Colorado’s SolVista Bike Park at Granby Ranch got the best endorsement imaginable when it was chosen to host this summer’s USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Championships, featuring both the elite of international mountain biking, hundreds of them, and an equally rampant onslaught of amateurs in cross country, downhill, single speed,…
Despite its intimate — read “tiny” — space, the Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969, www.thesandraphillipsgallery.com) has big ambitions. Owner Sandra Phillips has relentlessly filled the place with something worth seeing, often turning to established talents and zeroing in on those who only rarely exhibit their work. Such…
The Magafan Twins. Ethel and Jenne Magafan were identical twins born in Chicago but raised in Denver. In the 1920s, their art teacher at East High School was so impressed with their talent that he paid their tuition to attend Denver’s School of Modern Art, run by Frank Mechau; they…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie — its mandatory summer family show — anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough…
Hamlet really is a narcissistic ass. I’m not talking about his famous, almost play-long dithering about whether or not he should kill the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother — and if so, when and how, and what it says about his character that he’s unable to…
The Thief of Baghdad is an enormous contradiction of the auteur theory. The 1940 release credits three directors — Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan and Michael Powell — and only the latter assembled a filmography of any particular note. Moreover, it’s likely that producer Alexander Korda and others contributed to the…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Play-House of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce. Such, more or less, is the method of the new Sacha Baron Cohen extravaganza Brüno. Communist Poland supported a…
Within the limits of the tubular milieu, the only thing more entertaining than simply watching TV is making fun of it. And this is the tried-and-true tack taken by the local comedy sketch group Nietzsche’s Moustache in its new spoof, 60 Minutes: the Musical!, which opens today at the Avenue…
One of the best, unsung results of the burlesque revival is the advent of boylesque. Think about it: Until boylesque burst onto the scene, male exotic dancers weren’t taken seriously. Of course, they’re still not, but by incorporating humor into their performance and refusing to take themselves seriously, suddenly these…
Office Space made smashing a copy machine seem absurdly badass and made “TPS reports” and “flair” household words. Starting off as a relatively unnoticed box-office fizzle, the movie came into its own when it gained legs as a quotable video cult classic. It’s the story of a sedate cubicle monkey,…
Downtown Littleton, like other urban retail pockets, has suffered in these economic times. While a few businesses have fallen by the wayside, it’s a good sign that they’ve been replaced by new ones – but the independents who form the backbone of the neighborhood, such as Peggy Cooper, of the…
Riding in the comfort of your SUV, 35 miles per hour might not seem too fast. But try that same speed inches above the pavement, ripping turns through a slalom course on a skateboard lacking brakes, and you’ll get a much different perception of 35 mph. Even if you just…
Ladies, a question: When are you going to finally address the mess of broken jewelry in your house? You know, that clump of chains and pendants and one-sided earrings and all the other shiny stuff that you can’t wear anymore for one reason or another. (Yes, we know about your…
To break out of the “record a record, play a CD-release party, go on tour” box, John Common turned to friend Alicia Bailey, owner of the Abecedarian Gallery, for help. Together they came up with the Common Box Project, a multimedia collaboration that’s grown to involve more than sixty artists…
Twenty-three years ago, the Denver Black Arts Festival was created to give black artists an opportunity to showcase their work. “Back in 1986,” explains festival spokeswoman Sheryl Renee, “there was no place for African and African-American artists to show their wares, no outlet for visual artists from mainland Africa and…
Everyone knows this particular time of day: I call it “Blue Time,” but a more classical designation for the full-on blush and ebb of dusk, when everything glows and then sinks into the shadows, is the “Violet Hour.” That playwright Richard Greenberg, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his plays Three…
What could be more perfect on a summer evening than a big, sprawling musical featuring larger-than-life characters and a message to match? Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which opened July 14 on the Arvada Center Main Stage, promises to sweep away audiences of all ages for a few…
Everyone claims a drop of Celtic blood on St. Patrick’s Day, but in Denver, the real time to celebrate the heritage of the Emerald Isle is at the annual Colorado Irish Festival. Every July, organizers incorporate yet another aspect of Irish culture, keeping things fresh while maintaining tradition. “The Cultural…
No school has a closer connection to the Beats than Naropa University. So it’s no surprise that Naropa’s archives are a treasure trove complete with audio files of “actual teachings and conversations, interviews, panels and essays that were presented at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics here in Boulder,”…
Indie comic Moshe Kasher has it all going for him: youth, brains, wit, a twisted edge and an inside track on what’s really funny in the 21st century. Once you’ve seen him, you won’t forget him. Comedy Works maven Wende Curtis certainly didn’t after she caught his “Best of the…
According to her good friend (and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art adult-education coordinator) Sarah Kinn, Lyons painter Sally King isn’t so much a feminist as she is “spiritual and into the feminine.” So King’s Breast Prayers for Peace project – for which women are invited to leave imprints of their…
