The peculiar love affair joining the biographer/ essayist Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington was played out, early in our century, on the periphery of London’s celebrated Bloomsbury Group. But for intensity and vision, this bohemian union may have surpassed even Virginia Woolf’s novelistic experiments or John Maynard Keynes’s…
Wednesday November 15 Lost in space: A real-life adventure and some of America’s favorite manufactured ones will be spotlighted tonight at separate Tattered Cover book signings, one at each T.C. location: U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady, the very same fellow who survived a fall from 27,000 feet and subsisted…
If it’s a taste of Manhattan modernism you’re craving this fall (and who isn’t?) run, do not walk, to Options 3–Robert Motherwell, the Denver Art Museum’s exhibit of twenty newly acquired paintings, collages and works on paper from this modern-day giant. Critics have sometimes dismissed Motherwell’s work as too pretty…
In his many short stories, John Cheever skimmed the surface of bourgeois American family life, laying bare the pretensions of suburban culture and dissecting the hopelessness of its materialism in nicely served, if thin, slices of life. In A Cheever Evening, playwright A.R. Gurney stirs together a number of scenes…
John Patrick Shanley’s poignant Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a three-scene argument for love–the kind of love between a man and a woman that penetrates individual isolation via mutual kindness. And it’s delivered in an unusual package as persuasive as it is hard-edged–partly because the play is well-written,…
Norman Rene’s Reckless is not for everyone, and Mia Farrow with her neurotic whine turned up full blast is for almost no one. But this quirky black comedy, which is in part another take on Candide, has the kind of daring you don’t find in more commercial projects. For one…
Mount the charm of Kennedy, the wisdom of Lincoln and the eloquence of FDR on the sleek chassis of Michael Douglas and you’ve got a pretty nice piece of Democratic Party wish fulfillment. Forget the facts of real life–the ascendancy of the Gingrichians and the decline of Bill Clinton. This…
Wednesday November 8 Two’s a crowd: As the dust continues to swirl around Amendment 2 and its impact on both sides of the fence, the issue of gay rights continues to occupy the state’s collective mind. Inner Journeys, Public Stands, a locally produced documentary, pays homage to a number of…
The Alternative Arts Alliance Open Show, which closes this weekend, is an annual demonstration of just how difficult it is for artists to create credible installations. Thank goodness an antidote is at the ready: Vital Connections, an intelligent and deeply felt installation by Virginia Folkestad that currently occupies the front…
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…
