Charles Dickens understood the fine art of tearjerking. Nobody before or since could sentimentalize human virtue, family life or the death of a child with such unabashed exploitation and get away with it. But Dickens loved the rarer pleasures of supernatural horror as well, and his A Christmas Carol, now…
Thieves and murderers can turn into comic heroes–even guardian angels. The result in My Three Angels at the Westminster Dinner Theatre is an intermittently divine comedy. The play proposes three miscreants as benevolent figures who watch over a poor but honest family when a rich and treacherous relative tries to…
For seventy years Dorothy Parker’s adherents have been calling her “the first modern American woman” or “the wittiest writer of her time” or something equally absolute. Valued for her sardonic commentaries on failed love, suicide, heavy drinking and the bad plays she was forced to review, she is held up…
“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” Yes, Dorothy Parker said that, too. She also said, “Let’s go wild–there’s plenty of time to do nothing once you’re dead.” And she summed up a Katharine Hepburn performance with this famous jape: “The whole range of emotion, from A to…
Before the cameras even started rolling on Ready to Wear (formerly Pret-a-Porter), Robert Altman’s mordant sendup of the fashion industry, the filmmaker had offended delicate sensibilities from New York to Paris and beyond. John Fairchild, editorial director of Women’s Wear Daily, has led a massive preemptive strike against Altman in…
The title says it all. The makers of Dumb and Dumber won’t win a genius grant anytime soon, but as long as you have a taste for the flipped-out antics of Jim Carrey and don’t mind juvenile bathroom humor, it ain’t a bad way to kill two hours. Especially if…
Wednesday December 14 Out there: Improvisation–a staple of the jazz aesthetic–is only the springboard for the kind of sounds you’ll hear during Frontiers: Explorations in Out Music. The new series, sponsored by the Creative Music Works and taking place every other Wednesday through February at the blessedly smokeless Vartan Jazz,…
Years before LoDo was a dull gleam in a developer’s eye, northwest Denver’s Highlands neighborhood shone as the city’s unofficial arts district. Artists flocked to the area, drawn by cheap rent, urban convenience and choice hangouts like My Brother’s Bar and the old Muddy’s on 29th Avenue. There artists gathered…
Beneath a thin (yet sturdy) veneer of respectability lies a nasty little secret at Ravenscroft manor. And when the handsome young footman of the house dies suddenly, falling to his death down the main stairway, it looks suspiciously like murder. The five women of the house claim his death is…
‘Tis the season, yet very few professional theater companies take up the religious significance of Christmas. A good thing, too, since the majority would muck it up with insincere pretensions. But the fact that most theater companies can’t do Christmas makes the fact that Eulipions can that much more exceptional…
For some reason, beautiful wackos just can’t keep their hands off Michael Douglas. Glenn Close made him pay dearly for infidelity in Fatal Attraction, then scheming Sharon Stone did that police-station number on him in Basic Instinct. Now it’s Demi Moore’s turn at bat, and Kirk Douglas’s baby boy winds…
Robert King, it says right here, in 1989 began to write a screenplay about love at first sight between political junkies from opposite camps. Hurrah for him. Without the unlikely, unseemly romance of Clinton spin doctor James Carville and his opposite number from the ’92 Bush staff, Mary Matalin, however,…
Gary Busey is six years old. That’s how long it’s been since the blond Texan star of Under Siege and Lethal Weapon dumped his Harley-Davidson at 45 miles an hour, whacked his head on the pavement and…died. “I left my body,” he says, speaking very fast. “I was looking through…
The relationship between great film directors and their actors can be perfunctory–Alfred Hitchcock showed open contempt for the succession of cool blonds ensnared in his thrillers, and entire casts quaked before the imperiousness of Erich Von Stroheim. But when kindred souls meet on the set, the bond can be mystical,…
Red is the final chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s riveting “Three Colors Trilogy,” and if we can believe him, it’s also his swan song. But even if the Polish director of such art-house hits as The Double Life of Veronique and Red’s predecessors, Blue and White, doesn’t actually retire in his…
Wednesday December 7 Beethoven’s 224th: Who knows what leonine Ludwig might have gone on to accomplish were he still around to party–perhaps the great composer would have hightailed it down to the mall to boogie down on a bank of synthesizers. But as it is, 1770 was a long time…
Rivers have always presented a challenge for landscape artists. Their majesty, their mystery and, especially, their movement all resist a flat, two-dimensional rendering. Enter German artist Mario Reis, whose recently completed North American Nature Water Color Project used an ingenious method to literally capture a river’s essence. Since 1977 Reis…
They’re baa-ack–the original cast (save one) of Denver’s long-running Murder Most Fowl, that is. The play returns to the Avenue Theater this season as (A Very Merry) Murder Most Fowl. The plot’s the same, but the jokes are all new, and the interactive element remains the show’s primary draw–the audience…
No matter where you stand on feminist issues, David Mamet’s Oleanna at the Denver Center Theatre Company will tick you off. This is the kind of theater that sends you furious into the night–masterfully manipulative and absolutely scary. It’s scary because we know too much about propaganda–how ideologues throughout history…
The fevers of adolescence have fascinated moviemakers since Griffith discovered the Gish sisters, but the results have grown more predictable by the decade. Ruled even more strictly by fad and formula than other commercial genres, most Hollywood teen movies are dominated by raunchy schoolboy humor, sweet nostalgia for the verge…
Unless you want to feel dull and laughless over the holidays, beware the latest outbreak of Chevy Chase Syndrome. Trapped in Paradise purports to be a comedy about three small-time, big-city crooks stuck in a cutesy-poo hick town at Christmastime. But there’s never been much funny in the spectacle of…
Wednesday November 30 Feed the Meters: Truly, it’s hard to say no to any configuration of former Meters members. So tonight, when the Founders of Funk –with Leo Nocentelli and Zigaboo Modeliste, the respective guitarist and drummer of New Orleans’s celebrated rhythm-meisters–put that trademark chunky sound together at the Fox…
