Think about it: Musicals are absurd. The minimal plots coast along on thin ice and then, suddenly, for no good reason, somebody erupts into song. The music is usually as thin as the plot line, and the characterizations are really about striking appropriate poses. Unless you’re talking about the achievements…
Out of the plain strivings of the British working and middle classes, Mike Leigh always manages to make art, even if his movies never announce themselves as such. His latest, Career Girls, is a more modest thing than last year’s superb Secrets & Lies, but he once more finds the…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
As another indictment of the male animal and American business ethics, Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men pretty much has it all. The playwright/filmmaker claims–rather coyly, I think–that this pitch-black tragicomedy about a pair of self-absorbed yuppie buddies who hatch a plot to exploit a beautiful deaf woman for…
Thursday August 7 Tale-telling hearts: Call it escapism, but everyone loves a story. And that simple truth is what fuels the annual Rocky Mountain Storytelling Festival, a weekend retreat at Palmer Lake where you and your family can get deliciously lost as much as you like, at least for as…
When we tuned in last fall, there were two groups vying to open a new museum in Denver dedicated to contemporary art. One group included such well-known Denver artists as Dale Chisman, Mark Sink and Linde Schlumbohm. This group dubbed itself “CoMoCA,” which stands for the Colorado Museum of Contemporary…
Playwright Tom Donaghy’s Minutes From the Blue Route offers a surprisingly tender, conciliatory look at a mildly dysfunctional family. And with its production of the piece, the Boulder Repertory Company has once again distinguished itself as a troupe capable of doing emotionally sophisticated work with quietly challenging material. The tensions…
Playwright David Mamet’s remarkable Speed-the-Plow is as true to the contemporary American cityscape as an Edward Hopper painting. Mamet’s tough-mouthed dialogue–always a series of interruptions and eruptions–falls with an intoxicating rhythm on the ear. His is the prose-poetry of the street, with its low-life hustlers, as well as the equally…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
Admirers of director Tony Gatlif’s enchanting look at Romany life and music, Latcho Drom, are now in for a treat of another sort. With Mondo, the world’s leading (perhaps only) Algerian-Gypsy-French filmmaker has crafted a poetic fable about friendship, human displacement and belonging that strikes all kinds of chords in…
If you like your summer movies indistinguishable from video games, your heroes straight out of Toon Town and, just to gild the lily, wise-cracking, clown-faced villains who chomp on pizza topped with wriggling green larvae, then Spawn might be the picture for you. Harder-edged than Spielberg’s latest dinosaur epic or…
Thursday July 31 Out of the woods: Smooth as silk. Liquid gold. These are just two of the ways one might describe the facile voice of Kevin Mahogany, the male jazz vocalist generally named these days by those in the know as the Joe Williams or Billy Eckstine of his…
For many years, the exhibition calendar in the art world featured a preordained hierarchy of shows. In the fall, galleries, museums and other venues presented their most important events. Then, special exhibits launched the winter holiday season. The spring and summer were traditionally the times when the art world would…
A new theater company has just arrived in Denver with a hot agenda and a cool style: Shadow Theatre Company is intent on bringing more plays by African-American playwrights to the boards. And if its first production, Innocent Thoughts, by William Downs, is any indication, we’re in for some exhilarating…
When Carlisle Floyd wrote the exquisite opera Susannah in the mid-1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was out hunting up commies under every rock and movie studio. It was a bleak, hysterical period–but it was nothing new. Witch-hunts crop up over and over again throughout history, changing form to suit every era…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high-school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his own…
Thursday July 24 Ska’s the limit: What goes around comes around, and when it comes to something as exuberant and danceable as ska, we couldn’t be happier. What began in the ’50s as a full-throttled precursor to the more loping Jamaican reggae music went through its first revival nearly twenty…
This has not been a great year for sculpture in Denver. First, the Solar Fountain by Larry Bell and Eric Orr that had graced the never-landscaped lawn of the Denver Performing Arts Complex was unceremoniously bulldozed off its foundation and tossed into dumpsters. (Would it have killed the Denver Center…
There are moviemakers, and there are people who have access to moviemaking equipment. The neophyte documentarians Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn fall into the latter group. In a benighted attempt to find “the American Dream,” these innocents packed their cameras and their post-adolescent neuroses into a borrowed Saab and hit…
Assorted historians are happily butting heads this week over the speculation that dour Queen Victoria may have had big eyes for the earthy Scotsman who tended her horse. For better or worse, that is the premise of Mrs. Brown, a witty nineteenth-century soap opera that shows no fear of offending…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One–Vietnam War hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his new…
Thursday July 17 Garden party: Next weekend’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem to better fit the occasion, but look at it this way: Kicking off this summer’s Theatre in the Park series in Civic Center Park with James Goldman’s Lion in Winter at least sounds pretty cool…
