Thursday, March 10 While Jose Rivera is probably best known for his screenplays — he wrote the script for The Motorcycle Diaries and was writer and creator of the short-lived but excellent TV series Eerie, Indiana — he is also regarded as an innovative playwright. The winner of two Obie…
From King Henry V to Louisiana’s Huey Long, history is filled with figures who balanced personal corruption against great achievement — and whose achievements, in fact, arose from their corruption. For playwright Joan Holden, Robert Speer, mayor of Denver during the first decade of the twentieth century, was just such…
THURS, 3/10 Fionn mac Cumhail, better known as Finn MacCool, was set the task of cooking a salmon one day by his tutor, the Druid Finegas, who had caught the fish after it ate nuts fallen from the hazel tree. According to ancient teachings, salmon that ate these nuts possessed…
FRI, 3/11 This year, the coffin-carrying competition at Nederland’s Frozen Dead Guy Days gets seriously stiff. The annual festival, which begins today, celebrates Bredo “Grandpa” Morstoel, the cryogenically frozen Norwegian who occupies a Tuff Shed behind the home of his dearly deported grandson. The festivities include the Cryogenic Parade, tours…
THUR, 3/10 New Yorker Chakaia Booker is making tracks across the contemporary art scene. The mixed-media artist conveys her images of struggle by twisting and contorting raw materials like wood, fiber and metal, but her signature works are created through manipulations of used, mangled tires. She weaves the discarded rubber…
FRI, 3/11 Most of us dance to get to know someone a little better or maybe to burn a few calories. But the Speaking of Dance troupe has another goal: peace on earth. Working for Peace, the company’s newest work, will be performed this weekend by SOD members and participants…
From the moment I heard about it, during the last years of Mayor Wellington Webb’s administration, I thought the idea of constructing a jail on the site of the Rocky Mountain News building just off of West Colfax Avenue was ridiculous — and I said so on this page back…
When I heard about a controversy brewing over a ceramics show at the Lakewood Cultural Center (470 South Allison Parkway, 303-987-7876), I naturally assumed that the problem exhibit was American Stoneware & Crockery: 1880-1930, featuring the collection of noted ceramics authority Tom Turnquist. After all, that show was overflowing with…
CPAC MEMBER AWARDS. Every year the Colorado Photographic Arts Center brings in guest jurors to select one member for a Project Grant and two others for Personal Visions Awards. The three are then brought together in the CPAC MEMBER AWARDS exhibition, which is currently on display. Though this may sound…
The best thing about Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree is the central character who tells most of the story, a six-year-old child named Elizabeth. She’s sometimes cute, but she’s also smart, bratty and eccentric enough to keep the highly emotional play from becoming overwhelmingly sentimental. It’s through Elizabeth’s often uncomprehending…
Nancy Cranbourne has a devoted following in Boulder, and if you check out Vulva Riot, her new solo show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, you’ll see why. Although naming theater pieces after genitalia seems to be a trend these days, I must admit, I wish Cranbourne hadn’t called…
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…
Despite the sunshine of the Stalin years and the carefree frolic of the oligarchs, the words “Russia” and “romantic comedy” don’t exactly come tripping off the tongue in perfect harmony. But if we can believe co-directors Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky, a welcome spirit of playfulness — or the brave…
The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and Westerns knew it was guaranteed gold — the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty, which became a hit…
Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you. Though it’s acted almost completely by children, Nobody Knows is not a film for children. A poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect and abandonment — all the more disturbing for being based on a true incident — this Japanese film is the…
The Pacifier, starring human battering ram Vin Diesel as a Navy S.E.A.L. ordered to protect five kids from baddies out to steal their dead dad’s invention, was written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, two members of the defunct MTV comedy troupe The State. Lennon, however, is best known…
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now: that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda gotten more Oscar nominations if only it hadn’t come out so early in the year and been forgotten by those…
While Jonathan Caouette’s extraordinary documentary Tarnation has given hope to aspiring directors (famously, it was initially shot and edited on a Macintosh for a couple hundred dollars), what has startled film-festival audiences across the country is not so much the method, but the madness: A mélange of old home movies…
My grandfather was a surgeon in the first field hospital that followed the American troops into Normandy after D-Day. He sent letters home from the front, letters that because of security reasons and his own private nature didn’t go into many gory revelations. You had to read between the lines…
Thursday, March 3 Hollywood portrait pioneer George Hurrell got his big break in 1930 when actress Norma Shearer and her husband, MGM bigwig Irving Thalberg, found him a job as head of the studio’s portrait gallery. For two years, Hurrell had free rein with some of the biggest stars of…
When local gallery owner and humanitarian Sandra Renteria does something charitable, she does it on her own terms. Already in the do-good business as founder of the Art Creation Foundation for Children, an organization that puts art supplies into the hands of children in troubled Jacmel, Haiti, Renteria took off…
MON, 3/7 Join the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails tonight as they host Stand-Up for SafeHouse at the Rattlebrain Theater. The women of Denver’s most fabulous not-so-secret society are joining nationally known comics Teresa Logan, Edith Weiss, David Gray, Stephanie McHugh and Dave Burdick to raise awareness…
