Cross-gender performances are not all equal. When women play male characters, we tend to take them seriously. But when men play female roles, we can’t help but laugh–it always looks like parody. CityStage Ensemble director David Quinn’s version of Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy The Critic includes a riotous array of…
Something about the Roaring Twenties still seems naughty–and in the best sense of the word. Maybe it’s just nostalgia for a simpler time, but even the wild flappers, the speakeasies and the social experimentation had a much more innocent feel than our own jaded, cynical era. That’s why Mame, the…
There was a time when Sean Penn was better known for punching out photographers and headwaiters than for anything he did on a movie screen. So it comes as no surprise that The Crossing Guard, Penn’s second stab at screenwriting and directing, depends on a sullen and seedy look and…
The sun continues to set on Western movies, but there’s still time for a picture about Wild Bill Hickok that doesn’t make him out to be a saint, a singer or romantic fiction from a dime novel. Wild Bill, written and directed by an old hand named Walter Hill, purports…
Wednesday November 29 At your bidding: It’s a small service, but one that brings great joy into the lives of AIDS patients for whom pets provide a sense of well-being and belonging. Members of the organization PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support) help provide supplies and assistance in caring for those…
The first of many holiday shows, She Loves Me may well turn out to be this season’s best. This delightfully quirky musical has been given a delicious, intimate staging by the South Suburban Theatre Company, with a charming cast, fine direction and a very cool set. The action takes place…
Psycho Beach Party is yet another outrageous parody of B movies and pop psychology–and it’s somewhat brighter and cleverer than most. The cast at Theatre on Broadway is right on down the line, but the show depends upon the ingenious antics of its star, Andrew Shoffner, to really make it…
It’s unlikely that Mike Figgis’s eloquent tragicomedy Leaving Las Vegas will be a smash hit down at the local AA chapter. Because this is one movie about alcoholism and the algebra of need that doesn’t go in for sanctimony, self-help solutions or any kind of moral uplift in the final…
The crux of Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling is a woman’s sexual awakening, which in itself has all the cinematic originality of a San Francisco car chase or a cowboy riding into the sunset. But Rozema is no commonplace filmmaker, as anyone who saw her cult hit I’ve Heard…
Wednesday November 22 Shane, Shane: Once the sloppy, sotted, folk-punk heart of Ireland’s Pogues, Shane MacGowan is back–in all his crooked-toothed splendor–with the newly configured Popes. The son of an office worker and a famed traditional Irish singer, well-read, off-key and off-color, late-season pub rocker MacGowan was transformed at his…
Russell Beardsley’s sculptures, wall reliefs, mixed-media pieces and an installation are interspersed with Debra Goldman’s photos and photo-constructions in the current show at the Mackey Gallery. Though there are few obvious similarities between Beardsley’s Absence Reveals Presence and Goldman’s Recordar, the exhibits are highly compatible in tone, perhaps the product…
George Gershwin’s pop tunes hold up after all these years. Tunes like “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “But Not for Me” have beautiful melodies and jazzy energies that are still capable of knocking your socks off. Crazy for You brings many of…
Purists may blanch at director Jeremy Cole’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but the adventurous revision has much to say to us. It’s not perfect, but this production by the Cattlecall theater troupe is intense, knowing, and never dull. As the play opens, Macbeth has just quelled a rebellion against King…
Following a high-toned promenade through Edwardian New York, The Age of Innocence, Martin Scor-sese is back doing what he does best–wallowing in the Age of Corruption. Casino, Scorsese’s three-hour journey through the back rooms, bedrooms and killing grounds of Las Vegas, is tinged with hip satire and studded with scenes…
The peculiar love affair joining the biographer/ essayist Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington was played out, early in our century, on the periphery of London’s celebrated Bloomsbury Group. But for intensity and vision, this bohemian union may have surpassed even Virginia Woolf’s novelistic experiments or John Maynard Keynes’s…
Wednesday November 15 Lost in space: A real-life adventure and some of America’s favorite manufactured ones will be spotlighted tonight at separate Tattered Cover book signings, one at each T.C. location: U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady, the very same fellow who survived a fall from 27,000 feet and subsisted…
If it’s a taste of Manhattan modernism you’re craving this fall (and who isn’t?) run, do not walk, to Options 3–Robert Motherwell, the Denver Art Museum’s exhibit of twenty newly acquired paintings, collages and works on paper from this modern-day giant. Critics have sometimes dismissed Motherwell’s work as too pretty…
In his many short stories, John Cheever skimmed the surface of bourgeois American family life, laying bare the pretensions of suburban culture and dissecting the hopelessness of its materialism in nicely served, if thin, slices of life. In A Cheever Evening, playwright A.R. Gurney stirs together a number of scenes…
John Patrick Shanley’s poignant Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a three-scene argument for love–the kind of love between a man and a woman that penetrates individual isolation via mutual kindness. And it’s delivered in an unusual package as persuasive as it is hard-edged–partly because the play is well-written,…
Norman Rene’s Reckless is not for everyone, and Mia Farrow with her neurotic whine turned up full blast is for almost no one. But this quirky black comedy, which is in part another take on Candide, has the kind of daring you don’t find in more commercial projects. For one…
Mount the charm of Kennedy, the wisdom of Lincoln and the eloquence of FDR on the sleek chassis of Michael Douglas and you’ve got a pretty nice piece of Democratic Party wish fulfillment. Forget the facts of real life–the ascendancy of the Gingrichians and the decline of Bill Clinton. This…
Wednesday November 8 Two’s a crowd: As the dust continues to swirl around Amendment 2 and its impact on both sides of the fence, the issue of gay rights continues to occupy the state’s collective mind. Inner Journeys, Public Stands, a locally produced documentary, pays homage to a number of…
