I first saw the intimate, two-person musical The Last Five Years when Modern Muse presented it almost two years ago, and now it’s being offered by Denver Center Attractions. The two productions provide an almost-textbook example of the difference that staging, casting and a director’s overall conception can make. Because…
A Body of Water. In Lee Blessing’s play, two middle-aged people wake up one morning in a beautiful house near a lake — or perhaps the shimmering they glimpse through the windows comes from more than one lake or inlet; they’re never quite sure. They have no idea who or where…
Colorado has an important ceramics tradition that stretches back a century. But the ranks of the top artists in the field have taken some big hits over the past decade: Betty Woodman retired from teaching in Boulder and moved to New York; Rodger Lang and Jim McKinnell died; and Nan…
Last fall, the Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969, www.thesandraphillipsgallery.com) presented a museum-quality show featuring some of Colorado’s most important ceramic artists, including Martha Daniels and Paul Soldner. Before the show opened, Daniels had lunch with Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit. Daniels — whose own work is…
Face East. Gallery co-directors Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran usually go the extra mile to put together a great show, but in this case they went an extra few thousand, traveling all the way to China to pick out pieces for Face East, their salute to contemporary Chinese art. In…
Don’t freak when the moon turns blood-red tonight. It’s not the end of the world, just a routine alignment of celestial bodies known as a total lunar eclipse. Over the course of several hours, the Earth will occlude most of the light falling on the moon, refracting the remainder through…
Simon Zalkind, director of exhibitions at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center at the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center, is excited about Good Impressions, a collection of American master prints from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s from the collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer. “Many of the artists have…
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 epic Alexander Nevsky was made as “a propaganda film for Stalin,” notes Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra executive director Sue Levine. However, its power remains undeniable, thanks in part to Sergei Prokofiev’s sweeping “Alexander Nevsky Cantata” — the centerpiece of the Boulder Phil’s Cinematic Fusion event tonight. A Hollywood…
Pan African Arts Society founder Ashara Ekundayo, who also curated and produced tonight’s “Urban Poetics” Poetry Slam at the Denver Art Museum, describes the event as “a multimedia mash-up of spoken word meets hip-hop meets Black History Month — an amazing lineup of gifted artists and musicians and painting and…
Josh Hartwell worked in two movie theaters growing up, so you can bet that his new play, Contrived Ending, will channel the ups and downs of cleaning candy wrappers and more in a venue for the arts. “It’s about a character who has gone off to film school, and then…
If you’ve never thought of frog embryos as a thing of art and beauty, then you’ve yet to check out the image captured by University of Colorado biology professor Mike Klymkowsky in the course of his research. That photo took seventh place in the 2007 Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition…
My father was a modern-day gold seeker; he pioneered a method by which seekers can find lodes of ore using water instead of soil. I used to tease him incessantly about his obsession with the precious metal (imagine hearing your daughter cackle, several times a day, “There’s gold in them…
“Valentine’s Day is really the pinnacle of loserness for the beautiful loser,” notes Adam Lerner, executive director of the Laboratory of Art and Ideas in Lakewood’s Belmar complex. “Failure really is a critical dimension. It’s critical of norms of American life, which says that there are certain norms of romance,…
Okay, unsentimental slackers, if you didn’t book a romantic table three years ago, you’re probably out of luck tonight, but here’s one you can at least attempt: Culinary cousins Mezcal, 3230 East Colfax Avenue (303-322-5219), and Tambien, 250 Steele Street (303-333-1763), are throwing Kill Cupid parties to celebrate the day…
Fiber artist, single mother and business owner Deborah Kruger is all those things and more: She’s also Jewish, a feminist and profoundly inspired by the indigenous artists of West Africa and the Amazon, and thus the product of a unique triumvirate that figures in equal proportions throughout her work, in…
Between Mexico City and Denver’s El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High Street, a funny thing happened to the dark comedy Las Chicas del 3.5″ Floppies. “I noticed the script was translated by a Brit,” says John Kuebler, media-development associate at El Centro. “The regionalism was most apparent in the translation…
What’s the common thread among cello-slinging singer-songwriter Ian Cooke, goofball Casio-pop wunderkind Magic Cyclops, burlesque dancers and a whole slew of painters, photographers and other visual artists? According to dRE Williams, the common creative spirit of all artists, aided by a loose, shared theme of “birds,” will be enough to…
Tonight the African Community Center of Denver kicks off its fifth annual African Extravaganza at the University of Denver with a two-part program dedicated to refugee awareness. The first half includes the exhibit Faces of Refugees, which showcases photographer Barbara Vogel’s images from Sudan, and a meet-and-greet with Vogel. Then,…
Waiting for a plane in Seattle, sounding hurried and harried as a final boarding call echoes in the near distance, Josh Blue has this to say about his upcoming Denver show: “Don’t hit babies.” Blue, who has long vacillated on the great do/don’t hit babies debate that divides the nation,…
The University of Denver’s Center for Judaic Studies continues its year-long series, Shema: What Jewish Culture Sounds Like, this week with a full platter of events, concerts and lectures featuring the Iranian Jewish cantor and ethnomusicologist Galeet Dardashti. A musician and expert on Sephardi and Middle-Eastern Jewish music — a…
Years ago, I walked into the McSweeney’s store in Brooklyn and fell instantly in love with the irreverent way the independent publisher’s quarterly journal and books were juxtaposed with nonsensical ephemera. It was a crazy, wonderful thing to stumble upon in the heart of that borough. Dave Eggers founded Might…
The Boulder International Film Festival is in full swing, and if you haven’t caught any of the innovative, controversial and just plain good movies being offered, now’s your chance to head up to Boulder for a full day of film-loving. The Opening Night Gala and Film, which took place on…
