Susan Claassen becomes a fashion icon in A Conversation With Edith Head

A Hollywood stylist before the term was even coined, costume designer Edith Head was the imagination behind the wardrobes for hundreds of films. For decades, the petite, behind-the-scenes boss oversaw a majority of Paramount’s clothing-design work, dressing stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis. She was the recipient of eight…

Meet the 2013 MasterMinds: Kitty Mae Millinery

On Saturday, Westword celebrated its ninth class of MasterMinds — artistic adventurers who are changing the landscape of Denver. Here’s our fourth winner: I’m not a hat person, but the first time I saw Susan Dillon’s handmade toppers, I had to throw my hat into the ring. Under the moniker…

Now Showing

20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…

Let My People Go!‘s cute comedy offers little insight

With his fluttery falsetto and haughty gaze, Ruben, the flamboyantly gay, ambivalently Jewish twenty-something hero of the new French comedy Let My People Go!, is the kind of big-screen character usually relegated to the sidelines. It’s refreshing to see him front and center, gamely played by Nicolas Maury, gangly limbs…

The reimagined Jack the Giant Slayer is a tale well told

To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on “Jack and the Beanstalk” be if those fearsome beasties didn’t somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook…

Germinal’s ensemble cast shines in Spoon River Anthology

The stage is set up for a cozy Halloween party: autumn-leaf ornaments, joke skeletons on the walls, a red paper lantern. Six people are sitting around a table for a seance. But the table is situated over a graveyard, and pretty soon the participants’ bodies are taken over by ghosts…

West of Memphis is more a work of advocacy than of journalism

The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. But for many viewers, that isn’t the case in the four films chronicling the arrest, conviction, and eighteen-year incarceration of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin for a crime they didn’t commit. The crime-scene photos of three young…

Californication‘s excesses take a turn for the worse

Honestly, when it started six years ago, Californication was provocative, ballsy and fun, with laugh-out-loud dialogue and plenty of smart musings about love, sex, family and responsibility. Over five seasons, anti-hero Hank Moody (David Duchovny) has drank and fucked his way through a series of Hollywood writing jobs, all the…

21 & Over just dares you to get offended

Guy humor is always with us, kind of like the poor. For as long as cavemen have been etching fart jokes into the walls of caves, women have been rolling their eyes, as they didn’t yet have the language tools to whip up outraged essays for Jezebel. Still, given the…

The Dope on Drop City

In 1965, four art students and filmmakers from the University of Kansas and the University of Colorado bought seven acres of land just north of Trinidad and created a community. Drop City tells the story of that now-famous community from the mouths of the people who lived it — and…

Candygram for Mongo

Colorado’s place as part of the Old West drives the Wildlife Experience’s Whiskey and a Western program, which pairs classic Westerns with whiskey and food. Of course, your own Western roots don’t need to be nearly as deep to appreciate the film, especially when the selection is Blazing Saddles, the…

For Love or Money

A lot has happened in the careers of Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky since they co-hosted Loveline, MTV’s relationship-related call-in show, in the late ’90s. Carolla went on to host one of the most successful podcasts on the Internet, as well as becoming the new Dennis Miller as a…

Boxed In

Think back: What was the first art object you ever owned? For many of us, it may have been the ubiquitous lunchbox, where pop culture, art and design intersected the PB&J. This is the thought behind Paileontology: Vintage Lunchbox Art, which opens tonight at Blue Dot Studio. “Television transformed the…

Robot Dreams

The LIDA Project will be in typical form, brewing a maelstrom of dark humor, technology and human hopes and dreams in a black-box pot, when the troupe’s latest project, R.U.R./lol, opens tonight in work | space at the Laundry on Lawrence. The new play is based loosely on Czech author…

Grounded in Art

“They always say after you leave art school to just keep creating work and be in the art scene,” says Jennifer Harrington, who got her degree from the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design in 2010. But once real life kicks in and the pressures of day jobs and…

Dressed to Impress

With more than a thousand movies, 35 Oscar nominations and eight Academy Award wins during her illustrious career, Edith Head defined Hollywood stardom. But behind the scenes is where the costume designer worked her magic. Tonight’s stage performance of A Conversation With Edith Head delves into her five-plus decades of…

Author, Author!

Love books and contemporary fiction? If you happen to be in the vicinity of Aspen this winter evening, there’s a book lover’s paradise awaiting: The ski town’s annual Winter Words series continues tonight at 6 p.m. with a conversation between the talented novelist Karen Russell, whose Swamplandia! earned her a…

Plains Truth

After ten years, award-winning author Kent Haruf has returned to Holt — a fictional town in eastern Colorado, but one filled with simple truths. Haruf, a native of Colorado, grew up in a place like this, “out from Denver, away from the mountains, back onto the high plains: sagebrush and…