Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a whinefest under the best of circumstances. The four characters reveal their secret sufferings in convoluted party games and end by eviscerating each other’s fragile emotional guts in a stupefying alcoholic haze. Despite the entertainment value inherent in such fireworks, when the…
At the movies, it’s open season on literary figures. In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, we got an earful of cult heroine Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liners, which was to be expected, and an eyeful of her alcoholic self-pity, which was not. Tom & Viv is an even rougher piece…
Want to foul up your next crime thriller? It’s easy. First, go down to the Florida Everglades at midnight and find some alligators. Next, reheat a big, dangerous slab of Cape Fear, add a humid chunk of In the Heat of the Night and a racially motivated miscarriage of justice…
Wednesday February 15 Speech! Speech!: As spokesman for the rootsy, politicized rap group Arrested Development, the man known only as Speech has made it his mission to introduce young black fans to the group’s difficult activism. So along with fellow Arrestee, Terrie Axam, he helped produce Fusion, a multimedia spinoff…
At the end of the opening-night performance of Grease, former Monkees heartthrob Mickey Dolenz hushes the applauding audience at the Temple Buell Theater and says, “If you like us, tell your friends. If you didn’t like us, tell them you saw Cats.” I saw Cats. The very best thing about…
Playwright Robert Shaver sets his new play, Slavia and Hugo, in a horrific, blood-smeared, body-littered clinic. An atmosphere of degradation and torture lurks, monsterlike, and with it the anti-war message of this harsh absurdist parable. War waged against civilians is the most atrocious war of all, and this ardent production…
Trying to revive the Western may be a fool’s errand. As revisionist historians will be happy to tell you, Manifest Destiny is as dead as John Wayne, and any hombre crazy enough to say otherwise will get the bellyful of hot lead he deserves. The real problem is that while…
That major-league enigma lying ninety miles off the Florida coast doesn’t often come into clear focus–not for North Americans. Aside from our occasional whiffs of its embargoed cigars and its stubborn, last-ditch socialism, Cuba remains terra incognita almost four decades after Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries shook the…
Wednesday February 8 Morph for your money: Face it, parents. If you don’t take your kids to see the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers–Live, they may never forgive you, because for them, a chance to see those colorful, megapopular TV teens conquer evil in person is more than compelling, it’s necessary…
The mysterious Internet, a computerized environment once inhabited only by government scientists, is becoming more and more consumer-friendly. Although the cyberhighway can be jammed with trivia, its potential is enormous–particularly in the field of visual arts, which can be lonely territory. Off the Highway, a show of photographs at Rule…
In playwright Keith Reddin’s Nebraska, even peacetime military life can be hell. And this Industrial Arts production leaves the viewer drained as Reddin delves into the loneliness, insecurities and futile adulteries plaguing the lives of his characters. The world these people inhabit is fraught with tension, fear and the terrible…
When a man lives under a cloud of fear, forever expecting a deluge, he may not notice that he’s already soaked to the skin and trembling. In the caustic comedy-drama Later Life, now in a superb production at the Avenue Theater, playwright A.R. Gurney masterfully reveals how fear has affected…
The pioneer trail blazed by Thelma & Louise several winters back is developing into a superhighway. Boys on the Side is Hollywood’s latest plunge into female bonding, and it confronts every meaningful women’s issue you can think of with such single-minded fervor that you start to wonder if the whole…
As soon as Cochran and Shapiro get done with this thing in L.A., they could get a call from Catherine de Medicis. Patrice Chereau’s noisy costume drama, Queen Margot, casts Catherine as the heavy in the bloody wars between Catholics and emergent Protestants in sixteenth-century France and in the palace…
Wednesday February 1 Belly up to the barre: Dancers from twenty colleges converge on Boulder this week to learn, perform and compete at the American College Dance Festival. But before the fledgling hoofers are put to the test, they’ll have a chance to see six of Colorado’s most accomplished professional…
Full of snowy paper and sleek framing, Female Problems, a new show of mixed-media photo-based art at Emmanuel Gallery, seems as crisp, white and sterile as a hospital operating room. On closer examination, however, the pristine mood is shattered by revelation after revelation of painful experiences involving the vulnerable female…
A new play from a young playwright is almost always rocky terrain. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Keith Glover’s Coming of the Hurricane is no exception, though Israel Hicks’s distinguished direction does much to smooth the way for the viewer. There is some wonderful dialogue here, along with…
Capitalism doesn’t always equal freedom, especially in the arts. That’s the bitter pill served up by Nagle Jackson’s The Quick-Change Room at the Denver Center Theatre Company. The message goes down easily–sweetened by Jackson’s piquant humor–but it burns in the belly. It’s a slow burn, too. The play demonstrates some…
There are worse places to be exiled than Paris, but Roman Polanski longs for sunny, featureless Los Angeles. It is, of course, a place haunted by the ghosts of Sharon Tate and the couple’s unborn child. But 25 years later, it is still the Emerald City. There, he remembers, deals…
Roman Polanski’s obsession with obsession itself may be the reason he’s stayed away from overtly political filmmaking: When you’re rooting around in the dungeon of the individual soul, there isn’t much time to talk about oppressive regimes. Seen in that light, Death and the Maiden is something of a departure…
There are few pleasures greater in moviedom than watching Albert Finney disappear into a character. In Suri Krishnamma’s A Man of No Importance, he does it again with such apparent ease that we forget his rollicking Tom Jones, the boozy diplomat of Under the Volcano, even the devastated classics professor…
Wednesday January 25 West meets west: The names of Sandy Greenhills and Urbana Asphalt West may not sound familiar to you, but you read about them all the time. In fact, this divorcing couple is regularly splashed all over the newspapers. But the bickerers are actually representatives of the urban…
