Horn Dance, which leapt across the…
This program for young dancers places an elite crew of twinkletoes in the spotlight for the annual Colorado Ballet staging of The Nutcracker. It’s a wonderful experience, of course, for any second-grader keen on turning pro, but the fast-track connections that come out of the mingling of so many upper-suburban…
Hard to say if it was dance, theater, circus or dressage, but whatever it was, Cheval Théâtre provided an astonishing evening of entertainment during its extended Denver run last fall. Sitting in the audience, you sensed some mysterious, Cirque du Soleil-influenced story must be responsible for the goings-on in the…
Denver should be grateful for the foresight and dedication that originally gave birth to the Denver Center Theatre Company, which has assembled a talented group of artists and every year offers an eclectic and intelligent mix of plays — classic and contemporary, angry and light, humorous and tragic. The production…
Coyote on a Fence opened soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and it says much for the production that it retained its strength and seemed both true and important in the face of those terrible events. Bruce Graham’s play examines the death penalty in America and concerns two men…
We don’t quite know what to make of Thaddeus Phillips, who managed — all by himself — to perform two full-length Shakespeare plays, King Lear and the Tempest, during one strange and coldly electrifying evening at Denver’s Buntport Theater and who later amazed a sparse crowd at the historic Rossonian…
Around Christmastime, the Hunger Artists brought James Joyce’s The Dead to lyrical life amid the gleaming lamps and dark wood of the Byers-Evans House Museum in Denver. The reading was adapted and directed by Jeremy Cole, and it was a jewel, glowing and multi-faceted, communicating all the wistful power of…
This is a play about the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Or about a man playing that survivor on a stage. Then again, the man may be Adam, tending the Garden of Eden. There’s a woman directing the play. Sometimes she’s helpful, sometimes mocking, sometimes downright capricious. Maybe she’s…
It’s impossible to imagine anyone matching Nancy Cranbourne’s lunatic genius in Two Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization: A Hormonal Cabaret. Since she’s also a dancer, her comic bits — most of them created through improvisation — involve her head, her heart, her soul, her mind, and every nerve and muscle of…
There’s a lot of acting talent in Denver, so best actor is a hard call to make. How do you compare a larger-than-life performance like Bill Christ’s Cyrano with Gene Gillette’s affecting portrayal of a skinhead in Coyote on a Fence? Or to Brett Aune’s squawks and flutters in The…
Director Ed Baierlein knows his onions. For his production of the Edgar Lee Masters classic Spoon River Anthology at the Germinal Stage, he kept the production values low-key and snared the services of six fine and very different actors. The script is less a play than a collection of monologues,…
Rachel York is a spectacular performer, larger than life and meriting a boxload of descriptors: beautiful, passionate, volcanic (yet subtle), able to rage or weep on the instant, mesmerizing. The finest element in a very fine production of Kiss Me, Kate, York gave Cole Porter’s brilliant score everything it required,…
“Over the top” doesn’t begin to cover Marc G. Dalio’s performance as Belle’s oafish and ultimately rejected suitor, Gaston, in Beauty and the Beast. He came across like a huge, muscled and inexplicably animated cardboard cutout, prancing and preening, utterly in love with himself, his grin revealing teeth as large…
There’s a reason that I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change! has been running forever: In it, four attractive, talented and energetic young people whip through the joys and traumas of dating and coupling (and re-coupling) in scene and song. There are a couple of insightful comments and touching moments,…
Donald Margulies’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Dinner With Friends, muses on marriage and the substitute families that married people form with other couples. Two people, immersed in their own misery, separate. Their close friends — a pair of trendy and dedicated foodies — immediately sense the cracks in their own relationship…
Normally, when you find yourself paying attention to technical details in the theater, it means you’re bored and the production’s a flop. Not so with The Immigrant. Lighting designer Don Darnutzer’s effects were both lovely in themselves and integral to the musical’s theme: transparent skies with clouds flowing across them,…
Playwright Martin McDonagh has a wicked way with words, but he also understands that they’re only one of the ways theater communicates. Mick Dowd, the protagonist of A Skull in Connemara, is a handyman who has to dig up old skeletons in the village cemetery every year to make room…
