When a single spotlight illuminated the bottle of Black Grouse whiskey resting on a bar stool center-stage, the 2,800 people in the audience at the Temple Buell Theatre rose to their feet, their deafening applause seemingly cheering the bottle of booze itself until Southern sass-man Ron White casually materialized out…
Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park has started its 123rd season with a new family-friendly roller coaster, seven more shows and a third custom-craft beer. The park’s new Blazin’ Buckaroo allows cowboys and cowgirls as short as 36 inches high to climb aboard (but they’ll need to be accompanied by…
This week’s cover story, “Paging Doctor Bang Bang,” recounts the medical adventures of Denver Roller Dolls skater Kimmy Kimmy Bang Bang, a foot-and-ankle surgeon known professionally as Dr. Kim Wilms. The 32-year-old is the league’s unofficial in-house doctor, assisting skaters with the sprains and bruises that come with playing the…
Ryan Demers, a Denver-based filmmaker, is the co-founder of Gaylord St. Productions, and has managed the impressive feat of helming two independent films without going completely bankrupt and abandoning the dream. The Honey Cooler, a farcical detective story set in the milieu of an economically depressed Denver rife with furries. In this week’s edition of Westword Book Club, Demers discusses his noir influences, politics, primary sources and trying to avoid being derivative.
You won’t need to crack open that piggy bank to go out this weekend, because every event on our 10 for $10 list is absolutely free. Whether you choose to peruse mandala drawings at an art show, gaze at vintage Volkswagons at a car fest, or take in Denver’s jazz…
A work constantly in progress, the Crochet Coral Reef is an installation of ten textile pieces at the Denver Art Museum, part of its summer exhibition, Spun: Adventures In Textiles. Through the project’s Denver Satellite Reef, museum visitors have a chance to contribute to the installation directly, by coming in…
Spun: Adventures in Textiles, this summer’s huge, campus-wide aggregation of exhibitions devoted to the textile arts at the Denver Art Museum, is definitely going to require more than one visit to absorb. In fact, DAM curators — every single one of them had a hand in putting the shows together…
Tonight The Office bids farewell after eight seasons and 200 episodes. Series finales have a complicated history; final episodes have left viewers with tears of joy as well as fists of fury as beloved characters have ended up in prison, happily in love, having mental breakdowns…or alone. Keep reading for…
Update: Congrats to therealstevecoogan! Check your email for details on how to claim your tickets. Original post: On June 22, as part of this year’s Westword Music Showcase, the Colorado symphony will partner with special guests to perform the Beck Song Reader. But you can catch the CSO even earlier…
The annual Five Points Jazz Festival is Saturday, May 18, and to kick it off, the city is offering a special screening of the 2011 documentary The Girls In the Band at the McNichols Building tomorrow night. The film traces the history of female jazz musicians who were marginalized and…
Comedy writing pioneer Bruce Vilanch is bursting with gayness. One of the first openly gay comedians, he’s known for his continuing role on Hollywood Squares and as a head writer for the Academy Awards show, as well as writing jokes for Bette Midler, Elizabeth Taylor, The Brady Bunch, Donnie and…
In Tainted, Guadalajara-based artist Eduardo Sarabia manipulates reality through a combination of paint and photography. Tapped to curate the Huevos Revueltos series at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Sarabia has invited invites artists, spiritual and legislative experts, and writers to discuss the cross-pollinating of contemporary art, politics and culture…
Materialized, a group show featuring abstract works utilizing unusual materials, opens today at Robischon Gallery; it’s a continuation of the gallery’s Material Abstraction, which introduced the whole idea last summer. All photos courtesy of Robischon Gallery. See also: – Material Abstraction at Robischon is more than just medium – Best…
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
One of the things that keeps art interesting is the way it’s constantly flowing, with various currents periodically overtaking one another and, in that way, changing established ideas. Last year, for example, a series of shows launched by the Getty Center in Los Angeles, collectively known as Pacific Standard Time,…
A trashy vampire flick in art-film drag, Kiss of the Damned satisfies on neither level. Drawing on a host of Euro-horror influences, including but far from limited to a synth score reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Goblin-performed soundtracks, Xan Cassavetes’s pastiche follows lonely bloodsucker Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) as she…
Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
Seemingly crafted to validate the fears of those conservatives who rage that the white man can’t get respect on the big screen these days, the smart-till-it-isn’t thriller Black Rock centers on a tense scene of hero-pantsing and gender inversion. The piece-of-shit bad guys, a couple of vets of our desert…
Dividing the Estate is a quietly incisive play about a large and contentious family. Stella Gordon, the 85-year-old matriarch, rules over a grand old house in Harrison, Texas — the fictional small town where author Horton Foote set most of his sixty plays. Stella is strong-willed and authoritative, but essentially…
The power of mothers — for good and ill — is a theater trope that never quite loses its potency. In Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water, three daughters convene for the funeral of their mother, Vi, who has, in different ways, ruined all their lives. Mary was the repository…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than SparkNotes is a high-quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shhh! Don’t tell the eighth-graders about Gregory Peck’s…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
