If the star of your summer fantasy/adventure movie happens to be a gorilla–or rather, a gorilla suit with a tiny actress stuffed inside–you naturally get a little stingy with the rest of the casting. That’s what the makers of Congo have done. The bogus primate is called Amy, and she…
Wednesday June 7 Taping measures: Local jazz vocalist Lynn Skinner will be in fine company tonight when she performs with two of Denver’s best instrumentalists–guitarist and master of chordal changes Dale Bruning and open-minded trumpet player Ron Miles–at Vartan Jazz, 231 Milwaukee St. The 8 p.m. show–which promises to smoke…
In Denver, like everywhere else, there are two highly distinct and opposing camps when it comes to the fine arts. There are the artists associated with a number of contemporary movements, and there are those who embrace more traditional styles. The rivalry between the two is anything but friendly: Traditionalists…
Four women inhabit a mansion in hell (provincial France circa the 1930s), and the horror they experience there is as dark as it gets on earth. Wendy Kesselman’s relentless exploration of class hatred and oppression in My Sister in This House amounts to an important modern tragedy of almost mythic…
It doesn’t matter how sappy the music is, the kids are what sells Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic The Sound of Music. The Country Dinner Playhouse’s revival features seven terrific kids, and every time they’re on stage, the whole production lifts a notch. Blatantly sentimental, the show has a few minor…
Hal Hartley’s Amateur flirts with pretension, but Hartley always pulls its head out of the clouds with dark humor. Consider: A French ex-nun named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who believes the Virgin Mary has appeared to her, is now living in New York, writing pornographic sketches for a skin magazine. A…
Trying to squeeze the goo out of Robert James Waller’s romantic bestseller, The Bridges of Madison County, must have been like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wherever you look, there’s another mess. Clint Eastwood, a man of few words, and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, a man of patience, have…
Wednesday May 31 Bottom of the month: A favorite mingle–the Denver Art Museum’s Top of the Week spring music series–comes to a close tonight. And what a swinging finale it’ll be–with the Queen City Jazz Band’s spirited Dixieland-style music accompanying a stroll through selected museum exhibits. Top of the Week…
The husband-and-wife team of Tracy and Sushe Felix emerged from the free-for-all that was 1980s art in Colorado. The Manitou Springs couple was associated with a hip, cartoonlike approach that was part and parcel of the neo-expressionism that dominated the period. But in the meantime, they’ve changed significantly, taking their…
Louis Jordan was an ingenious saxophonist, vocalist and songwriter whose energetic music lit up radio airwaves in the 1940s and continued to delight audiences into the 1960s. Roll Jordan Roll, at the Denver Civic Theatre, celebrates the moment in Jordan’s life when he began to make it big with his…
Humorist and movie star Will Rogers made political satire a gentle art. The Oklahoma country boy once said he never met a man he didn’t like, and that kindly sentiment even governed the way he skewered politicians. The Will Rogers Follies celebrates Rogers’s show-business career in the brazen style of…
What does it say about Hollywood that it has taken a British writer, Paula Milne, and a British director, Antonia Bird, to come up with the most provocative movie in years about American first love and American teenage anxiety? Mad Love is a little rough around the edges, but there’s…
If we are to believe Mel Gibson’s version of thirteenth-century history–and there’s not much evidence that we should–the ragtag army led by Scottish patriot William Wallace gloried in goring onrushing Englishmen with deer antlers, in bludgeoning, spearing, crushing and dismembering them. But first they mooned them. Braveheart, Gibson’s bloody (and…
Wednesday May 24 A key player: Musician Robin Connell takes her jazz straightahead, but she isn’t afraid to rework the standards to her own liking. The Detroit composer/pianist, who knocked about New York City before moving to Greeley in 1991, will bring drummer Mike Smith, bassist Eric Applegate and trombonist…
The Mackey Gallery is as filled with color as a spring garden. But bright hues are about the only common ground shared by the two very different artists on display. Lynn Heitler’s work falls readily within the tradition of abstract expressionism. Her more or less instinctive formal relationships provide a…
Two respected Denver artists, Dan Ragland and Bill Stockman, offer more reasons to respect them, with new work displayed in separate exhibits at the Grant Gallery. Most of Ragland’s somber, mixed-media pieces started out as Polaroids. Although the original photo images remain fairly true, Ragland enlarges them to mural size…
When a scumbag becomes a TV talk-show celebrity, the world is in trouble. And so English playwright Alan Ayckbourn skewers the cult of the celebrity, the mendacity of television and the public’s infinite appetite for manipulative trash in Man of the Moment. With a subject such as this, sparks ought…
Intense, ingenious and shocking, Steven Dietz’s God’s Country is also appallingly timely. After the Oklahoma bombing and all the recent press about so-called patriot militias, a powerful play about the murder of liberal Jewish radio talk-show host Alan Berg, along with a painful expose of the ideology behind that murder,…
The guards probably won’t be piping Die Hard With a Vengeance into Timothy McVeigh’s jail cell, but it might look awfully familiar to him if they did. As you might expect, the third installment of the Bruce Willis action series has but one dramatic goal–to blow things up–and even though…
Once they become “celebrities,” some Hollywood types like to hang around race-car drivers. Others prefer tennis players. Or boxers. Billy Crystal claims to have played a little hoop back in high school on Long Island, so the jocks he sniffs from one end of Tinseltown to the other are NBA…
Wednesday May 17 Tear of the dog: Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy open up a whole slew of new possibilities in character development with their book When Elephants Weep, a volume that uses studies of joyful squirrels and vengeful whales to explore the authors’ belief in the existence of animal…
It’s hard for those who love art to understand why some would seek it out only to destroy it. What is the motive of the vandal who slashes a painting or defaces a sculpture? Is he deranged? It’s different with architecture. No one would consider out-of-town hotel magnate Fred Kummer…
