It’s hard to take Any Day Now‘s message seriously

Any Day Now is homo history repurposed as courtroom soap opera. Director Travis Fine, greatly embellishing a script written decades ago by George Arthur Bloom — who based it on a real-life, high-camp Brooklyn neighbor (played by Alan Cumming) and the mentally challenged kid he looked after — has virtuous…

The Hobbit hews closely to its source material

Set some sixty years before the events depicted in LOTR, The Hobbit tells of another unassuming Shire-dweller’s grand mythopoeic adventure in the company of wizards, elves, and — this time around — a merry band of thirteen dwarfs. The hobbit in question is one Bilbo Baggins — uncle of Frodo…

See Hyde Park on Hudson for Bill Murray’s performance

It’s dispiriting that a film about the romantic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who cultivated a small coterie of mistresses, should exhibit so little interest in what so engaged its hero: the women’s individual hearts and minds. Instead, Hyde Park on Hudson quickly introduces us (and FDR) to the president’s…

The BDT’s 42nd Street is a tinseled treat for the holidays

42nd Street is a big, glitzy show filled with great songs and requiring dozens of tapping feet. So I settled in for the Boulder’s Dinner Theatre production with some trepidation. The playing area here isn’t huge, nor is the pool of singers and dancers infinite. The theater does tend to…

Movie Night at the Jones

A mash-up of theater, improvisation and film is an apt description of tonight’s Cult Following #3 presented by Off-Center@The Jones; co-director Allison Watrous dubs it an “improv cocktail.” The mostly unscripted show features six actors working off of five classic movie moments and a handful of plot lines to create…

Child’s Play

When you ask middle-school students to draw something, they usually create something representative and concrete, says PlatteForum education director Meagan Terry — which is why the community art center brought in abstract artists Conor Hollis and Amorette Lana for its newest learning lab. “These artists are not representative; they are…

Jingles All the Way

Door-to-door caroling isn’t really a thing anymore, so when the urge hits to express your Christmas spirit in song, head to The Watching Hour: Xmas Pops Sing-Along, hosted by the Action Pack’s Henri Mazza. “Action Pack is a branch of the Alamo Drafthouse that concentrates on sing-alongs, quote-alongs and other…

Vail’s Golden Age

“I knew they had a great thing going as soon as I got there,” says filmmaker Roger Cotton Moore, who was hired in the early 1960s to film top ski racers in the backcountry playground that would become Vail’s famed back bowls as a way to woo investors to the…

Classic Style

In past years, when Denver designer Mona Lucero threw a fashion show in her LoHi boutique, she’d also take a philosophical look back over the changes in her own life. But this year is different. “It is more about new beginnings,” says Lucero, who is both celebrating the boutique’s tenth…

War and Peace

They’ve dealt with conflict in a war-torn country overseas, but the couple at the center of Time Stands Still — Curious Theatre Company’s new production — finds just as many emotional challenges and troubling issues back home in Manhattan. Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies’s Tony-nominated work makes its regional premiere in…

Ho Ho Ho for Making Merry

Santa will tell you that there’s plenty of Christmas literature out there, from A Christmas Carol to “The Gift of the Magi” and beyond. But this year’s edition of Stories on Stage’s Making Merry dramatic holiday readings will skew younger…and funnier. Sort of. The show will start off more seriously…

Find Cool Looks at Frost

Rounding out another big year for Denver’s ever-growing style scene, the Frost: Fashion Denver’s Holiday Market features twenty Colorado designers — fifteen of whom are new to the market — and promises a shoppable showcase of clothing, accessories and housewares in numerous styles and tastes. “It’s not kitsch and craft,…

Go to Hell

Opening the curtain on its 39th year, Germinal Stage Denver begins the new season with a production of Don Juan in Hell, by George Bernard Shaw. Written in 1903 as a section of the larger, four-part drama Man and Superman, Don Juan in Hell is a pleasantly strange tale of…

That’s Amore!

Tamara Pidhayny, aka the Merry Widow, says her monthly Artisan Operetta vaudevillian variety show at Voodoo Comedy Playhouse dedicates each program to a different pre-1960s pop hero or heroine. Last month, for instance, it was the inimitable Mae West. And when it came to December and the holiday season, an…

Class Act

Visionbox, a local actors’ studio and commercial theater group, recently relocated to 910Arts in the Art District on Santa Fe, bringing an infusion of performing-arts energy to an already artsy area that’s starting to see an upshift in the theatrical realm. But, as Visionbox director Jennifer McCray Rincon (who first…

A Creepy Christmas

The holiday show at Obscene/Courageous Theatre begins on a traditional note: a family sitting around the tree on Christmas Eve. But that’s where it gets weird. When drunk Uncle Al shows up and the kids beg him to read them a story, Al pulls out H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and begins…

Ice, Ice Baby

Ice sculpture is a holiday art form with wide-ranging appeal, offering power tools and chisels for hands-on types, aesthetically pleasing forms for those with an artistic bent, and a transient, impermanent medium for die-hard romantics. So it’s no wonder that Crested Butte Mountain Resort has made a tradition of bringing…

The Big Build-Up

Denver artist and Chicago native Tim Flynn grew up loving his home city’s unique Midwestern architecture; as an adult, he gravitated toward twisted wire and sculptural assemblage, and eventually — in the present — back to architecture, thanks to a rekindled interest and ensuing research into the technical side of…

Go Home Again

With more than fifty performers taking the stage, seasonal extravaganza Home for the Holidays promises extra punch this year. “I liken it to a New York spectacular; the scale of it really makes it special,” says Katie Maltais, spokeswoman for the Christmas variety show. Denver First Lady Mary Louise Lee…

A Gift Worth Giving

When Winnie Wenglewick of Denver’s Dangerous Theatre set out to write The Perfect Gift, an offbeat holiday play with a message, she looked inside her own life. And when rehearsals began, her two co-stars did the same. “Since then, we’ve practically rewritten the whole script,” she says. “For me, this…

Photos: Artists make statements with materials at RedLine

Michael Paglia visited RedLine for this week’s review, taking in a group show from artists who also use studio space at the gallery. The show features many different types of work, ranging from paintings to installations, from about two dozen artists. Continue reading for photos from the exhibit…