The reading public–O, endangered species–grows understandably wary every time screenwriter, director and cast get their collective hooks into a bona fide literary classic. It doesn’t happen every time, but some of the world’s most dreadful movies have dropped stillborn from some of the greatest books. Who can imagine Tolstoy’s reaction…
Wednesday October 11 Things to do in Denver before you’re dead: Denver’s annual fifteen minutes–or in this case, ten days–of Hollywood glamour and glitz begin today, when the Denver International Film Festival kicks off with a big premiere. In what is getting to be a tradition for the fest, it’s…
It truly is fall in Denver, and the trees themselves are coming down along with the leaves. Given this loss to our visual environment, it’s some solace that another, more expected feature of autumn also has arrived: the start of high season for the art world. This year in Denver,…
Thomas Merton, it’s fair to say, was an individual worth writing a play about. An American monk who lived a hermetic life out in the woods, he nevertheless kept up a mighty correspondence with many of the greatest writers of his age during a literary career that ran from 1941…
It may be juvenile, brash and silly here and there, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ultimately transcends its own naivete with delightful exuberance and dazzling production values. From lyricist Tim Rice’s humor to Webber’s sweet pop tunes to the sophisticated lighting and set designs, the…
Gus Van Sant, best known for the junkie street fantasy Drugstore Cowboy and the quasi-poetic road movie My Own Private Idaho, is a hipster first and last–a contemporary Jack Kerouac with a Panaflex pointed at the Nineties. So the swipes Van Sant takes in To Die For at celebrity worship…
The eighteenth Denver International Film Festival gets under way October 11 at the Auditorium Theatre with the local premiere of Woody Allen’s new film, Mighty Aphrodite–in which Allen and Helena Bonham Carter play a married couple with plenty of, well, marital problems. The festival closes nine days later at the…
Cushioned by money and blunted by convention, Dead Presidents lacks the raw thrill that catapulted the Hughes brothers’ first film, Menace II Society, onto critics’ Best Ten lists and into the consciousness of an America obsessed with race and violence. Like many filmmakers on their second outing, Allen and Albert…
Wednesday October 4 Powell to the people: Harlem-born to Jamaican parents, Colin Powell joined the army, eventually rising to the rank of four-star general. His mastermind role during Operation Desert Storm catapulted him into the public eye; now his possible presidential candidacy is discussed in a tone well above a…
Museum-quality art can often be found at LoDo’s Robischon Gallery. Rarely, though, are the gallery’s three display spaces all devoted to the work of a single artist, as they are in the current exhibit John Buck–New Work. The special treatment is warranted, given Buck’s formidable artistic output of the last…
The third play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Broadway Bound, is only ankle deep. But the wading is both more pleasant and more interesting than in the first two plays in the series, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. This last play is about writing–the desire, the tedium and the…
In a Pentecostal church near 11th Avenue and Acoma Street in downtown Denver, a corps of volunteer carpenters is busy building the only Elizabethan-style stage in Denver–and a one-of-a-kind theater arts facility. The church, where a small congregation still holds services on Wednesdays and Sundays, was recently purchased for $200,000…
Easy Rollins, the smooth private eye at the heart of four Walter Mosley novels, occupies the same city (Los Angeles) and the same period (the fertile 1940s) as his celebrated counterpart in the detective trade, Philip Marlowe. Both of them are stained by the violence of their antagonists and, quite…
The versatile British director Peter Yates once made American tough-guy movies like Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, as well as such quirky little comedies as Breaking Away. Now he’s joined the Irish charm cult. The Run of the Country is a coming-of-age story set in an Irish village…
Wednesday September 27 On their toes: Twenty-five years old and still growing, one of Denver’s most respected cultural institutions celebrates in high style. Cleo Parker Robinson Dance is throwing a week of silver-anniversary events that touch on every aspect of dance: Tonight at 6:30 at the Warwick Hotel, 1776 Grant…
Lately, and increasingly, museums across the country and around the world have begun “deaccessioning”–selling off parts of their existing collections as a ready source of “free money” to pay for new acquisitions. It’s money, more than art, that’s hard for many of these institutions to come by, especially in recent…
The Aurora Fox Theatre’s striking production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus proves once again that one can abhor the sentiments of a playwright and still find depth, meaning and mastery in his work. But it takes an ingenious performance or two, luminous directorial insight and a willingness from the audience to…
Reviving the quintessential Fifties drama is no easy matter; so many of the values and beliefs of the period seem dated. The best approach is to be as true to the period as possible. Director Jeremy Cole takes Terence Rattigan’s charming Separate Tables–two linked one-acts from the England of the…
Jerry Garcia had been at the undertaker’s about five minutes when a filmed valentine to his true believers hit the street. Your enthusiasm for Tie-Died: Rock ‘n Roll’s Most Deadicated Fans will likely depend on your tolerance for cult argot in general and Deadhead blather in particular, but make no…
In the cold, gray, unnamed city where David Fincher’s bloody thriller Seven takes place, it’s always raining. There’s a coating of grime on every door lock and lampshade, the coffee cups are all chipped and smudged, and every dark staircase in every tenement is collapsing. So is the tenement. All…
Wednesday September 20 A brand-new bag: Few men have the distinction of having worked with two of the most influential funkmeisters of all time, James Brown and George Clinton. Saxman Maceo Parker not only has it, but he wears it well. The oft-sampled Parker, who’s also provided propulsive riffs behind…
Words, just like art objects, are subject to fashion. Suddenly everyone is using the word “venerable” or mouthing a phrase like “narrative content.” Everywhere I go these days, artists, especially those associated with the alternative scene, are talking about a “critical mass”–or, more properly, the lack of one in Denver’s…
