A few years before Martin Luther King Jr. thundered his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a quartet of black college students stood up for equality by sitting down at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. That singular act of courage,…
Like the rotting entrails of the butchered animal one of them has dumped in the backyard, a Queens family’s darkest secrets ooze with stultifying frankness as a holiday barbecue unfolds. Knit together by tears as well as blood, the Robinsons and the O’Conners have dutifully gathered for their annual Labor…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best-selling Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon — “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about this woman regaled in her day…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, which was built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six…
Denver was a ghost town on New Year’s Eve, with cops everywhere, revelers in short supply and nary an official firework. Not exactly the things you’d associate with a supposed world-class city. But there was one honest-to-God party in the Mile High City that night. It was over at the…
Most Coloradans are more familiar with Jolly Rancher candies than they are with the Harmsen Western Art Collection, but the two are closely related. Jolly Rancher entrepreneurs Bill and Dorothy Harmsen came to Colorado from Minnesota in 1942 and built an ice-cream factory out on Ward Road that eventually began…
On a recent Saturday afternoon, in the up-and-coming neighborhood around First Avenue and Broadway, a steady stream of visitors found their way through the doors of the Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery. At the same time, a client in the gallery’s back office was making a purchase. At one point,…
The Fine Arts Center Exhibition Space, on the third floor of the fine art building at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, is currently presenting Homeless in Denver, a compilation of disturbing photo-based work by longtime Denver artist Annalee Schorr. Over the years, Schorr has explored the ubiquitous…
Near the end of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, an immigrant worker strides through the streets of Brooklyn in search of the drunken longshoreman who has wronged him. Waving away another’s placating pronouncements, the fiery man lifts his voice heavenward and cries, “He degraded my brother, my blood!…
If contemporary Texas politicians were as endearingly funny as the small-town folk who bustle to and fro during Red, White and Tuna, then having a whole bevy of Texans in the White House someday might not seem so unsettling. It’s easy enough, for instance, to snicker at the small-minded observations…
The besmirched hero of Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s valentine to swing-era jazz and the furies of creative temperament, is a fictitious ’30s guitarist called Emmet Ray. Self-absorbed but brilliant, crass but lyrical, Emmet is the embodiment of the notion that a great artist needn’t be a good guy or…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it…
In Cradle Will Rock, his third directorial outing, Tim Robbins takes on an almost insurmountably ambitious project: the re-creation of an era into which characters imaginary, obscure and famous are woven into a tapestry representing the texture of the time. It’s a tall order. E. L. Doctorow was able to…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way,…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, the Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,…
Although some people really are crazy, “crazy” is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who feels he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table or…
Abbott Fay thinks skiers lamenting this year’s late and scant snowfall ought to quit bellyaching. Farmers and ranchers throughout the West already know that drought is a cyclical occurrence, after all. Fay, a semi-retired Grand Junction history professor who has written the entertaining A History of Skiing in Colorado, knows…
Stuart Perkin’s wife left him for another woman. Four years later, he still wasn’t over it — despite three “really sexual” relationships that proved Sue hadn’t dumped him over his lack of manhood (a typical though illogical fear). Finally the Denver filmmaker decided there was only one way to resolve…
There’s no denying that Real to Surreal, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in Sakura Square, has garnered some negative word of mouth. Perhaps it’s the disappointment generated by the fact that it could have been a great show and is instead merely a good one. The exhibit represents…
RedShift Gallery, which combines a frame shop with a minimal exhibition space — just a few walls, really — has been framing for ten years and presenting art shows for the past five. But it’s only been in its current location in the Ballpark neighborhood for the past two years…
No matter how dedicated they are to presenting plays that provoke as well as entertain, most independent theater artists face the same middle-of-the-road, bureaucratic issues that plague large, established companies. That’s especially true when a troupe earns acclaim and immediately sets its sights on becoming “the next Steppenwolf” — referring…
Once upon a time in ancient Denver, when there were few contemporary art galleries and even fewer galleries showing unproven work, a ragtag crew of pirates fresh out of art school and unspoiled by the business of art banded together in search of a sturdy galleon with clean walls and…
