Of the thirty-plus songs that constitute the musical revue Jerry¹s Girls, only one proves to be more than a display of vocal pyrotechnics or choreographic cuteness. Oddly enough, that distinction belongs to a tune that’s performed in drag by an actor whose ambling gait, ill-fitting gown and rouged face drew…
British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is often regarded as England’s version of Neil Simon. But while both master craftsmen have an affinity for rim-shot-style comedy — Simon started out as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, as did Mel Brooks and Woody Allen — they are careful to…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
The biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver. It’s not even that technological advances appear to have added…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witch hunts? Territorial conquest and genocide?…
If you think the instrumentally correct Academy of Ancient Music — an English ensemble formed in 1973 to reproduce, as truly as possible, the voice of early music as it sounded in its day — is a serious and stodgy crew, give it a rest. Orchestra member David Carter –…
From the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the glow-in-the-dark Madonnas that line the counter at your friendly, neighborhood 99-cent store, different cultures have always found ways to express their religious beliefs through art, icons and physical representations of a higher, more ephemeral world. Dr. Martha Narey of the University…
In the capacious lower-level galleries at the Arvada Center, curator and exhibition director Kathy Andrews has installed a pair of large photo displays: Fresh Eyes: Colorado Photographers¹ Views, which looks at recent experimental photography by some of the state’s most interesting artists, and Signs and Relics, a solo show that’s…
Perched atop a high, bare platform and isolated in a pool of bluish-white light, a search-and-rescue pilot talks about why she’s devoted herself to serving the needs of others even as she chooses to reside on life’s perimeter. Surveying the landscape below, the youthful Maxine (Kristin Erickson) quietly says to…
As wrongheaded as it is well-intentioned, CityStage Ensemble’s world-premiere production of Bad Money flounders from the very first scene and never gains much of a foothold thereafter. Ostensibly written in the style of film noir, which uses ambiguity to heighten mystery, cloak clever plot twists and slowly reveal character, David…
No one likes to be seen as the roadblock to a revolution. The unfortunate soul–or the dumb bastard–who chooses to impede progress is likely to be mowed down by those charging toward tomorrow. He will become a thing to be wiped off the shoes of those who march, march, march…
The subject — or rather, the object — of Christine Fugate’s unsettling and surprisingly poignant documentary The Girl Next Door is one Stacy Valentine, a pneumatic blonde from Oklahoma who recently concluded a brief but reasonably lucrative career as a porn star. The film spans two years, and for that…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of us, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. Men of Honor has Academy Award bait written all over it. If you were to use the latest…
At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…
Denver is becoming home to a peculiar literary subset: black doctors who moonlight as mystery writers. In 1996, author Robert Greer, a professor of pathology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, published the first of three Denver-based mysteries featuring bounty hunter CJ Floyd. Now, local surgeon Pius Kamau…
Under its many-layered, controversial and stolidly postmodern roof, the Denver Central Library houses many treasures. But one of the most fascinating — a vast collection of historical photographic images of the West — may also carry the lowest profile, though the library, which maintains a remarkable digitized collection of over…
Mark Masuoka took over as director at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver on January 1, 2000, and he quickly transformed the place from what had looked like the city’s largest co-op into something that could pass, on a good day, for a bona fide museum. But less than ten months…
Interpretive Visions, at the Camera Obscura Gallery, is a solo exhibit featuring black-and-white photos by Loretta Young-Gautier. The show includes older photos dating back to the 1980s, as well as a batch of new ones. Young-Gautier studied with local black-and-white masters Ron Wohlauer and Ray Whiting. Like them, she has…
Eleven-year-old Miguel knows all too well that his journey into manhood will begin only when his father takes him on the family’s annual sheep-herding trip to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. When the crucial decision day arrives, though, Papa says Miguel must remain behind, forcing the disappointed youth to endure…
Hampered by pacing problems and a couple of lackluster opening scenes, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Show-Off doesn’t hit its stride until the end of Act One, when a mother-daughter debate over love and marriage kicks the proceedings into high gear. Penned by veteran vaudeville entertainer George…
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because so many of you will find this hard to believe: Yes, Mad magazine still exists. It is still being published 48 years after it was created by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, neither of whom lived long enough to see…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sen-sations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
