Chess moves to Lone Tree: Check it out!

Did you miss Chess at the Arvada Center? Now you have a second chance to see the production, which has moved to the Lone Tree Arts Center’s Main Stage Theater, where it opens tonight. In the meantime, here’s a reprise of Juliet Wittman’s review: The semi-operatic Chess doesn’t have a…

Photographer Cory Richards wins American Alpine Club’s 2012 Rowell Award

The American Alpine Club announced this week that Boulder-based photographer Cory Richards has won its 2012 Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure. The $15,000 award, which will be officially presented next month during Mountainfilm in Telluride, is named for photographers Galen and Barbara Rowell, who died in a plane…

Reefer Mania: Boobs and bud rule Bar Standard for 4/20

There are a lot of marijuana-related goings-on tomorrow, what with it being 4/20 and all, but this event looks like a definite hit. Burlycute, the burlesque production company run by Cora Vette (aka Reyna Von Vett), happens to be booked on the third Friday of every month at Bar Standard,…

Psst: Spy new paintings by William Betts at Plus Gallery

We all know that Big Brother’s been watching us for some time, but that doesn’t make the amazing recent paintings of William Betts any less intriguing or, well, creepy. Accurately replicating video imagery taken by surveillance cameras, the acrylic-on-canvas renderings are pointed in their message and sharply detailed in their…

Reader: Metro State is the best institution in the state!

It’s been a big month for Metro State — or Metro State University of Denver, according to the law signed by Governor John Hickenlooper yesterday. Not only does the school get a new name, but its theater department recently won accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Theatre. And…

Nearer, My God, to Thee

Last time out, the Denver Public Library’s Frock Out fashion fete went a little wacky, with a side-show theme that rocked the Denver Central Library’s Schlessman Hall with drag queens, freaks and roller derby girls. But this year, which also happens to mark the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of…

GuerillaGarden Goes Big

Street-style artists Jolt and Quentin “Omni” Rice will show off a series of large-scale “abstract-expressionist-meets-graffiti-futurism” pieces created on seven twenty-by-twenty-foot walls at the GuerillaGarden warehouse. “This is going to be the biggest show we’ve had in three years, and I mean that literally,” says Jolt, a 2010 Westword MasterMind. “We’re…

Eat Around Town

Kate Armstrong grew up on a farm in upstate New York, where, if her family didn’t grow it, they didn’t need it. “We may not have had much money, but we had great food,” she says. More important, they had healthy food, which has become less common in the half-century…

Fueled by Fairy Dust

How far can you go in fairy wings and a tutu? Once Upon a Race, a fairy tale-themed dash, could provide the answer. In this urban scavenger hunt, which begins at Stoney’s Bar & Grill at 11 a.m., teams of costumed Rapunzels and Rumpelstiltskins will have roughly four hours to…

Zine and Mean

Self-publishing gives authors the means to tell stories that often get left out of the mainstream, corporately published narrative. Albuquerque performance artist Marya Errin Jones will add to that DIY archive with her newest zine series, Mocha Chocolata Mamma, which focuses on influential black women. “I was getting really sad…

The Trees are Alive!

When T. S. Eliot famously wrote that “April is the cruellest month,” he wasn’t referring to tax day, but to the hopeful but fleeting beauty of spring. At today’s Denver Digs Trees Earth Day Sale, you can purchase trees to help capture some of that beauty for many seasons to…

Dog Days of Spring

Since 1973, the organization Moving to End Sexual Assault (MESA) has lived up to its name by offering a hotline, services for survivors of assault, prevention education and much more. And for twelve years now, MESA has hosted the Canine Classic 5K run/walk, a Bolder Boulder qualifier at the Boulder…

Latino Life on Screen

There will be no red carpets at the XicanIndie Filmfest XIV, but there will be a lot of films that slipped quietly under the radar of mainstream cinema, representing a range of insights into contemporary Latino life. “The festival continues to provide a perspective that you will not find anywhere,”…

Long Live the Lounge

After hearing Nick Apollo Forte’s “Scungilli Song” on the jukebox of a Bronx bar, Woody Allen considered him for a part in his film Broadway Danny Rose. Forte later got a call from someone at Allen’s studio asking if he could send a resume, and he says he took out…

Tearing Down the Wall

Great Wall Story, by Lloyd Suh, opens at the Denver Center this week, having begun life with a staged reading at last year’s New Play Summit. It is based on one of those tall tales that just happen to be true. In 1899, a small group of Denver journalists who…

Let’s Twist Again

Musical director Jason Yarcho and the cast of Wicked had grown tired of their regular fundraising efforts — post-show collections, autographed posters, rock revues — and they needed a new option. And as Yarcho drove from Arizona to Texas, the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack blasting, it came to him…

Love for Lalo

“stupid america, hear that chicano / shouting curses on the street / he is a poet / without paper and pencil / and since he cannot write/he will explode.” — Lalo Delgado Given what’s going on in Tucson, Arizona, these days, this kind of poem is coming back into style…

Watching Colorado

The Boulder History Museum’s current exhibit, Hollywood, Colorado, takes a look at the history of moviemaking and movie-going in the Centennial State with a series of movie posters and artifacts from films with a Colorado connection. In conjunction with the exhibit (which runs through May 6), David Emrich, film buff,…

Music To Our Ears

Colfax Avenue, all 26 miles of it, is home to a wide spectrum of restaurants, shops, live-performance venues, historic landmarks, not-so-historic landmarks and just about everything else you can think of. This week, more than twenty of those locations — including the Fillmore Auditorium, the Satire Lounge, X-Bar and Charlie’s…

Smear Factor

Simon Zalkind, curator at the Singer Gallery in the Mizel Arts and Culture Center, is one of many local exhibition organizers who are saluting Clyfford Still this season in conjunction with the opening of the new Denver museum dedicated to the legendary abstract expressionist. Zalkind’s participation in Still-mania is Mene…