Whatever else you can say about the performances at the Heritage Square Music Hall, there’s nothing else quite like them in Denver. The current hybrid production Sweeney Todd (no relation to the Stephen Sondheim musical) is part sketch comedy, part old-fashioned melodrama, part musical and part obnoxious silliness. It’s also…
Excruciatingly funny, dark as a dungeon and peculiarly exhilarating despite its bleakness, American Buffalo secured David Mamet’s leading place in American theater when it was produced on Broadway in 1977. The killer cast it attracted then, including Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage, indicates just what a jewel it…
Look out below. Here’s another movie about a child’s grief, a hard-shelled grownup’s loneliness, and the healing power of imagination. It unfolds in Las Vegas (the city of illusions) and Newark, New Jersey (Harsh Reality, U.S.A.), and features Gerard Depardieu in, roughly speaking, the role of Harvey the invisible rabbit…
When movie actors talk in reverent tones about David Mamet, Team Hollywood’s designated thinker, it’s probably not because they regard him as the nation’s leading playwright. Or because of his famous insights into the emptiness of the American Dream and the casual cruelties of the business world. Or even because…
Thursday September 5 Put this in your bagpipe and smoke it: Celts from everywhere will be flipping their kilts for the Longs Peak Scottish Highland Festival in Estes Park, a four-day extravaganza of all things Celtic. Live music, a jousting tournament, a dog show and a dance competition are just…
It’s hard to imagine, but at one time regional growth meant something more than the grand opening of another shopping center or the umpteenth big-box hardware store. In the 1970s, new construction also meant a cultural coming of age for metro Denver. The decade began with the completion of the…
Innovation has its price, and the liberties Denver director Jeremy Cole has taken with The Adding Machine, Elmer Rice’s famous 1923 experiment in expressionism, may not please purists entirely. But you have to hand it to Cole; he has found exciting ways to translate the dated designs of expressionism into…
Tuna, Texas, is one nightmare town–everybody in it is a jerk, a sociopath or a pathetic loser. The townspeople can be amusing, but not amusing enough to make you want to pay them a visit. And maybe that’s what’s wrong with Greater Tuna, now in a popular revival at the…
While Republicans and Democrats spend the summer wrangling over custody of the American family, our most thoughtful filmmakers continue to address the burning issue with less bombast, but in far greater depth. Case in point: Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo. In a swift hour and a half, this promising new…
If you’re going to spoof a movie genre, it’s probably best to reproduce the old plots and characters and cliches to near-perfection, then give the mannerisms a hard, deviant twist. The keenest humor, after all, always lies close to the truth. In The Big Squeeze–a mutant take on Forties film…
Thursday August 29 His and Hersh: The personal and idiosyncratic visions of Kristin Hersh lie in a brilliant heap at the high end of the alternative music spectrum. Whether on her own or with Throwing Muses, as she is this evening at the Bluebird Theater, Hersh intertwines folk, punk and…
Because it was made by an artist and is meant to portray America’s recent art history, the film Basquiat, which opened a couple of weeks ago at the Mayan Theater, has sparked a groundswell of interest in the art community. Perhaps only a psychiatrist is truly qualified to interpret painter…
It’s not clear why ex-newsman Walter Cronkite felt it necessary to narrate a piece like this–yes, that’s his voice booming over the loudspeakers–but another celebrity, the Karate Kid, sure kicks up a fuss in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The musical satire of big business and the…
King Arthur, what a guy. Somehow the grand old Celt still appeals to the popular imagination. Many works of art have spun out from the legends of Arthur and the Roundtable, and there are good reasons for the current revival of interest in the King and his court–and in the…
At the midpoint of Escape From L.A., a futuristic action yarn from director John Carpenter, protagonist Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) walks along a crumbling street with Taslima (Valerie Golina), a shell-shocked but spunky resident whose shag haircut seems to have been created by DuPont Stainmaster. It’s a nothing bit, really–a…
Being home on the Front Range in August brings new meaning to the old cowboy song about the skies not being cloudy all day. After all, it’s the too-clear sky that leads to that searing, oppressive heat. But there’s an upside to all that blazing sun: the clear light that…
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote some of the best comedies of their era, teaming up in the 1930s and 1940s to produce, among other hits, the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can’t Take It With You, which later became one of Frank Capra’s greatest movies. Hart was long on plot,…
Samuel Beckett thought it all through for us–what it means to live in a world where God is absent. In such a world, life is absurd because it has no ultimate meaning. If there is no God, we are all fools and clowns scrambling for bits of comfort and amusement…
Is it a trend or just an accident? In any event, the old Andy Warhol crowd has inspired two films this year, and you can envision a time when they’ll wind up on a double bill in what’s left of the revival houses. For now, the more interesting of the…
If you’re wondering what Travis Bickle has been up to for the last twenty years, here’s the answer. He’s changed his name to Gil Renard, taken a job selling big hunting knives out in San Francisco and become the baseball fan to end all killer baseball fans. Or so it…
Thursday August 15 Kitty got your tongue? You’ll be smiling like a Cheshire cat at Cajun’s Comedy Night, an evening of funny stuff at the Holiday Inn North, 4849 Bannock St., that benefits the Cat Care Society’s cageless, no-kill shelter for cast-off felines. Featuring comic Kevin Fitzgerald–who, in his other…
Colorado’s printmaking tradition is so rich, its influence spreads far beyond state lines. In the first decades of the twentieth century, George Elbert Burr plowed new ground with his color etchings made right here in Denver. In the 1930s Guy McCoy and Paul Gallagher, working in Colorado Springs and Aspen,…
