Wednesday August 9 Listen and learn: Jazz and Japan are the culturally diverse subjects at two separate lecture series in the area. The Chautauqua Forum Series ends its season at 8 tonight with a time-honored tradition–a concert lecture given annually by Willie Hill, University of Colorado College of Music professor…
Buildings are among the most public of artifacts–they’re really out there, literally. So it’s a shame that most of Denver’s built environment is so bad, more “narcotecture” than architecture. On the bright side, this sorry situation makes the good structures all the easier to recognize, even for neophytes. And surely…
The second series in The Changing Scene’s annual festival of new plays called “Summerplay” opened last weekend with four short pieces as different from one another as fruit, vegetables, rocks and rice. Some of it is digestible, some of it isn’t. But each play gets a full-bodied production, intelligent directing…
When Bertolt Brecht first staged his scathing The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928, it not only delighted his middle- and upper-class audiences, it made him money for the first time in his theater life. Maybe it was the sheer naughtiness of its womanizing, murderous, thieving antihero, Macheath (aka Mack…
Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
Wednesday August 2 Foo’s paradise: Not one to dwell on past events, ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl surged forward after Kurt Cobain’s suicide with his own band, Foo Fighters, thrashing around old and new musical ideas with a do-it-yourself confidence not generally expected of a man firmly ensconced behind his traps…
Between the First World War and the 1930s, the United States experienced an internal population shift unprecedented in its history. More than 1 million rural blacks left their sharecropper farms in the South and came north in search of factory jobs and better living conditions in the industrialized urban centers…
Different people, different points of view: That’s the modest message behind 10 Percent in Maple Grove–a collection of disconnected scenes about gay and straight interaction in a small Midwestern town. Playwright Mark Dunn’s world-premiere show at Jack’s Theater is not about sex, AIDS, hate or self-pity, but rather about understanding,…
Humphrey Bogart never actually said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca. But somehow the line has lived on and permeated the culture. It stands for the reckless, sophisticated tough guy Bogart usually played–the stuff of male role models for the last fifty-odd years. Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam brings…
If American adults are still capable of being shocked by the behavior of teenagers–I’ll lay six to five that they’re not–then Larry Clark’s Kids is the movie that will shock them. The New York teens we meet here for one harrowing 24-hour period talk dirty. They pursue sex and drugs…
You don’t always get what you pay for. As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be reshot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked–such were…
Wednesday July 26 Moonlight serenade: Get out your shoulder pads, girls–Larimer Square will be transformed this evening into a wartime dancehall, with help from the still-rollicking Glenn Miller Big Band Orchestra. Although bandleader Miller perished more than fifty years ago, his spirit continues to jitterbug into the Nineties as the…
Abstract expressionism is the bane of the uninitiated. Paintings of this type have no discernable subject and typically look sloppy, covered with scribbles, drips and scratches. They’re the kind of thing people are talking about when they say “My kid could do that.” But to artists, the problem of creating…
A major event in the local art world of the 1980s was the “21 Year Show,” presented eleven years ago at the now-defunct Progresso Gallery. It displayed the works of a group of local artists 21 years after they came together at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Now comes…
Musicals tend to be shallow, sentimental fun–a day in the park. But once in a while, one rolls along that actually has a little something to say. Three musicals now on the boards in Denver offer something beyond a quick escape, rousing tunes and slick performances: a trace of social…
It has taken a week or two to catch up with an exceptional children’s movie called The Indian in the Cupboard, and the wait was worthwhile. The director is Muppet-meister Frank Oz, the screenplay is by Melissa Mathison, who wrote the family blockbusters E.T. the Extraterrestrial and The Black Stallion,…
For Westerners, at least, the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre are symbolized by the image of a lone, nameless Chinese student standing in the path of a huge army tank on a street in Beijing. Played and replayed on the evening news, these few seconds of blurry…
Wednesday July 19 Take a bike: In just a few short years, Denver Bike Week has been expanded to Denver Bike Month, offering fun incentives to cyclists throughout July. But the event’s centerpiece is still today’s Bike to Work Day, when all you suits can pedal downtown, grab a free…
In recent years, Loveland has acquired a national reputation as the place where romantics and cornballs send their Valentine’s Day cards to be canceled with a “Love-Land” postmark at the local post office (which, by the way, features some charming WPA murals by Russell Sherman). Perhaps it’s this saccharine sentimentality…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has been around a long time, but though a lot of people support the noble cause, many more do not. There are just too many agonies associated with attendance at CSF. Every year, those of us who do show up try to forget the grotesque discomfort…
For more than half a century, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel stood in splendid isolation from his peers. Social subversive, incessant joker and deep thinker, he took it upon himself to lambaste some of the world’s most cherished institutions–notably the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class morality and vintage political correctness–without regard…
James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
