The trouble with message plays is the annoying tendency of the moral to get stuck in your throat as the playwright tries to ram it down. Very unpleasant. That’s why a play like Mark Dunn’s The Deer and the Antelope Play is rare and welcome: Its message is so clear,…
It may be hard to believe now, but truly great talents once graced the world of television–and viewers across America knew how to appreciate a good gag or a searing drama. Before the era of sitcoms and car chases, before cynical admen took control and cut up the airwaves into…
With six straight hit movies in the bank and a pair of Oscars on the mantel, Tom Hanks has inflated into a major Hollywood power. So when he tells the guys in suits he wants to write and direct a film all his own, the suits start nodding vigorously into…
In Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Bound, film noir gets one helluva gender-bending. But when the scamming and shooting stop, the genre looks healthier than ever. Envision Double Indemnity with two Barbara Stanwycks, no Fred MacMurray and a couple of enflamed lesbian love scenes. Throw in a briefcase stuffed with 2…
Thursday October 3 World party: Visitors to Denver’s sprawling Auraria campus are greeted by the picture of multiculturalism, as students from all walks of life crisscross its urban quads. Apropos to the wonderfully motley quality of the higher-education complex, a World Friendship Festival, held today from 10 to 2 at…
The paintings and sculptures in the current show at Denver’s Artyard Gallery were completed in the last five years, but they still provide a look back at the city’s nascent contemporary-art scene of the 1960s. Reunion joins Robert Mangold, a household name and old-guard wizard of local contemporary sculpture, with…
There are no surprises in the touring production of Leonard Bernstein’s fabulous West Side Story, but there fortunately are no disappointments of any importance, either. Baby-boomers are bound to sink into a pleasant pool of nostalgia over this one: Where were you when the 1963 movie version opened across the…
The Melancholy Dane has been done by so many so well that every performance of Hamlet is haunted by the geniuses of the past. Recognizing just how haunted the part is, playwright Paul Rudnick brings back the specter of one of those geniuses, early American movie star and Hamlet extraordinaire…
The best movie of the year has nothing to do with space aliens blowing up the White House. Or the durability of the Klan in Mississippi. Or shooting heroin in Scotland. The best movie of the year is about a couple of Italian immigrant brothers struggling to keep a restaurant…
Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie made by a grownup. A movie fueled by Tarantino’s brand of daredevil adrenaline but with none of his schoolboy nihilism. A movie drenched in blood that also understands loss. A swaggering black comedy stuffed with betrayals that still takes time to glimpse the soul of…
Thursday September 26 The patter of little poets: When Crofton-Ebert Elementary School students put pen to paper, out came a fantastic pastiche of funny, sweet and imaginative poetry, collected in the book When Elephants Smash the School. Toads in the Garden, an ongoing Thursday night poetry series on the Auraria…
Fall has arrived, and with it the most desirable slots in the exhibition schedules of the city’s art galleries. This time of year, excellent solo shows by established artists seem to pop up nearly everywhere. Among the most notable this autumn are a fine pair of exhibits that feature the…
Director Louis Malle’s 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street brought David Mamet’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya to the screen. It’s a magnificent movie, beautifully written and a veritable textbook on the art of acting. But it has left a big problem for theater companies: How in the…
Victor Hugo’s magnificent, sardonic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame is everywhere you look these days. Disney’s animated musical interpretation was a smash hit, and even The Simpsons television sitcom satirized Andrew Lloyd Webber’s penchant for musicalizing tragedies in its hilarious “Hunchback” episode. Still another rendering of the dark medieval…
All right, buffs, let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1961 the great director Akira Kurosawa made a lightly veiled homage to American Westerns called Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cold-eyed samurai-for-hire who teaches an overdue lesson to both warring factions in a lawless town–now located in…
In the final scene of The First Wives Club, a comic fantasy in which three middle-aged women take revenge on the husbands who have traded them in for newer models, the triumphant heroines, all dressed in stylish, sinless white, link arms in the glistening dawn streets of lower Manhattan and…
Thursday September 19 A good sign: Novelist Larry Brown–one of our finest fiction writers, if not the most well-known–tells powerful, straightforward stories wrung artfully from the pith and bedrock of human experience. His sixth novel, Father & Son, a good-versus-evil parable set in small-town Mississippi, is now being touted as…
Maybe it’s the way the mountains emphatically hit the sky, or perhaps it’s those seemingly infinite flat prairies. Whatever the reason, many artists working in Colorado have looked to the firm, straight line as the principal means to their artistic ends. One of the most prominent of those practitioners is…
Back in 1959, Hollywood called it The Fugitive Kind, and Marlon Brando’s brooding sexuality and Anna Magnani’s voluptuous realism made it a dark meditation on the nature of jealousy and violence in a small Southern town. It was as good a movie as Hollywood could produce. But Hollywood could not,…
Improv can be deadly; when it’s bad, it’s horrid. Good thing Comedy Sports is alive and well and living it up downstairs at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. After ten years and 1,900 performances (making it the longest-running show in Denver), the ensemble group has developed a distinctive persona. The performers…
If Cameron Diaz knows what’s good for her, she’ll settle down with a nice, stable insurance salesman in rural South Dakota, have five kids and vote Republican forevermore. Hey, it could happen. For now, though, the spectacular blonde who helped transform Jim Carrey from geeky bank clerk to strutting superstud…
Thursday September 12 Go west, young woman: Though ground has yet to be broken for the Women of the West Museum, a national institution-in-planning for Boulder, those administering the project are ready to begin sharing some of it with the public right now. Their Women in the American West Lecture…
