The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League (PHAMALy) has launched another hit–a lively production of Stephen Sondheim’s bawdy musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This time, director Don Bill’s experiments get outrageous. Some of his choices are tasteless–a bit too far over the top for…
Roundfish Theatre Company is off to a fast start. The new group’s taut, smart production of David Mamet’s scathing indictment of American salesmanship gone awry, Glengarry Glen Ross, proves the new producers have guts–and taste. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Mamet’s use of profanity is almost poetic. He stealthily reveals…
In Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, the age-old drama of soldiers doing battle gets a treatment-in-depth that is both overdue and welcome. Between the outright flag-wavers of the 1940s in which John Wayne single-handedly defeated the treacherous Japanese and the heart-of-darkness job Hollywood eventually did on the divisive Vietnam War,…
Between comeback kid Eddie Murphy’s lively new take on The Nutty Professor and the unintentional nonsensicality of the sci-fi megahit Independence Day, this has turned into a pretty good summer for movie yuks. For my money, though, the sharpest and funniest comedy of the silly season is Multiplicity, a breakneck…
Thursday July 11 High notes: The area’s outdoor concert series season is hitting its summer peak, but few of the venues afford more striking surroundings for a better price than Classics by the Cliff, which features the Littleton String Quartet, with friends, tonight in the Visitor Center courtyard at Roxborough…
The reputations of Pirate and Spark have been rehabilitated in recent years owing to the hard work of their members. Both of these co-op galleries are often the place to find intelligent art shows by accomplished local artists. Surely that’s the case right now with exhibits from versatile painter Stephen…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo earlier this year was terrific, but it wasn’t really Brecht. Much truer to the spirit of the radical German playwright is CityStage Ensemble’s testy, uneven production of The Good Person of Szechwan. Too long, sometimes annoying and certainly abrasive, this…
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote their first show together in 1943, and Oklahoma! has proven to be one of the most influential musicals in the history of American theater. With Hammerstein’s sentimental yet memorable lyrics and Rodgers’s lavishly melodic tunes (nearly impossible to refrain from humming), they built…
The lean, windburned sheriff at the heart of John Sayles’s Lone Star descends directly from the classic lawmen of Hollywood’s Old West–quiet loners obsessed with raw justice and denied the comforts of home. But Sayles’s present-day creation, Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), has a slightly different bale of hay to burn…
In the realm of movies aimed at preteens, there is probably very little this discerning group won’t find dorky. An exception, I say with some trepidation, might be the long-overdue movie version of Harriet the Spy, which is a joint venture of Nickelodeon TV and Paramount Pictures. The late Louise…
Thursday July 4 Go Fourth: You won’t have to look far today to find a bang-up time, but our advice is to simply look up: That’s where the real fireworks happen. The former Stapleton Airport will be Pyrotechnics Central when it hosts the Sky Art Festival ’96, a combined two-day…
For the past six months, the Mackey Gallery has presented one large and raucous group show after another–out of character for a place that made its reputation presenting in-depth displays featuring only two or three artists. But it’s apparent that her experience with so many group shows has caused gallery…
We don’t really understand our world. Flailing about in unsuitable relationships, many people really want a perfect blend of community and independence and just can’t find it anywhere–except maybe at a place like Stanton’s Garage, where life unexpectedly solves its own riddles and strangers help each other through emotional distress…
The so-called phenomenon in Phenomenon first shows itself when a likable but dim-witted auto mechanic played by John Travolta suddenly starts beating brainy Robert Duvall at chess. A little while later, the ex-dumbbell learns Portuguese in twenty minutes, just in time to save a lost boy’s life. He cleverly engineers…
If the goofballs in Hollywood want to pay Demi Moore 12 million bucks to waggle her butt and flash her chest at a movie camera, so be it. That doesn’t mean we have to reimburse them. Striptease contains two or three minutes of softcore T and A, and that is…
Want to hear a recipe for competing in the summer movie marketplace? First, dig up $80 or $90 million. Add 3,000 (yes, 3,000) special-effects shots depicting stuff like the fiery destruction of the Empire State Building, the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a couple of major air battles between…
Thursday June 20 Main squeezebox: Her last novel, The Shipping News, ran away with all the most impressive distinctions, including a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, catapulting E. Annie Proulx into the literary limelight. Now her latest, Accordion Crimes, continues in form, following a green accordion built in…
When people think today of the Victorian era–if they think of it at all–they imagine a Dickensian world populated with polite yet insufferable prigs and upright if ignorant street urchins. But the latter half of the nineteenth century also marked the emergence of modern and social science–everything from physics to…
Extended families can be such a blessing–sometimes a mixed blessing, as two local theater productions remind us. American playwright Paul Osborn’s charming, poignant comedy Morning’s at Seven and Irish playwright Brian Friel’s dismal drama Wonderful Tennessee both step gingerly on the minefield of sibling tensions. But while the first is…
One of the great things about a show like Ain’t Misbehavin’ is its interactive dimension: The performers play directly to the audience members, who get to clap their hands and tap their feet in time with the boisterous, life-affirming music of Thomas “Fats” Waller. And the fabulous Pointer Sisters production…
The young filmmaker Todd Solondz insists that the unsettling picture of preteen trauma he gives us in his astonishing Welcome to the Dollhouse is not autobiographical–even though Heather Matarazzo, the eleven-year-old actress he cast in the part of a lonely, terrorized seventh-grader, bears a striking physical resemblance to him, and…
The Germans are not exactly the kings of comedy–not in this century–so it’s always a little startling to come across a German film speckled with yuks, even when those yuks are largely about dissolution and death. Case in point: Doris Dorrie’s Nobody Loves Me is a kind of bedroom farce…
