There are a lot of people who wouldn’t dream of attending an opera. They think of operas as outdated, frequented by the old, rich and pretentious, and featuring incomprehensible plots, elaborate costumes and scenery, great washes of sentiment, fat people pouring out endless arias, and dead people who inexplicably get…
Circe. “Circe” — Chapter Fifteen evokes a stream of ideas and images that flow by faster than they can be absorbed, although on one level they’re very familiar — all that grotesque and hilarious stuff dealing with sex, shame, religion, transsexuality, myth, politics, food, lust, greed, shame, sex, religion, dirt,…
There’s an unusual convergence of related art shows at many of the state’s galleries, particularly those in Denver. Scores of venues have arranged their schedules to feature the topic of weaving (broadly speaking) in conjunction with the sixteenth biennial meeting of the Handweavers Guild of America, taking place at the…
In the front room of Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is the notable solo Telling Fantasies, which features recent paintings and drawings by Denver artist Irene Delka McCray. McCray’s style is realistic, and she’s thoroughly accomplished technically. She revels in accurate renderings of fabric folds and…
cadence. Here’s a delicious irony: Many artists who explore the “cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is demonstrated in cadence, at the Space Gallery. The important show begins with…
My reaction to Germinal Stage’s “Circe” — Chapter Fifteen was a lot like my reaction to James Joyce’s Ulysses in general. It began with impatience and drifting attention. Then I found myself fascinated and riveted as the play evoked a stream of ideas and emotions that flowed by faster than…
George Burns, having just died, finds himself in limbo. To enter heaven and reunite with his professional partner and beloved wife, Gracie Allen, he has to audition for God. The audition is a recounting of his life. Burns was born Nathan Birnbaum on the New York’s Lower East Side. The…
Born to Be Loud. Born to Be Loud consists of a string of songs from the late ’50s to the ’80s. Some are sung straight, some satirized, some clearly intended as an homage to a particular band or performer; they’re stitched together with all kinds of humor and hokum, and…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in loving, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…
It’s one of the oldest stories in cinema, and possibly in the history of storytelling: A man is kidnapped by a baddie wielding a deadly weapon. His family waits at home to hear word while law-enforcement types try to figure out what’s going on. A plan is developed to deal…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic than one’s own. I am not by nature romantic, or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two Internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet life…
Perhaps some day in the distant future, film scholars and academics concerned with race relations will devote papers and lectures and even entire books to Keenen Ivory Wayans’s White Chicks, in which two FBI agents, played by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, don Caucasian masks and impersonate white women in order…
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…
Everyone loves tigers, save perhaps for those actually being mauled to death by them. Men like ’em because they’re wild beasts; women like ’em ’cause they’re big kitty cats. So whatever your point of interest, Two Brothers, starring a pair of tigers named Kumal and Sangha, is the perfect date…
“Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s Porter biopic, De-Lovely. “It’s a musical;…
By 1974, the year funnyman Mel Brooks directed Blazing Saddles, the Hollywood Western was all but extinct, a casualty of America’s Vietnam War weariness, and our dawning awareness that maybe the cavalry weren’t such good guys after all and the Indians not quite the vicious savages we’d imagined. It was…
From the moment Revolutionary War patriot Betsy Ross first threaded a running stitch to create Old Glory, many Americans have made a tradition of expressing nationalism through handiwork in times of both joy and loss. That’s why, in the wake of 9/11, the American Quilter’s Society called upon its members…
Thursday, July 1 Sprawl devours land in Colorado at the alarming rate of ten acres per hour, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times. While the bulk of that consumption may come in the form of sacrifices to metro Denver, our precious Rocky Mountains also feel the…
The Cherry Creek Arts Festival is like the Lexus SUV of summer activities in metro Denver. Just as the luxurious sport-utility vehicle seems oversized, so the scale of the fourteen-year-old festival — which typically draws 350,000 visitors during its three-day run — can be overwhelming. Likewise, the dozens of knobs…
THURS, 7/1 Some things were made to complement each other: peanut butter and jelly, Hope and Bo on Days of Our Lives, St. Augustine and the Marx Brothers. “But what does St. Augustine have in common with the Marx Brothers?” That is exactly the kind of question that Adam Lerner,…
SAT, 7/3 When Roy Delgado took up the sport of boxing two and a half years ago, it seemed only natural that his father, Henry Delgado, would manage his career. However, it didn’t take long for the former amateur boxer and martial arts fighter to recognize inadequacies in the Denver…
