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…
FRI, 7/2 I’ve gleefully lit my share of fuses on bottle rockets, cones, pinwheels and other sulfur-spewing devices in honor of July 4th. More than my share, actually, since my cousin — the future plastic surgeon — was forbidden by his folks to handle the explosives. Still, there’s a lingering…
TUES, 7/6 When longtime Denver resident Dennis Law isn’t working at the University of Colorado, he might be found negotiating with China’s government for permission to contact various Chinese performers. Law also spends his time touring with more than ninety foreign artists whose talents he has assembled for Terracotta Warriors,…
Repetition is a key to all human endeavors, from music to math to the sciences, from the spoken word to the written one. And don’t forget history and the social sciences, which are all about repeating things. In the fine arts, too, repetition is basic and, as far as I…
Here’s a delicious irony: Many of the artists exploring what’s inaccurately called “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 amply demonstrated by an important show titled cadence at…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Robert Dubac is currently workshopping Inside the Male Intellect (TV. 10.0) at Rattlebrain Theater because he’s about to tape it for cable. This show is an updated version of The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron, an engaging monologue that began in Denver almost a decade ago and has since traveled the…
Racism is a common topic in theater, but before attending Dael Orlandersmith’s lacerating Yellowman, I had never seen a play that explored racism within the black community itself — that is, the contempt felt by some lighter-skinned African-Americans toward their darker-skinned brethren and the reciprocal rage it engenders. Some analysts…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
Love him or hate him, filmmaker Michael Moore knows how to get under your skin. As a political muckraker, he favors schoolboy rage over measured argument; as a social satirist, he never fails to slug us with a hammer when a scalpel might serve him better. A self-appointed guardian of…
Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know?!, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of new-age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly…
A jury award-winner at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold offers a revealing look at contemporary Tehran through the day-to-day life of a suspiciously impassive pizza-delivery man named Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin), who rides through the streets of the city on his motor scooter as if…
Before every performance of their Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, members of the Chicago-based theater troupe The Neo-Futurists make name tags for audience members. This gesture might seem welcoming — if said badges didn’t brand recipients with labels like “Dog Breath.” Still, in the context of such…
Thursday, June 24 Boulder’s Mariposa Collective will soar this weekend with Moon Stories, a challenging medley of multi-disciplinary performances spotlighting five diverse local female artists (and, for good measure, a couple of visiting guest choreographers) in a series of vignettes and previews of full-length works. Participating are puppeteer Betsy Tobin,…
For weavers, introspection comes with the territory. In its simplest form, the repetitive act of weaving cloth, driving threads together into an artful entanglement of warp and weft, is something like time itself: slow, steady, drifting, building. The weaver moves deliberately, thinking all the time, perhaps dreaming. And even in…
Karen Moore is a walking fashion statement, the keeper of a personal style so strong that she’s managed to shape it into a local retail temple of rich, delicious, quirky interior design. And when her business, DjUNA, a two-story tribute to shabby chic and modern vintage style, first hit Cherry…
SAT, 6/26 Think you’ve got what it takes to be Colorado’s greatest all-around competitor? Then sign up for this weekend’s first-ever GAAC (Greatest All-Around Competition), an amateur sporting contest featuring seven different events. “We are searching for the greatest competitor in Colorado, and the funny thing is, the first words…
SAT, 6/26 Polly Letofsky was walking on a “barren highway through a tiny town in northern Australia” when a senior citizen flashed her. As Letofsky tells it, an “eighty-year-old, kind of big woman” hailed her by name and then told her in a heavy Aussie accent that she’d survived a…
TUES, 6/29 For better or worse, nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner regarded himself as the most German of men. Classified as an anarchist, socialist, proto-fascist, nationalist, vegetarian and anti-Semite, among other things, Wagner was a stern man whose name has appeared in connection with almost every major trend in German history…
I think it’s exciting to watch the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building rise out of the ground, as it has been doing over the past few months just south of West 13th Avenue along the vacated axis of Acoma Street. Currently, the Daniel Libeskind-designed structure is merely…
