donnie l. betts has a dream. Actually, betts, a longtime figure on Denver’s theater scene, has several. He’s setting his sights on future stage productions–such as one jazz-lover’s fantasy about Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Duke Ellington meeting in heaven–and hopes to make inroads on television with a proposed local…
Federico Garcia Lorca, an Andalusian poet and playwright of the early 1920s and 1930s, would have been 100 this month. Students of world literature know, however, that the liberal Garcia Lorca–brilliantly creative, openly homosexual and a champion of Gypsies and other downtrodden peoples–was executed by Fascists during the Spanish Civil…
Thursday June 18 Denver’s notable Greek population loves to share its culture, something it does with more than the average gusto at the annual Greek Festival, this year celebrating its 33rd anniversary. One of the town’s best-planned ethnic fests, this one features a craft marketplace, costumed folk dancers and musicians…
A new piece of public sculpture planned for the Denver Performing Arts Complex may yet displace the goofy entrance canopy at the Denver Art Museum as the most reviled object in the local art world. If the winning entry in a recent competition–Jonathan Borofsky’s as-yet-untitled monumental six-story-tall sculpture of conventionalized…
Hollywood’s neatly packaged lies have been both bane and beacon to playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. Even though Hatcher’s farce about Thirties Tinseltown types, One Foot on the Floor, was given a rousing world-premiere production last year by the Denver Center Theatre Company, the play’s satiric commentary nonetheless failed to resonate with…
Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek’s joyous musical about pioneer life on the prairie, Quilters, couldn’t have been mistaken for a Broadway success when it closed in September 1984 after a run of just 24 performances. But like another musical that failed on the Great White Way, a short-lived endeavor based…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
It was once said of Honore de Balzac: “Next to God and Shakespeare, he is the greatest creator of human beings.” In his time, which was the first half of the nineteenth century, this driven Frenchman wrote more than sixty novels and countless shorter tales–passionate, sprawling, obsessively detailed. Each was…
Better check your popcorn for microchip implants. And make damn sure that the guy sitting behind you at the multiplex isn’t the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Just in time for the summer blockbuster season, 20th Century Fox has released its $60 million movie version of The X-Files, and if you’re not already…
This is for those of you who simply zoom past Limon on Interstate 70: Whoa! Pull into the little town on the eastern plains, and you’ll find a modest but intriguing place called the Limon Heritage Museum and Railroad Park. Housed in the town’s old Rock Island-Union Pacific depot, the…
At a time when the buzz in LoDo is about how all the galleries are fleeing, here’s one making a solid commitment to staying put: Under the innovative leadership of director Sally Perisho, Metropolitan State College of Denver’s Center for the Visual Arts crosses Wazee Street this month to relocate…
Thursday June 11 Comparisons to Terry McMillan are inevitable, but novelist Lolita Files says she’s her own woman and her characters–sassy, sexy, professional buppies looking for love (and other stuff)–an extension of her own life. McMillan simply opened the door for talented women authors with a knack for turning out…
Contemporary art has fractured into innumerable directions and styles since the 1970s, but the situation has never been as wildly pluralistic as it is today. For proof of this diversity, see three current shows at two very different local venues. But catch them while you can–they’re all set to close…
Feminism is the main character in Parallel Lives: The Best of the Kathy & Mo Show, now on stage at the Avenue Theatre under the hit-and-miss direction of Michael McGoff. A pared-down version of the off-Broadway hit originally written and performed by actresses Kathy Najimy (best-known as the neurotic, rubber-faced…
Upon exiting the Space Theatre after a recent performance of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s current production of Don Quixote, a boy no older than twelve turned to his mother and said, “That was even weirder than The Master of Two Servants.” To which his mother haltingly replied, “Servant of…
There are cheap thrills aplenty in Nick Broomfield’s scandal-enhanced, self-serving wreck of a documentary, Kurt and Courtney. For one thing, its out-of-the-picture protagonist is Kurt Cobain, the latest dead junkie rock star to be canonized as “the voice of his generation” before the body was even cold. For another, its…
John Duigan’s Lawn Dogs is the kind of arch, postmodern fairy tale in which the little girl who’s gone wandering in the dark forest winds up pointing an automatic pistol at her insufferable father’s head, and the mysterious boy who’s become her secret friend makes his getaway from demons in…
Thursday June 4 It’s not often you’ll find a singing voice this strong and clean in your own backyard. Local country/folk diva Celeste Krenz, who captured time on the Gavin Americana charts in 1995 with her second album Slow Burning Flame, has just released a new CD, Wishin’, and it’s…
William Corey is a bit baffled. The Boulder photographer, who’s spent the last twenty years snapping placid images in Japanese gardens, is surprised that anyone in this country–other than a few wealthy collectors–would be interested in what he does. “Nobody’s interested in slowing down,” Corey says of his fellow Americans…
What do visitors remember most about a trek through Denver International Airport? The terminal’s tented peaks and monumental marble expanses? Well, maybe. But for many, it’s Gary Sweeney’s “America–Why I Love Her,” a wall-sized, puzzle-like map of the United States studded with flags that mark vanishing tourist traps, such as…
Alarming as the re-emergence of Seventies clothing and musical styles might be, one of that period’s most influential musicals, Chicago, resonates well with modern audiences. That’s because society has finally fulfilled late director/choreographer/auteur Bob Fosse’s prescient observation that Americans, egged on by an unscrupulous media, deify certain classes of criminals–especially…
The beginning moments of local dramatist M. Scott Merrifield’s play Desert Air are full of promise. As the Changing Scene’s world-premiere production of this Gulf War-era drama begins, the strains of a popular rock song (“Video Killed the Radio Star”) fade out while the stage lights illuminate a drab olive-green…
