Thursday May 22 Beck to the future: The performer of the future is here right now. It’s Beck–and not much else. Somehow, though, Beck hauls his turntables and microphones and pale, deadpan eyes on stage with him and manages to deliver a whopping good, charged-up live show for the ages…
Commercial art galleries rarely coordinate their shows. The normal practice for galleries, even those next door to one another, is to schedule shows according to the vagaries of artists’ schedules and the idiosyncrasies of gallery directors. But viewers sometimes luck out, as they did this past winter when Robischon Gallery…
Anyone who’s ever been to Christmas mass at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver knows that the church is what the theater wishes it were. It has drama, mystery, joy, a sense of the tragic, a joke or two and, at its best, a feeling of transcendence. Moving the church…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Broken English, the first feature by New Zealand’s Gregor Nicholas, is a Romeo and Juliet tale that owes the usual huge debt to Shakespeare and the dozens of variations filmmakers have attempted over the decades. But it is beautiful and disturbing in new ways. Just to start with, Nicholas’s young…
The veteran director Sidney Lumet is one of the few guys on the planet who can make Woody Allen and Spike Lee look like tourists from Des Moines. Lumet has shot 29 of his 40 films on the streets of New York, and he still captures better than any other…
Thursday May 15 Sticks and stones: Behind every great comedian, there’s a guiding philosophy. For pernicious stand-up wit Bobby Slayton, it goes something like this: “If you can’t laugh at yourself, make fun of other people.” Be forewarned–meanness is Slayton’s oeuvre. Slayton says himself that even Don Rickles apologizes at…
Sure, he’d hate it–and it’s hard to imagine that he could squeeze more schmoozing time into any given day. But imagine if Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp were the city’s omnipotent art czar. Oh, the disappointments we might have been spared. The $7 million-plus art collection at Denver International…
All that bastardization of African-American music by white rock-and-rollers produced some terrific stuff. But white pop music is pasty indeed compared to original rhythm-and-blues masters like Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The rock musical A Brief History of White Music, in which a trio of black performers belts…
The musical version of Jan de Hartog’s Tony Award-winning play The Four Poster is called I Do! I Do!–and if it weren’t for two fine performers who pump their life’s breath into it at Littleton’s Town Hall Arts Center, it would be a resounding I Don’t. The songs are uniformly…
Here’s more good news for independent filmmakers living on macaroni and cheese in studio apartments everywhere. The 25-year-old Australian director Emma-Kate Croghan shot Love and Other Catastrophes in seventeen days on a budget of $30,000, and Fox Searchlight Pictures picked it up. Here’s the bad news: Croghan didn’t spring for…
Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…
The unlikely heroine of Peter Duncan’s Children of the Revolution is one Joan Fraser (Judy Davis), a red-haired, bug-eyed Australian Communist whose fervor doesn’t stop with belting out “The Internationale” in the corner pub or forcing leaflets on bemused passersby. Joan is so hot for Bolshevism that she sends a…
Thursday May 8 War and priests: Church-related issues run thick and deep in Racing Demon, David Hare’s insightful theater verite based on the playwright’s in-depth interviews of priests in impoverished London neighborhoods. While Hare pays homage to the grassroots efforts of Anglican clergymen on the streets of South London, he’s…
It was in the early 1980s that many of Denver’s alternative art spaces first came into being. Spark and then Pirate were founded, and within a few years, Edge and Core and other, more minor locales appeared. At first these spaces were little more than friends-only clubs. But soon their…
Only Stephen Sondheim or the devil could build an entire musical around a 35-year-old bachelor spending two and a half hours trying to decide whether he’s ready for marriage. Get over yourself, jackass. Come to think of it, apart from two or three sufferable songs in Sondheim’s Company, now playing…
Jules Feiffer’s Carnal Knowledge was written in the 1960s, made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in the 1970s, and revised in the late 1980s. It may seem a bit dated today–most educated men, after all, have learned a little something from the women’s movement. But Feiffer’s…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
If you happen to be a highly civilized yuppie couple from Massachusetts and you’re driving a $30,000 sports/rec vehicle to California, don’t bother stopping off in cactus-and-enchilada country. After all, the black-clad varmint at the wheel of that sun-scorched pickup truck just ahead has a Dalton Brothers mustache and a…
Thursday May 1 What’s new? In every swarm of musicians, there are always a few adventurous souls who aren’t satisfied with playing the same old thing. Now a handful of the area’s intrepid music makers, the Modern Chamber Players, with help from the Boulder Philharmonic, are celebrating la difference with…
We may or may not have seen the last of the snow this year, but signs of renewal–such a part of the ritual of spring–are visible everywhere. Blossoming along with all of those tulips is the city’s local alternative-art scene, where a veritable nosegay of important events are helping ease…
East German playwright Heiner Muller is not well-known in America, so the Lida Project’s production of HamletMachine presents a rare opportunity for Denver audiences to experience his wild woolliness. And what an experience: Such extravagant craziness is hardly ever this controlled and involving. The play is based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet–a…
