Louis Jordan was an ingenious saxophonist, vocalist and songwriter whose energetic music lit up radio airwaves in the 1940s and continued to delight audiences into the 1960s. Roll Jordan Roll, at the Denver Civic Theatre, celebrates the moment in Jordan’s life when he began to make it big with his…
Humorist and movie star Will Rogers made political satire a gentle art. The Oklahoma country boy once said he never met a man he didn’t like, and that kindly sentiment even governed the way he skewered politicians. The Will Rogers Follies celebrates Rogers’s show-business career in the brazen style of…
What does it say about Hollywood that it has taken a British writer, Paula Milne, and a British director, Antonia Bird, to come up with the most provocative movie in years about American first love and American teenage anxiety? Mad Love is a little rough around the edges, but there’s…
If we are to believe Mel Gibson’s version of thirteenth-century history–and there’s not much evidence that we should–the ragtag army led by Scottish patriot William Wallace gloried in goring onrushing Englishmen with deer antlers, in bludgeoning, spearing, crushing and dismembering them. But first they mooned them. Braveheart, Gibson’s bloody (and…
Wednesday May 24 A key player: Musician Robin Connell takes her jazz straightahead, but she isn’t afraid to rework the standards to her own liking. The Detroit composer/pianist, who knocked about New York City before moving to Greeley in 1991, will bring drummer Mike Smith, bassist Eric Applegate and trombonist…
The Mackey Gallery is as filled with color as a spring garden. But bright hues are about the only common ground shared by the two very different artists on display. Lynn Heitler’s work falls readily within the tradition of abstract expressionism. Her more or less instinctive formal relationships provide a…
Two respected Denver artists, Dan Ragland and Bill Stockman, offer more reasons to respect them, with new work displayed in separate exhibits at the Grant Gallery. Most of Ragland’s somber, mixed-media pieces started out as Polaroids. Although the original photo images remain fairly true, Ragland enlarges them to mural size…
When a scumbag becomes a TV talk-show celebrity, the world is in trouble. And so English playwright Alan Ayckbourn skewers the cult of the celebrity, the mendacity of television and the public’s infinite appetite for manipulative trash in Man of the Moment. With a subject such as this, sparks ought…
Intense, ingenious and shocking, Steven Dietz’s God’s Country is also appallingly timely. After the Oklahoma bombing and all the recent press about so-called patriot militias, a powerful play about the murder of liberal Jewish radio talk-show host Alan Berg, along with a painful expose of the ideology behind that murder,…
The guards probably won’t be piping Die Hard With a Vengeance into Timothy McVeigh’s jail cell, but it might look awfully familiar to him if they did. As you might expect, the third installment of the Bruce Willis action series has but one dramatic goal–to blow things up–and even though…
Once they become “celebrities,” some Hollywood types like to hang around race-car drivers. Others prefer tennis players. Or boxers. Billy Crystal claims to have played a little hoop back in high school on Long Island, so the jocks he sniffs from one end of Tinseltown to the other are NBA…
Wednesday May 17 Tear of the dog: Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy open up a whole slew of new possibilities in character development with their book When Elephants Weep, a volume that uses studies of joyful squirrels and vengeful whales to explore the authors’ belief in the existence of animal…
It’s hard for those who love art to understand why some would seek it out only to destroy it. What is the motive of the vandal who slashes a painting or defaces a sculpture? Is he deranged? It’s different with architecture. No one would consider out-of-town hotel magnate Fred Kummer…
What books would you bring to a desert island if, heaven forbid, you were condemned to one? What single luxury would you bring to ease the loneliness and discomfort of such an imprisonment? These are the questions asked by three captives in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, as they languish…
A lot of cultural pretensions are examined in David Ives’s hilarious collection of six playlets, All in the Timing–mostly in bursts of brilliant and sometimes surreal parody. Though none too deep, this offbeat offering is still right on, and the Germinal Stage Denver’s finely tuned production is as delightful as…
Try to pick the moment when jazz reached its apogee in America, and the summer of 1958 is not a bad choice. In New York’s smokey Five Spot Cafe, pianist Thelonious Monk and his quartet were in the middle of an extended, overreaching engagement that would revolutionize the music forever…
The crux of Crimson Tide is a mutiny aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine at the height of an international crisis–the stuff that huge underwater explosions and tiny ruminations on the future of the planet are made of. This is also standard naval-war movie material. If you let your attention wander…
Wednesday May 10 Left-minded hitter: Radical voice Alexander Cockburn has written a book that hopes to prove that the metamorphosing political left is still kicking in spite of the times. Cockburn will introduce The Golden Age Is in Us: Travels and Encounters 1987-1994, which picks up on the eve of…
Our society has never afforded organized athletics the social status granted to those things ordinarily called culture: music, dance, theater, literature or the visual arts. But that distinction was unknown in the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where team sports were taken as seriously as religion or science. That’s Mexican artist…
Just when you think it’s safe to go to the theater, Christopher Durang shows up somewhere and disturbs all your complacencies. Brilliant, amusing, incisive and ultimately humane, Durang’s caustic assessments of American life and Catholic upbringing manage to undermine even the most insistent optimism. Cattlecall Productions’ appallingly funny The Marriage…
According to the first version of the war in heaven, Michael and his angels fought, and Satan fell like lightning from the sky. God won. Not so in Jose Rivera’s apocalyptic Marisol, in which God loses, in part because he’s already allowed all hell to break loose. Now being presented…
The Indian-born, Harvard-educated director Mira Nair knows a thing or two about culture shock, bigotry and the immigrant’s burdens of adjustment–three of melodrama’s classic subjects. But she is never content with merely yanking at our heartstrings. Unlike more straight-faced, straitlaced filmmakers, this independent thinker also has a healthy grasp of…
