Quick–name three women artists from Latin America. Well, there’s Frida Kahlo, of course, and then there’s, uh…er…. That most of us know so little about the art of our neighbors to the south makes a point about how art appreciation in this country can be xenophobic–that is, when it’s not…
It’s almost impossible to put on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice today; if one excises the loathsome anti-Semitism from the play, one can’t help but do violence to its original meaning. Laurence Olivier managed to virtually reconstruct the play’s intentions by cutting lines and casting all the characters except Shylock…
The local husband-and-wife acting team of Moira Keefe and Charlie Oates couldn’t be much different from each other. Yet they have managed to stay married for nine years, and they share their often dark and mostly hilarious secrets in the show they wrote and perform together, Staying Married. This is…
Agnieszka Holland’s overwrought Total Eclipse tries to exalt Arthur Rimbaud, the bad boy of French poetry, as the soul of raging creativity, a revolutionary so fierce and pure that no act of drunken self-destruction or wanton cruelty could bank his artistic fire or soil his reputation. Fine. The reports about…
The whore with a heart of gold and the punchy fighter with a rosin bag for a brain are not exactly new movie types–not even for that high Manhattan intellect Woody Allen. So when we meet them again in Allen’s new movie, Mighty Aphrodite, we’re tempted to apply the same…
The American frontier of the nineteenth century was a bonanza for both nature-loving romantics and the pragmatic forces of manifest destiny. And at the nexus of these two very different groups were the artists who recorded it all firsthand as members of the four major survey parties sent to map…
Arthur Miller appears to have gained some wisdom in his old age. A man has to mature a long way in his understanding of the world and of women to write a play as insightful and kind as The Last Yankee. And the Denver Center Theatre Company has imported the…
The plays that George Bernard Shaw wrote in the late nineteenth century were popular because they were funny–and because, despite Shaw’s socialist politics and Darwinian outlook, the societal conventions he appeared to flout were actually refined under the scalpel of his wit. With a few notable exceptions, Shaw’s plays remain…
Mainstream producers revile young auteurs. Sure, a certain prestige is conferred upon those who work with a Gus Van Sant or a Steven Soderbergh, and these associations tend to guarantee respectful treatment from both sweater-clad TV “critics” and minor-league Andrew Sarris wannabes. But they also force money men to contend…
Wednesday November 1 Look at me, ma: The school pageant grows up, beginning tonight at the Auraria campus, where the student-developed Kindness and Its Many Opposites: A Mosaic of Poems, Stories, Music and Drama opens at 8. Called a performance “collage” by CU-Denver theater professor Brad Bowles, the ensemble work…
Wednesday October 25 Tan parlor: The tearjerkers don’t get any better than those written by Amy Tan, whose Chinese mother-daughter paean The Joy Luck Club was made into the rare women’s movie that spills right over into being a people’s movie. The same combination of clannish ties, humor, poignancy and…
Fads, fashion and fancy are all reflected in the historic art that is of interest to people today. And just like art itself, the study of art history is subject to change over time. One of the sea changes in the field in the last twenty years has been the…
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of that country’s most famous contemporary artists have come to settle in the West, especially in New York City. This colony of Russian expatriates has had a profound effect on American contemporary art. And the artist’s artist of the group is Oleg…
Over the past year, many of Denver’s most powerful and insightful theater productions have been political in nature, displaying a passion for justice without resorting to propaganda: My Sister in This House, Six Degrees of Separation, Star Fever, Parallel Lives, God’s Country, The Interrogation, Oleanna, Death and the Maiden and…
Resignation to suffering is the best playwright Hugh Leonard can offer as resolution to the accumulated pain of a lifetime. But the strength of his humanist viewpoint in A Life lies in its cultivated compassion. The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of this gentle reflection on one man’s life and the…
As the story goes, Wayne Wang’s Smoke, that fascinating loaf of life set in and around a Brooklyn cigar store, got such a grip on its authors and actors amid last year’s shooting that no one wanted to let go. So they didn’t. With just six more days of filming…
It has been half a century since the star-struck gangster Bugsy Siegel arranged a screen test for himself (alas, his gifts lay elsewhere), and more than two decades since assorted soldiers from the Lucchese and Gambino crime families stood around the Godfather set giving Mafia style tips to Marlon Brando…
Wednesday October 18 The big Chile: Chile encompasses Andean heights, prairie-like pampas, the still-wild bottom of the world at Tierra del Fuego and the cultural mysteries of Easter Island–all co-existing within the lean South American nation’s boundaries. Interpreting this kind of diversity is a major task for members of Ballet…
Expressing a variety of minority views through art is the goal of two exhibits currently on view at Golden’s Foothills Art Center. According to center director Carol Dickinson, the shows also are intended to reflect how minority artists can use their art to “triumph over victimization.” The Holocaust is a…
Several current local shows zero in on the renewed vitality of abstract art in the Nineties. Chief among these are the group exhibit Reinventing the Abstract, at the Mackey Gallery, and a single-artist display, Gary Passanise, at the CSK Gallery. In the Mackey show, gallery director Mary Mackey includes her…
Director Israel Hicks zeroes in on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with fervor and style in his new telling of the classic tale at the Denver Center Theatre Company. He has the temerity to set the greatest of Shakespeare’s cautionary tales in old California (instead of old Verona), with Spanish dons…
Toward the end of John Guare’s tragicomic Landscape of the Body, one of the characters tells us that the mystery is always greater than the solution. This sentiment (seen most recently in the movie thriller Seven) may be oh so au courant, but it may also be a dodge–a way…
