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…
Here in Colorado, we get more than our share of “pretty” photographs of the West. These brilliantly colored fantasies portray a land full of unspoiled scenery, snow-capped peaks, green forests and crystalline lakes. But longtime residents know another West that seldom makes it into coffee-table books or postcards: a vast,…
Mark Twain spins fitfully in his grave every time Bernard Sabath’s execrable The Boys in Autumn plays again. Now this effort by a third-rate artiste to project his meager talents onto the work of one of his betters is playing at the Theatre at Muddy’s. If it weren’t so dull,…
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, now at the Theatre on Broadway, makes a plea for compassion in these days of AIDS. But his ideas about how a lover can best express that compassion are sometimes questionable. Rife with in-jokes and written primarily for the gay community, Jeffrey is a kind of riotous…
We need only glance at the supermarket tabloids to find the current follies of the British monarchy. But long before the Prince of Wales wished he were a tampon and Lady Di got those riding lessons, there was George III, the fellow who dispatched the Redcoats to the colonies, wound…
Warner Brothers has been making tough, compelling prison melodramas on and off since 1932. This is hardly the golden age of identifiable studio style, of course, but you can bet your last nickel that the stingy coots who once ran the family business like a work farm would approve of…
Wednesday January 18 A stand-up kinda guy: Remember Tom Hanks in his role as a comedian in Punchline? The comic touch in his routines came directly from the funny bone of Barry Sobel, who not only coached Hanks in the fine art of making people roll on the floor but…
Hard as it is to admit, Denver’s alternative scene is aging. Well-established cooperative galleries such as Pirate and Spark are celebrating anniversaries well into the double digits, and many of their members now enjoy elder-statesman status. Housed mostly in shabby storefronts in cheap neighborhoods, these hardy urban survivors can seem…
The texture and nature of intimacy is the texture and substance of Shay Youngblood’s potent Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery at Eulipions Theatre. The story about a twelve-year-old girl and the eight “Big Mamas” who raised her reveals the hidden threads women sometimes weave into a community. Many of the…
The record book tells us that Ty Cobb was one of the greatest players in baseball history, and he was. His .367 lifetime batting average will never be approached. His record of 4,191 hits was finally broken by Pete Rose in 1985, but he still holds the mark for runs…
As usual, filmmaker Zhang Yimou is in hot water with the Chinese authorities–the kind of people who think freedom of expression means picking your own appetizer off the lunch menu. Zhang’s latest film, To Live, is a family epic that just happens to trace the agonies and ironies of the…
Believe it or not, Paul Newman will be seventy this year. That serves to remind us how long it’s been since the crass young cowboy called Hud and the Christlike rebel Cool Hand Luke passed into the realm of movie legend. It also tells us that the heroes of Newman’s…
