Burns Park fills the triangle of hillside defined by Colorado Boulevard to the west, Alameda Avenue to the south and Leetsdale Drive, which runs diagonally from northwest to southeast. The park is notable for being home to a suite of mostly minimalist sculptures, some of which have been on the…
When I was a kid, I dreamed of Mars. I wanted to go there, see its strange sights, meet whatever strange beings might live there. Sure, I dreamed of other planets, too, both here in our solar system and in galaxies far, far away, but Mars dominated my childhood fantasies…
Over the weekend, the fourth annual Denver County Fair brought everything Denver — from pot and paraphernalia vendors in the first-ever county fair Pot Pavilion to drag queens and lucha libre wrestlers and pretty contortionists in the Freak Show — to the National Western Complex for a nonstop weekend of…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…
Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, non-threatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is to not have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Perhaps fitting for a celebration of a musician whose polyrhythmic extravaganzas tended to run twenty-plus minutes, Alex Gibney’s doc Finding Fela takes a while to get started. The opening scenes focus on rehearsals for Broadway’s Fela!, and early on, Gibney shows us more footage of stage-Fela Sahr Ngaujah than of…
Though I generally love Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, The Sound of Music has never been one of my favorites. But continuing a tradition it started two years ago of bringing a more mainstream production down from the hills to Denver’s larger audiences, that’s the show Central City is presenting at…
Last month, Michael Paglia reviewed Unbound: Sculpture in the Field, an over-the-top outdoor exhibit for which the prairie land south of the Arvada Center has been turned into an informal sculpture garden. This week, Paglia takes a look at another of the shows in the Unbound series. For Unbound: Five…
Henry IV, Part 1. King Henry IV gained the throne by deposing his predecessor, Richard II, and having him murdered, and in Henry IV, Part 1, the crown lies uneasily on his head. Men who aided his insurgency have turned against him, and there’s rebellion brewing throughout the kingdom. Worst…
Joseph Coniff (in parenthesis). This is only the second presentation to open at the Rule Gallery since the untimely death of Robin Rule late last year. It was important to Rule that the gallery continue, so three longtime associates — Valerie Santerli, Rachel Beitz and Hilary Morris — are carrying…
Wonder what NASA’s latest mission to the red planet has turned up? Get the answers — and maybe get your future astronauts excited about space in the process — at the Mars Science Laboratory Two Year Recap. Your guide to the stellar successes of the Curiosity Rover is Adam Pender,…
“We wanted to experiment with trying an event-themed cocktail party,” says Denver Botanic Gardens spokeswoman Erin Bird, explaining the origins of Unwind. “This is the first time we’ve done something like this; we’ve done a few one-off things in the past, but we wanted to brand Unwind as an ongoing…
Can sports persuade more people to take an active interest in art? That’s the notion that set Game Changer, the latest exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in motion, and things are about to get very active with Summer Games, a string of free interactive athletic events that…
Adam Stone doesn’t want to reveal much about the art installation at the center of Screw Tooth’s Prophetia Vetitum Mundi (or Prophecy of the Forbidden World), other than to say that it’s fairly massive and really absurd, every inch of it is covered with tiny pieces of stuff and it’s…
The American public is still very much divided on Bill Maher, in spite of all his years in the public eye. But while people may disagree with his beliefs, few can deny his impact on the media landscape. Maher became a household name during the network run of his signature…
Is it trash or treasure? At today’s fifth annual Antique Row Neighborhood Block Party, experts will be on hand to appraise all kinds of stuff, from artwork to Civil War-era belongings to dolls and more. “People think that because Grandma owned something that it’s 300 years old. Well, Grandma may…
Denver has a vibrant, thriving comics scene, and collectives like Squid Works are a big part of that. For nearly twenty years, the artists, writers and various other creatives of Squid Works have been producing an array of content in every medium under the wide umbrella of “comics” while helping…
Burns Park is a hidden jewel in plain sight: Trapped in a traffic-heavy triangle bordered by Colorado Boulevard, Alameda Avenue and Leetsdale Drive, it’s in the middle of the action but rarely used. Still, the tiny park has a storied past that includes four big-name modern-minimalist sculptures, the remaining pieces…
Boulder’s Frequent Flyers aerial dance school and company is already held in high regard. But every August, director Nancy Smith elevates the program to an international level with the two-week International Aerial Dance Festival, bringing master dancers and choreographers from around the world to join an already distinguished student body…
Fermentation is the blessed process that gives us beer, wine and spirits, but it’s also one of the oldest forms of food preservation in the world, and this weekend’s second annual Fermentation Festival & Market plans to highlight that history, as well as showcase everything from pickles and sauerkraut to…
Cat trainer Samantha Martin, who travels the nation with her Amazing Acro-Cats trained-cat act, is the first to admit that there’s truth to the cliché about herding cats: “The cats, they’ll mess with you a little bit,” she told Westword before a 2011 performance. “They’ll switch up a trick or…
