Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and surprisingly robust indie box office…
Watching Marilyn Monroe in Cinemascope, a critic once wrote, is “like being smothered in baked Alaska.” Reading that as a teenager raised some thrilling questions: Is that good or bad? What is “baked Alaska”? And then a realization: How singular it must be for a woman — or a filmmaker…
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with a novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…
First of all: God bless Atlus. As a publisher devoted to bringing obscure Japanese gaming gems to the West — basically, the much-needed heir apparent of Working Designs — Atlus is the only hope for gamers who crave oddball, strange, or downright niche titles from the Land of the Rising…
The intimate Germinal Stage Denver theater is a perfect venue for The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter’s claustrophobic puzzler of a play. On the stage, the furniture is almost insultingly nondescript — a round wooden table, worn-looking chairs, a bulbous fish ornament. We’re inside an English bed-and-breakfast run by a very…
Artie Shaughnessy is an untalented songwriter with a dream — and it’s because she feeds this dream, as well as his ego, that he loves Bunny, his confident, glossy, mindlessly positive girlfriend. The fact that he’s married to the aptly named Bananas presents very little problem: As soon as he…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
When two different groups of people, one made up mostly of artists, the other comprising collectors and donors, began to separately brainstorm back in the 1990s about the creation of a new contemporary-art museum in Denver, one of the biggest motivating factors was the desire to showcase art made in…
The Denver Art Museum’s outlandish Hamilton Building (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000, www.denverartmuseum.org) has fans and detractors. As for myself, I love it and think it’s one of the great landmarks of the city. But there are some problems with the handling of the interior. The cheap and already…
Inspiring Impressionism. This is hardly your run-of-the-mill effort in which a cavalcade of big-name European artists are represented by minor works. Instead, it’s an intellectually stimulating exhibit crowded with iconic pieces by some of the most significant artists who ever took brush to canvas. Curated by the DAM’s Timothy Standring…
Fade in. Three twelve-year-old Mississippi boys find themselves enraptured by the 1981 Lucas/Spielberg classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s summer, and they’ve yet to discover girls. Or maybe it’s the girls who have yet to do the discovering. The guys rent a video camera and enlist anyone willing to…
In June, performing-arts professionals from across the country will land in Denver for the National Performing Arts Convention, a first-ever venture organized by nearly thirty performing-arts organizations. “Never before have all these disciplines gotten together,” says NPAC’s Ross Moonie. And the cross-discipline brainstorming has already begun at www.artsjournal.com/npac, where NPAC…
For a play that peaks with a rape and double murder, El Centro Su Teatro’s Little Hands Hold the Wind is a surprisingly gentle story. In their second collaboration in two years, playwright Anthony J. Garcia and director Laura Cuetara breathe new life into a play originally commissioned as a…
The great responsibility of the photographer to record life is more than evident in the work left behind by Holocaust survivor Henryk Ross, whose Lodz Ghetto Album: Clandestine Photographs of Ghetto Life goes on display today in the Mizel Center for Arts & Culture’s Singer Gallery. Shot on the sly…
Prepare yourself for the next generation of bar sports with RollerBall, a game that inventor Bob Lyons calls “a cross between air hockey and foosball, laced with the essence of boxing.” Players face each other across a table and try to launch a one-inch steel ball into one of three…
The ninth annual Black Is…CultureFeast arts and culture extravaganza, presented by the Pan African Arts Society, is aptly named. The Feast is five days of film screenings, panel discussions, workshops, performances and more, stuffing attendees to the gills with programming and parties. Black Is… kicked off last night with an…
The Denver Roller Dolls will take a page from the history books tonight when they face off against Albuquerque’s Duke City at the Fillmore Auditorium, 1510 Clarkson Street. The building that houses the Fillmore opened in 1907 as the Mammoth Roller Skating Rink. From 1935 to 1962, it became Mammoth…
In our topsy-turvy world of shrinking bank accounts and quickly changing trends, it can be both empowering and cost-effective to embrace a DIY outlook. Whether you want to pinch your pennies by doing your own taxes or dropping that gym membership and working out at home, the Colorado Women’s Expo…
Dean Martin loved the charms of the grape, and he laid them out in his lyrics: “I can hear a mandolino/Softly entice/While I raise a glass of vino/Praising your eyes.” And there’s no better place to raise a glass than Bonacquisti Wine Company’s annual Spring Barrel Tasting Party, which takes…
Kelly Shortandqueer and his friend Jamez Terry had a dream: the Tranny Roadshow. “My good friend Jamez called me back in December 2004 and pitched the idea to me,” Shortandqueer remembers. “The two of us thought we would go on tour with maybe one or two other people and it…
As Barack Obama bids for a room in the White House, it’s hard to imagine that less than fifty years ago, blacks couldn’t even stay in the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Legendary African-American blues singer Dinah Washington had something to say about that little fact in 1959: Instead of…
As the co-creator of The Daily Show, Lizz Winstead, who cracks wise today and tomorrow at the Comedy Works, has had plenty of experience needling the nightly news. But until she got a dog that insisted on being taken outside at the break of dawn, she didn’t watch enough of…
