FRI, 4/30 People are always telling country rocker Marshall Chapman: “You talk in song titles.” And she does. The thirty-year Nashville veteran, a tough, six-foot blonde of genteel Southern extraction who’s been a cohort over the years of everyone from Waylon Jennings to Jimmy Buffet, is a walking card catalogue…
SAT, 5/1 Lola/Sings saetas/The little bullfighters/Circle around her/And the little barber/From his doorway/Follows the rhythms/With his head. These words from famed Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca will echo during The Spanish Muse, a two-day celebration of Spanish poetry, music, art and dance. Flamenco group Ojaleo will provide the msica, along…
I was really worried about contemporary art at the end of the twentieth century. Things were looking bleak, as public support was clearly on the wane. The art magazines and the art establishment were no help, either, since both were filled with the novel, the outlandish and the absurd, but,…
The Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) is presenting a theme show with the scientific-sounding title of TRANSMUTATIONS, referring to something that has been changed or altered into something else. In this case, the three artists represented at CPAC — Marilyn Waligore, Lisa Folino and Marc Berghaus –…
Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…
Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love is an eighteenth-century play, but it contains elements reminiscent of Shakespeare’s work, which was written more than a century earlier: the spunky heroine who dresses as a man in order to pursue her beloved; the haven of learning and philosophy whose inhabitants discover, like the…
Steven Dietz’s Inventing van Gogh unleashes a torrent of ideas about art, possibly enough for a dozen plays. The words are so evocative and so many, the set and lighting so lusciously colored and the acting so selfless that the experience of watching the play becomes all-encompassing. I felt engulfed…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it’s hardly worth the effort. Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star, a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this…
One of Hollywood’s most enduring leading men will be the centerpiece of four film screenings and a lecture this weekend at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The Cary Grant Film Festival begins on Friday evening, April 23, and will be highlighted by the Nancy Nelson Masterpiece Lecture at 6…
Artist Scott McCloud has long been a champion of comics. The comic book is a medium that the acclaimed storyteller feels is as legitimate and accessible as literature or film, not just fodder for big-budget blockbusters and the covers of kids’ lunchboxes. To heighten awareness of the expressive capabilities of…
Thursday, April 22 Frankie Manning, the acknowledged king of the Savoy lindy hop, might, incredibly, be ninety years old, but he’s still going strong, and so is the Frankie Manning Weekend — a local tradition, now in its eighth year, hosted annually by Karen Lee Dance Theatre. Age is apparently…
“I think John Kerry missed his calling,” Jello Biafra says by phone from San Francisco. “Now that Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing aren’t making those low-budget Dracula knockoffs, they need a new one. And FrankenKerry would’ve been perfect! I can’t get it out of my mind that he voted for…
FRI, 4/23 “My mission is to make something new out of an old piece of crap that nobody wanted anymore and to bring forth genius — satirical, irony-filled attitude — to a mundane world of fashion drones,” says Boulderite Rachel White, who will show her new designs at tonight’s Retrofit…
SAT, 4/24 Get ready for a royal thigh workout at today’s thirteenth annual Imperial Challenge adventure competition, held in Breckenridge. The contest begins with a 6.2-mile mountain-bike ride on unpaved roads to the base of Breckenridge Ski Resort’s Peak 8, followed by a 2,998-foot ascent of the Claimjumper run using…
WED, 4/28 The best-selling novel Getting Mother’s Body, by Suzan-Lori Parks, holds a chorus of voices from cover to cover. Indeed, the replication of voice — from simple syntax to each character’s unique inner psychology — is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s forte, regardless of which medium she’s dabbling in. And…
FRI, 4/23 El Centro Su Teatro’s annual Neruda Poetry Festival and Barrio Slam events are all about instilling a new appreciation for literacy in Chicano youth through a series of in-school residencies designed to get kids excited about putting words together in a creative way. The wordplay culminates with tonight’s…
Not since the 1960s has there been so much aesthetic interest in popular culture. It all began a decade ago, when many contemporary artists grew tired of formalism and expressionism and began picking up on the pop-related styles of a previous generation. Some of these new-pop artists revived the original…
The spacious if grungy Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-292-3281) near Coors Field is the perfect setting for the fourth annual Kinetic and Robot Show, which highlights art about actual and implied movement. Put together by Andenken director Hyland Mather, the exhibit is quite strange, mostly because the selections don’t…
Hidden Images. On the mezzanine of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is Hidden Images, which is dedicated to recent work by major contemporary Czech artist Adéla Matasová. The show is made up of a handful of things, including a group of conceptual installations that reconcile minimalism to movement. Three of…
Ellen McLaughlin’s Tongue of a Bird isn’t poetry, though it wants to be: It lacks conciseness, the sense of language reduced to its essence. Instead, it floods the stage with lyrical phrases and poetic images, as if the author were saying, “How’s this one? Didn’t move you? Didn’t quite work?…
