One of the most marvelous of medieval tales is the story of Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil for either knowledge, wealth, youth or sex, depending on who’s doing the telling. Among the most appealing versions of the cautionary tale is a contemporary African-American treatment–The Trials and Tribulations…
We probably have William S. Burroughs to thank for the unlikely inflation of heroin use into an American literary credential. Drug vogues come and go, but ever since Burroughs sanctified smack in Naked Lunch, the wannabes of tragic hipdom have been quick to embrace anyone who owns a ballpoint pen…
If you’re looking for a spark of life in Team Merchant-Ivory’s fatal collision with American history, Jefferson in Paris, skip right past the hotly disputed moment at which the author of the Declaration of Independence beds a fourteen-year-old slave girl from Old Virginny. That’s this straight-faced movie’s lone comic moment–and…
Wednesday April 19 The write stuff: Author Ana Castillo is a novelist, poet and essayist, and she’s a favorite among her contemporaries, earning glowing reviews from fellow Latina writers Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez. It’s not hard to see why–her 1993 novel So Far From God was described by novelist…
The inaugural show for Pismo Gallery’s new space in Cherry Creek is a splendid survey of recent work by Dale Chihuly, the prominent glass sculptor from Washington state. Chihuly is represented by many examples of his most characteristic work, groups of small blown-glass elements nested in large ones. By assembling…
In a sense, modern art came to the United States because of World War II. Hitler, like some of the more extreme right-wingers of our own time, hated modernism. Among his earliest targets were the artists and architects of the famous Bauhaus school, which was forcibly closed by the Nazis…
Renowned modern sculptor Starr Kempf was found dead April 7 at his Pine Grove Avenue studio in Colorado Springs. Police said Kempf, 77, appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Kempf was best known for his ambitious steel kinetic sculptures, which incorporated ready-made elements like ventilator turbines and…
The Compass Theatre Company’s Much Ado About Nothing needs more room. The cramped space of the Dorie studio in the Denver Civic Theatre is more suited to smaller casts. But restricted as the actors are, they still manage to bustle, run, stand in elaborate ceremonious arrangements and even dance. So…
Christopher Selbie is a lot older than any Hamlet I’ve ever seen, and he’s more manic-depressive than melancholic. But if his performance is quirky, it’s also remarkable–and it turns the Compass Theatre Company’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though uneven and clunky in places, into an oddball victory. Hamlet has been…
The unholy furor that assorted Roman Catholics and sundry conservatives are raising over Priest should be just enough to ensure its success at the box office. But no infusion of scandal can deliver it from TV-movie mediocrity. British director Antonia Bird, who’s making her feature-film debut, and writer Jimmy McGovern,…
The son of a poet, Bernardo Bertolucci was a prize-winning poet himself by the age of 21. Then came a turn in the road, and he spent the next two decades making a powerful case that, to use his words, “cinema is the true poetic language.” In 1961 he dropped…
Wednesday April 12 Pulling strings: Based in Colorado Springs, where they are artists-in-residence at that city’s University of Colorado campus, the Da Vinci String Quartet is a chamber ensemble at home with a variety of composers and musical periods. The prize-winning group–Jerilyn Jorgensen, Kay Kireilis, Margaret Miller and Katharine Knight–will…
Eric Zimmer, a relatively new member of the Edge Gallery co-op as well as a relative newcomer to Denver, currently fills Edge’s front gallery with an ambitious display of quirky paintings and paper pieces. The paintings are closely interrelated and mostly follow a similar program: Zimmer draws with ink on…
I’ll be as clear as glass. It is an act of barbarism to even raise the question of whether I. M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza is worth preserving, let alone to threaten it with destruction, as St. Louis-based absentee landlord Fred Kummer has. The plaza ranks as one of the greatest…
The growing influence the movies have over theater has its downside. Some theatrical productions try to vie with movie spectacle, for instance, cheapening the theatrical experience, a la Miss Saigon. But Hollywood’s influence can also lead to ingenious or charming solutions to theatrical problems. Madeline Walker O’Brien’s The Why and…
The full title of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. A mouthful–and really a much more proper title than the abbreviated one. This is a long, complicated…
Those glimpses of wounded babies, desolate old women and bombed buildings on the evening news pass through most Americans like air: The war in Bosnia remains a meaningless abstraction located somewhere between Judge Ito’s latest pronouncement and Chelsea’s latest camel ride. Milcho Manchevski’s beautiful and disturbing Before the Rain probably…
As a boy, Samuel Goldwyn was an apprentice glovemaker, not a reader, and in the Thirties the late Hollywood mogul had a famously loose acquaintance with the obscure French novels and half-forgotten Italian plays he was always buying in hopes of giving selected MGM talkies a touch of class. So…
Wednesday April 5 Affirmative action: Social consciousness and comedy have probably been willing bedfellows since the beginning of time. Or at least since the first funny guy got up in front of his cavemates and began to make fun of know-it-all Glog, who shared his coconuts only with the palest…
Current exhibits at Spark and Pirate: a contemporary art oasis each feature art that represents the human body–though you might not know it from simply looking. In Spark’s front gallery, Susan Koenig shows both works on paper and works made out of paper. Her still-life drawings, most combining charcoal and…
Wes Hempel and Jack Balas, two painters who share a studio and an affinity for narrative content, are now sharing the Robischon Gallery with their separate but equally impressive exhibits. Hempel’s paintings, on display in the front gallery, pointedly evoke art history, specifically seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art–but there’s a feeling…
It might seem odd to find it in a theater instead of a smoky bar, but the Denver Center Theatre Company’s It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues is a scintillating piece of work. The songs have been carefully chosen to illustrate the history of the blues with all its hot…
