Thursday, March 31 Topping off a fine season with a rustic touch, the Denver Center Theatre Company presentation of Fire on the Mountain, a rootsy bow to the music and coal-miner culture of Appalachia, opens tonight at 8 p.m. for previews. The brainchild of Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman, creative…
Could any pleasure be more guilty than sitting around a saloon with good company, drinking up the news — and booze — of the day? That’s what a group of Denver journalists and ad men (and they were almost invariably men) did back in the ’50s and ’60s, when the…
TUES, 4/5 Ask any kid on the street who Charlie Chaplin was, and you’ll probably get a blank stare or, at the very least, a snicker about that retarded dude with the weird mustache and big feet. It’s just a fact of nature: The little guy on the flickering screen…
FRI, 4/1 In this season of puckless hockey and spotty snow, the good hosers to our north are helping fill the void with the Radical Reels Film Tour, a spinoff of the Banff Mountain Film Festival that is dedicated specifically to adrenaline-sports cinema. Five years ago, the decades-old BMFF found…
THURS, 3/31 The Yard Dogs Traveling Road Show is rolling back into town, ready to prove that a Yard Dog can, indeed, learn new tricks. “Nail your hat to your head and hide the wine,” says the carny’s barker, Eddy Joe Cotton. “Did I mention the Œdancing girls, dancing girls,…
THURS, 3/31 Imagine, if you will, a sardonic tale of a maniacal cowboy prospector who, with the help of a greedy group of financiers, senators and businessmen, conspires to overturn an entire village in his crazed obsession for oil. Sound familiar? Well, believe it or not, there’s not a single…
In the big box-office months of December and January, Mike Nichols’s Closer was overwhelmed by the likes of The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby. Now comes a second chance to catch this boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing, adapted from a play by talented Brit misanthrope Patrick Marber. It…
Not everything to come out of this here cattle town is a shoot-’em-up or a spaghetti Western. Denverite Richard Groskopf and Los Angles-based Mile High native Melissa Fouch plan to reveal the region’s wilder side at the opening reception for Denco Connected: The West Coast to the Rockies on Saturday,…
Thursday, March 24 Most guys discovered by Wynton Marsalis do pretty well for themselves. And Philly-born bassist Christian McBride was on his way up even before he met Marsalis at the age of fourteen: His father, Lee Smith, was a session bassist himself, whose timekeeping kept the Delfonics in the…
To music historians and fans, the late Bob Wills was the “King of Western Swing,” one of America’s greatest music pioneers. To Nick Forster — a Colorado music legend and the founder and host of the e-town radio show — Wills and his Texas Playboys were much more. “He had…
FRI, 3/25 You think you really know a place; then you get an aerial view of it, and your understanding increases tenfold. I’ve always considered myself an expert on Denver, but on a recent flight from Denver International Aiport, the plane took off toward the east and then looped back…
WED, 3/30 Not since Mike Tyson’s psychosis-driven title fights battered the public consciousness a decade ago has the sport of boxing staged such a ruthless assault on society. Between this year’s Academy Award-winning knockout Million Dollar Baby and NBC’s new reality hit, The Contender, the so-called sweet science appears to…
MON, 3/28 “‘Inchworm,’ 1998 — computers, aluminum, software, electronics, motors, 6 feet, autonomously mobile.” “‘I Like To Watch,’ 2000 — steel, aluminum, wood, electronics, motors, 9 x 8 x 8 feet, operating envelope.” Looking over the descriptions of some of Alan Rath’s “Robots” sculptures, it’s hard to tell whether you’re…
THURS, 3/24 Saturday night at my grandma’s house was always Welk night. Once a week, we would dress up in hats and furs and do the polka. That wasn’t as strange as it sounds: From The Lawrence Welk Show’s inception in 1955 through the early ’70s, millions of viewers tuned…
Conversations in Clay. The ceramics exhibit at the Lakewood Cultural Center has been causing a lot of commotion ever since Lakewood City Manager Mike Rock ordered that part of a piece be removed for being “anti-American.” The piece that Rock and members of the Lakewood City Council had a problem…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The action can get pretty hot and heavy when LoDo’s bars let out at 2 a.m. But from the cheap seats on the sidelines, watching the crowds pour out of the clubs and pour themselves into cars and cabs — after some last-second attempts to hook up –can be mighty…
Though Stevyn Prothero’s tiny Iron Feather Book & Zine Shop is in danger of losing its space in north Denver, the place’s do-it-yourself attitude lives on to the bitter end. Prothero welcomes any and all wannabe zinesters to use his stuff — Xerox, keyboard, scissors and so on — to…
Capitol Hill encompasses a wide swath of central Denver, so it’s no wonder that the Capitol Hill People’s Fair is the city’s best, and most diverse, festival. From its humble beginnings at Morey Junior High in 1971, when 2,000 people attended, the People’s Fair has exploded into Colorado’s premier arts-and-crafts…
Normally, when you come across a celebrity in Aspen — say, Kevin Costner fashioning a kayak for an In Style magazine photo shoot — it’s funny, but not ha-ha funny. For nearly one week out of every year, though, Aspen is the ha-ha-funniest place in the world. The U.S. Comedy…
The first of its kind in the United States, The Shoot Out Boulder celebrated the art of quick and cheap movie production. Filmmakers were given 24 hours to complete a seven-minute short. Only in-camera editing was allowed — meaning everything had to be shot in sequence — and the footage…
Good food and Cherry Creek North? Two of the most obvious bedfellows in town. It took little stretch of the imagination to combine them into a fail-safe annual festival. The glitzy al fresco celebration spreads over several Saturdays and features a gourmet market and cooking demonstrations by hot chefs from…
