Denver’s Pictorial Photographer. The Colorado Photographic Art Center no longer has a permanent home, but it’s still going. The group has held on to its impressive permanent collection, which is where the material for Denver’s Pictorial Photographer at Gallery Roach comes from. The title refers to R. Ewing Stiffler’s work…
At the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt was the grande dame of French theater and Eleonora Duse her Italian counterpart. The two actresses had contrasting strengths. Bernhardt’s acting was glamorous and stylized; she posed prettily and had a self-consciously beautiful voice. Duse’s approach was more realistic; she believed…
“Poor Wandering One” is among the loveliest of Gilbert and Sullivan’s many lovely melodies, but you haven’t really lived until you’ve heard Johnette Toye singing it — as she does in Phantom of the Music Hall. Toye preens and staggers and makes her mouth into a dark, wide-open square from…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
On paper, Black sounds like a sure hit: Criterion Studios (the developer behind the spectacular Burnout games) designs a first-person shooter that does away with all that boring sneaking and instead focuses on the pure pyrotechnic appeal of a Hollywood-style gun battle. The game promised sub-woofer-rattling explosions, frantic gunfire in…
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand…
Bee Season (Fox) Best of 3rd Rock From the Sun (Anchor Bay) The Big Question (THINKFilm) Bustin’ Bonaparte (Freestyle) Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (Sony) Dirty (Sony) The Fallen (Anthem) Far Side of the Moon (TLA) Gorillaz: Demon Days Live (Virgin) Judges (Anthem) Little Manhattan (Fox/Regency) Liza With a…
“Tree-hugger” has become an almost warmly pejorative term, conjuring images of feckless hippies and stoned CoPIRG canvassers on the 16th Street Mall. As such, it’s easy to forget the life-and-death struggle at the core of anti-logging movements, especially the one centered around the redwood forests of northern California. The area…
Since the summer of 2004, the Longmont-based humor quarterly American Drivel Review has been sticking it to the McSweeney’s mob by going beyond satire and the merely ironic to offer experimental, subversive and absurd humor that “runs the gamut from intellectual to intestinal,” according to founder and editor Tara Blaine…
Toga parties are, by most accounts, ridiculous. Then again, so are white-trash parties, pimp-and-ho parties and pretty much any other themed shindig that mandates costumes and the exorbitant consumption of alcohol. But ridiculous or not, we still go — we always go, because people in costumes tend to leave their…
Curious Theatre Company artistic director Chip Walton stole the idea, but give him a break: The Curious fundraiser Denver Stories is based on a similar event mounted at an independent theater in Atlanta, but the results are purely Denver-centric and amount to another well-deserved feather in Walton’s already heavily plumed…
Score points tonight at March Madness, a comedy and musical parody show presented by the Denver Cycle Sluts. With local drag queen/charity princess Nuclia Waste as the host, it’s sure to be a glittery, plastic-boob extravaganza that makes that three-breasted chick from Total Recall look like a poseur. “I think…
More than a hundred years ago, settlers edged the Arapaho Indians away from their home at the confluence of the Platte River and Cherry Creek. But every year, native people return to a spot just a few miles east of there for the Denver March Powwow, the region’s largest gathering…
Gilbert and Sullivan are corny, I know, but as a child I was sung to sleep with songs from their operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. My family owned a songbook and a recording by the D’Oyly Carte opera company, and at a tender age I learned all about the romantic (and not)…
Nancy Norton has been out of the local stand-up circle for about two years. Once a regular act at Comedy Works and a national touring comedian, the Boulder-based riot-raiser left the scene to focus on adopting a boy from Nepal. She returns to the stage tonight at the Oriental Theater,…
Last year, Team Highland Pacific won the Denver Jax Fish House’s annual Oyster Eating Contest. “The four of them ate 116 oysters,” says Jax’s Bryce Clark. And Boulder’s individual winner scarfed down 95 all by himself. In fact, all this month, Jax is all about eating ridiculous numbers of oysters…
Ah, Vail. What did that chip-toothed pundit Lloyd Christmas say about the mountain town? “A place where the beer flows like wine, where the women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.” Oh, wait, that was Aspen. But ever since the Vail Film Festival began in 2004, Christmas’s description has…
We think Westword’s own Jay Vollmar is pretty slick: Our hardworking art director has a keen eye for what’s visceral and street, especially when it comes to his own fly images, made famous through the years on local concert posters and Westword covers alike. And now it’s Vollmar’s time to…
You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness,…
We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations, we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions — that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God most of us will never…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
Balletomanes are bound to adore Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s lavish documentary Ballets Russes (2005), which recalls the glory days of that legendary emigré dance troupe through rare footage of its opulent performances and interviews drawn from a 2000 reunion of its surviving stars, most of them in their eighties…
