It would be accurate to call BLOOD: Lines & Connections, the fall-winter exhibit at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a bold effort. It would also not be too far wrong to call the show — or at least parts of it — outrageous, confrontational and over the top. MCA director…
This past spring, emerging artist Jared David Paul founded an exhibition space that he originally called the Santa Fe Arts Assembly. He has since shortened the name to the Assembly (766 Santa Fe Drive, 303-257-0145), because the original name, it turns out, misled people into thinking that the space was…
The news at Country Dinner Playhouse is that Bill McHale — artistic director from the time the playhouse opened in 1970 until his premature retirement in 2000 — is back. Which means that after three years of lackluster productions, there’s a strong, vibrant show on stage. Sure, it’s that hoary…
All the sad young men, drifting through the town Drinking up the night, trying not to drown — “Ballad of All the Sad Young Men,” by Thomas J. Wolf Jr. and Frances Landesman William Inge’s Picnic so entirely typifies the ethos of the 1950s that it forces a director to…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hatred remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally… snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to enthusiastically greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psychosexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost…
That crazy little girl hidden away behind a cold, white bedroom door in Georgetown, with her mouthful of pea soup and her patented 360-degree head-swivel trick, still has the power to scare the hell out of us, and she will do it again Friday, October 31, in Boulder. The Exorcist,…
Nobody understands the gestalt approach to making music better than guitarist (and former Denverite) Bill Frisell, one the great original improvisers of our time and a recording artist who changes partners more frequently than a square-dancer. But it’s not that he’s fickle: Frisell is just a dreamer, a musical sponge…
Thursday, October 30 Sque-e-e-ak For old-time radio aficionados, that eerie sound effect, followed by greetings from a creepy-voiced host, needs no introduction: It was the trademark opener for every episode of The Inner Sanctum, the popular ’40s mystery program that enjoyed a run of over ten years, from radio’s heyday…
There’s nothing quite like the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). El Día is a time when families build living-room altars and decorate family members’ graves as a sign of love and respect. Beginning every November 1 and continuing through the following day, it’s a celebration…
Want to get in touch with your inner Little Red Riding Hood or let loose the Gandalf trapped inside your routine self?Don’t wait around for a fairy godmother to help. Instead, check out some of the dozens of costume stores in the Denver area. And while this isn’t a complete…
SAT, 11/1 The rumblings started early last season, when the Denver Nuggets became the first — and only — National Basketball Association team to add a Portuguese-translation page to its official team Web site.The catalyst for this linguistic link was rock-steady Brazilian rookie Nenê Hilario (now simply known as Nenê)…
SAT, 11/1 We try to get our kids to read, but it’s an uphill climb in the 21st century: The older they get, the more tuned in they are to sense-teasing technological amusements — Game Boys and Xboxes, non-stop television and computer games — and the less inclined they are…
SAT, 11/1 Seminal New Orleans musician Jelly Roll Morton, acknowledging his own Creole roots, used to say his syncopated early jazz music evolved with a “Spanish tinge,” and it’s an element of jazz that’s always grown with the genre itself. In fact, there’s a name for what’s become of that…
SAT, 11/1 If there’s a giant squid hurling gutter balls next to a harlot in pasties, hot pants and yucky brown rented shoes, then Beats & Bowling must be twinkling its toes again. The competition, which rolls its fifth installment tonight, assembles costumed and themed teams of music-industry enthusiasts who…
The season began only a scant six weeks ago, but already many of the first shows have closed — or soon will. It’s been a crowded calendar, with more than a hundred exhibits being presented simultaneously, a couple dozen of which are definitely worth seeing — pretty good odds when…
The Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is just coming off a recent bout with censorship. As reported in Westword (Off Limits, October 9), the Denver Civic Theatre requested that Edge remove a photo from its show hanging in the theater’s lobby. The photo depicts two men kissing, with the…
In Blue/Orange, Christopher (Keith L. Hatten), a young black man, is awaiting his release from a London psychiatric hospital, where he’s been held for 28 days of observation. However, his psychiatrist, Bruce (Steven Cole Hughes), isn’t sure he’s ready to be discharged. He fears that Christopher is displaying all the…
We remember Oscar Wilde today primarily for his epigrammatic wit — the nineteenth-century bons mots that have lost none of their sharpness or humor over the intervening decades. This was a man whose last words were supposedly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Wilde’s theories of aesthetics, his faith…
On October 12, BBC America aired the second-season premiere of The Office, the beloved mockumentary that follows paper-selling rats ’round the maze of cubicles leading to the office of head cheese David Brent, a pathetic little man who says in public things no rational human being would even think in…
That a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine; that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers chose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz,…
Sometimes something so wonderful appears on the big screen that I want to leap up like a shameless non-professional and hug it. Such is the case early on in the film Sylvia, a superb drama based on the brief life of writer Sylvia Plath. While boating in Cambridge, England, with…
