For decades social psychologists, campus film historians and other pests have been cooking up elaborate theories about how the Z-grade giant insect flicks of the 1950s were really reflections of our deepest Cold War fears, or that the disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s, with its swarms of killer bees and…
Wednesday March 8 Finn and dandy: At the heart of the updated Finnish folk sound of Varttina are the voices of four women harmonizing in the kinds of timbres that last took your breath away when sung by the Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria. But these saucy Finnish ladies have punched…
Pity Denver. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of American cities–it can’t get no respect. Regardless of what’s done here, negative national attention seems to follow. DIA is the most recent case in point. The new airport is nationally renowned not for its radical and dramatic design or its cutting-edge technology, but…
The production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Country Dinner Playhouse is clean, lively, ingeniously choreographed and fetchingly performed family entertainment. But this rollicking story, based on the 1954 MGM film of the same name, does require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, particularly for adult women…
Kevin Barry tries to zero in on a painter’s life in The Secret of Durable Pigments, now in its premiere production at the Changing Scene. The playwright creates a number of interesting little portraits–the artist’s mother, his best friend, his kindly old aunt–but his portrait of the artist as an…
There are plenty of good reasons Once Were Warriors has become the most successful film in New Zealand’s history, outgrossing The Piano and the Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park. Shock value is only one of them. Lee Tamahori’s searing examination of a contemporary Maori family facing extinction in the brutal urban…
How’s this for a comic premise? A Jewish American princess finally gets engaged to her longtime boyfriend. While everyone pushes to set the date, her nagging questions about marriage in the Nineties all come to a head with the discovery that every member of her family is having an extramarital…
Wednesday March 1 Pretty plies: Ballet doesn’t have to be stuffy anymore. When the dance company Ballet Eddy Toussaint U.S.A. hits the stage tonight at the Arvada Center, led by its progressive, Haitian-born choreographer/namesake, you’ll be bowled over by a high-energy balance of ballet and jazz steps taken to an…
Mountain McClintock never took a dive–it’s the one thing the aging boxer is proud of, the one shred of dignity he still owns. But the hero of Rod Serling’s sagacious Requiem for a Heavyweight has a dignity he doesn’t recognize, a small flame of intelligence that blazes up for one…
Truth hides in the details. The regional premiere of Parallel Lives, at Jack’s Theatre, zeroes in on the particulars of women’s lives, especially as they interact with men–and gets the Big Picture right. Based on The Kathy and Mo Show, by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy, this feminist sketch comedy…
The pleasures of Shallow Grave, a stylish black comedy disguised as a bloody thriller, are strewn so playfully about that they feel effortless. The characters, a trio of twentysomethings sharing a roomy flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, are so snotty and amoral that we’re never burdened by any pretense of liking…
That Irish charm school the movies have been conducting of late is still in session. The Secret of Roan Inish, an innocuous bit of Hibernian whimsy featuring a little girl’s vivid imagination, a kindly fisherman/grandfather who likes to pass on the family myths and a boy who’s mysteriously floated out…
Wednesday February 22 Be bop: Tonight may mark a first–we’re willing to bet there’s never been a collaboration between an orchestra and a Denver cartoonist. But when Tom Blomster’s Mostly Strauss Orchestra tunes up for tonight’s Freedom Concert, it’ll be Westword’s own artiste-about-town, Kenny Be, providing the visuals. Be’s series…
Half Native American and half African-American, the title character of Carlyle Brown’s Buffalo Hair struggles to make sense of his racial identity. That internal battle, refracted in the lives of several other mixed-race characters, forms the central conflict of this fascinating historical drama. The regional premiere at Eulipions offers an…
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…
