Wednesday April 12 Pulling strings: Based in Colorado Springs, where they are artists-in-residence at that city’s University of Colorado campus, the Da Vinci String Quartet is a chamber ensemble at home with a variety of composers and musical periods. The prize-winning group–Jerilyn Jorgensen, Kay Kireilis, Margaret Miller and Katharine Knight–will…
Eric Zimmer, a relatively new member of the Edge Gallery co-op as well as a relative newcomer to Denver, currently fills Edge’s front gallery with an ambitious display of quirky paintings and paper pieces. The paintings are closely interrelated and mostly follow a similar program: Zimmer draws with ink on…
I’ll be as clear as glass. It is an act of barbarism to even raise the question of whether I. M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza is worth preserving, let alone to threaten it with destruction, as St. Louis-based absentee landlord Fred Kummer has. The plaza ranks as one of the greatest…
The growing influence the movies have over theater has its downside. Some theatrical productions try to vie with movie spectacle, for instance, cheapening the theatrical experience, a la Miss Saigon. But Hollywood’s influence can also lead to ingenious or charming solutions to theatrical problems. Madeline Walker O’Brien’s The Why and…
The full title of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. A mouthful–and really a much more proper title than the abbreviated one. This is a long, complicated…
Those glimpses of wounded babies, desolate old women and bombed buildings on the evening news pass through most Americans like air: The war in Bosnia remains a meaningless abstraction located somewhere between Judge Ito’s latest pronouncement and Chelsea’s latest camel ride. Milcho Manchevski’s beautiful and disturbing Before the Rain probably…
As a boy, Samuel Goldwyn was an apprentice glovemaker, not a reader, and in the Thirties the late Hollywood mogul had a famously loose acquaintance with the obscure French novels and half-forgotten Italian plays he was always buying in hopes of giving selected MGM talkies a touch of class. So…
Wednesday April 5 Affirmative action: Social consciousness and comedy have probably been willing bedfellows since the beginning of time. Or at least since the first funny guy got up in front of his cavemates and began to make fun of know-it-all Glog, who shared his coconuts only with the palest…
Current exhibits at Spark and Pirate: a contemporary art oasis each feature art that represents the human body–though you might not know it from simply looking. In Spark’s front gallery, Susan Koenig shows both works on paper and works made out of paper. Her still-life drawings, most combining charcoal and…
Wes Hempel and Jack Balas, two painters who share a studio and an affinity for narrative content, are now sharing the Robischon Gallery with their separate but equally impressive exhibits. Hempel’s paintings, on display in the front gallery, pointedly evoke art history, specifically seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art–but there’s a feeling…
It might seem odd to find it in a theater instead of a smoky bar, but the Denver Center Theatre Company’s It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues is a scintillating piece of work. The songs have been carefully chosen to illustrate the history of the blues with all its hot…
The hit movie The Madness of King George has stimulated popular interest in eighteenth-century England, which had a rich theatrical tradition of its own–witness Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The Industrial Arts production of this Georgian comedy, though a bit thick at first, soon opens a bright window on…
The over-the-top comic strip Tank Girl became an instant cult sensation when it hit the streets of London in 1988, and it wasn’t long until kids on this side of the Atlantic started eating it up, too. No surprise. The futuristic action heroine created by self-proclaimed layabouts Jamie Hewlett and…
Between the uptight harangues of the New Right and the P.C. nitpicking of gay activists, it’s a wonder that anyone can get a mainstream movie involving homosexual life past the popcorn stand. To hear all the noise surrounding Philadelphia, you’d have thought the entire cast of characters had half the…
Wednesday March 29 Gimme five: The modest Five Points neighborhood, now a light-rail hub, has been around for a long time, but you may not have paid it much mind until you zipped through it on one of those shiny new LRT cars and took a good look around. Chances…
Denver city librarian Rick Ashton’s been taking so many bows lately for “The Big New Library,” which is on-time and on-budget, that he really ought to do an aerobics tape. Forgotten in all this excitement is the fact that had it been left up to Ashton, Denver wouldn’t have gotten…
Anton Chekhov’s first play, Wild Honey, is raucous, intermittently charming, sometimes scathing and terribly clunky–the original is said to take six hours to perform. This production by Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre is the short version, translated and adapted by gigglemeister Michael Frayn (Noises Off). But while Hunger Artists does a…
The great French playwright Moliere hated doctors, and more than 300 years after he wrote The Imaginary Invalid, his scathing ridicule of the profession still stings. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production aims its darts at medicine’s present as well as its past, and it hits the mark with…
The most talented young filmmaker in Canada may never attract mass audiences, but he gets under the skin in ways almost no one else can. If you’ve seen Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts or The Adjustor, you know his territory is a psychosexual mindscape where people act out personal rituals, where…
Some fans of Stephen King’s horror fiction–stuff he cranks out at a frightening rate–will probably see Dolores Claiborne as another serving of King Lite. The novel, and Taylor Hackford’s radically altered movie version of it, are decidedly non-supernatural and non-gory. Here, in fact, we behold the bestselling Mr. King in…
Wednesday March 22 Time to quilt: If you’re the sort to wonder why there’s a National Quilting Day in the first place, a visit to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum might shed some light on the subject. The museum will celebrate the occasion with a myriad of demonstrations today from…
There’s a good reason why Denver’s Dale Chisman is frequently described as one of the most important painters in the American West. But in his latest exhibition, he demonstrates (again) that he is also a virtuoso printmaker. Chisman’s One Man Show, at 1/1 Gallery, is filled with marvelous work in…
