Jesus Camp

“The higher the hair, the closer to God,” says Reverend Yolanda, the campy, drag-queen star of the new documentary Reverend Yolanda’s Old Time Gospel Hour — The Movie, billed as the Rocky Horror Picture Show of country gospel music. “Yolanda and Dolly Parton keep the wig makers of America in…

Roll ’Em

The Found Footage Festival has been bringing the gospel of weird-ass VHS footage — from how-to-cybersex videos to vintage home-shopping insanity — to the masses for an entire decade. And yet it doesn’t look like the fest is going to run out of new material. The latest iteration of the…

A Wild Ride

Though New Belgium Brewing’s Tour de Fat travels to several cities each year, it still feels especially Denver-centric in a town where cyclists of every ilk ride side by side every day on miles of city streets and greenway trails. And that’s what makes the crazy, costume-friendly festival — which…

A Little Off the Top

Vivienne VaVoom (aka Michelle Baldwin) has made a brand out of the “Burlesque As It Was” concept. Indeed, if burlesque has become a runaway train of popularity in recent years, VaVoom was the woman who drove that locomotive into Denver. And after earning accolades for her old-timey style of burlesque,…

Direct Objects

Joseph Coniff, one of many talented graduates of the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and a member of the Rule Gallery stable, typically creates deadpan sculptural works exploring the inner and perceived lives of readymade objects. But in his new show at Rule, (in parentheses), he takes a…

Country Time

In 1948, Denver’s partnership with its first-ever sister city, Brest, France, proved to be ahead of the curve. It wasn’t until eight years later that then-president Eisenhower established America’s sister-cities initiative. Denver’s Worldwide Festival, happening today at the McNichols Building, celebrates our ten global sister-city connections as well as the…

Westword DISH

Join us and over forty restaurants as we enjoy a beautiful Denver Sunday in Sculpture Park at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. 11 to 12:30 p.m. VIP access; 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. general admission. DISH is a 21 and over event. Sun., Sept. 7, 11 a.m.-3:30 p.m., 2014…

A Streetcar Named Desire

Vintage Theatre turns on the summer heat with the classic of all classic Tennessee Williams dramas: the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire, a story forever etched across our eyeballs in black and white, thanks to Elia Kazan’s iconic film version starring Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh as Stanley Kowalski…

Odd on the Rocks

The iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre inspires wonder in visitors and performers alike, but with its open skies and arena seating, it doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for a comedy venue. Comedy, like most fungi, tends to grow in darkened basements, but the 2014 programming calendar at Red Rocks has…

Bogged Down

In The Lewis Man, set on the forbidding shores of Lewis Isle in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Detective Inspector Fin Macleod, a native islander who’s come back, becomes engulfed in the mystery of a body found preserved in a peat bog, which turns out to be not 2,000 years…

So True

There are plenty of documentary festivals east of the Mississippi, which is why it’s so important that DocuWest has carved out space for nonfiction films in our region. “What we want to do is make DocuWest and Denver a hub for documentary filmmakers, documentary film lovers and those who really…

Pippin Fresh

As summer segues into autumn, the Denver Center Attractions theater season is up and running with Pippin, a Tony Award-winning musical that’s proven itself timeless on Broadway, where the Brechtian ’70s hit resurfaced again last year to rave reviews. Bob Fosse’s involvement in the original show, featuring music and lyrics…

Review: Conceptual Takes on Nature Fill the Robischon Gallery

The exhibit Testing Grounds, which runs through this weekend only at Robischon Gallery, brings together artists who look to nature, especially the Western landscape, as sources for their disparate approaches. As usual at Robischon, there’s enough room to allow the artists to essentially be given solos, so that the work…

Harmony Hammond and Tirza True Latimer on Queer Feminist Abstraction

Art naturally evolved from representation (pictures of things) toward abstraction, argued modernist art critic Clement Greenberg and his fellow formalists. Portraiture and landscape painting be damned: In pure art, paintings do nothing but express their essence as painting. But in the 1960s, painting about painting fell out of style and…

Playbill: Four Front Range Plays to See This Week

Theater companies all along the Front Range are springing to life as fall seasons get under way. Catch a rocking musical or a taut dark comedy close to home, or venture north for a one-woman tour-de-force or an evening of colorful folklore, with awesome stage moves. See also: M. Butterfly,…

The Ten Best Comedy Events in Denver this September

As the year lumbers toward autumn and Denver shakes off its various summer-festival hangovers, our city’s bleary-eyed revelers have few better live entertainment options this month than comedy. From a nice roster of comedy club headliners rolling through town, banner months for some of Denver’s most esteemed local showcases, to a greedily stacked comedy festival, comedy fans have solid options nearly every week this month.

See Tree of Life, Celebrate One Year of Ernie Quiroz at DFS

Denver Film Society programming manager Ernie Quiroz has been on the job for a year now. In that time, he’s learned that Denver film audiences are nothing if not surprising. “There’s some films that I did that I thought would go over great, and just utterly bombed,” he says. “And…

Retail and the Lost Art of Customer Service

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip back to my old stamping grounds, the Cherry Creek Shopping Center. Working there off and on from 1996 to 2013, I spent a lot of time wandering the building’s hallowed shopping-mall halls (when you work retail, you do a lot of…

On Trend: Clear Fashion Is Clearly a Hit for Fall

With fall right around the corner, we’re starting to get pumped for the season’s new looks. One trend is already clear: Transparent and see-through fashion is now being rocked by modern guys and gals alike, and has hit Denver in a major manner. Keep reading for more. See also: Suitsupply…