Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a difficult play, full of subtle tests of skill for those hardy souls who undertake it. But Germinal Stage Denver’s new production grapples with all the challenges and wins. And though the seats turn a tad hard toward the middle of the…
What if the Big Bad Wolf wasn’t really bad at all? As the song says, there are “Two Sides to Every Story,” and playwright/director Pamela Clifton’s interactive children’s musical What Really Happened Once Upon a Time, at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, finally defends the real victims…
By now, most people beyond the age of reason have noticed that Oprah and Geraldo and the rest of the TV blabbermouth shows are not really about child abuse or stockbrokers who cross-dress on weekends or teenagers who have sex with their parakeets. They’re about reaction. The day’s topic is…
The period of Honore de Balzac’s Colonel Chabert is the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the French bourgeoisie was rising on tides of post-revolutionary democracy, material desire and disillusionment with war. Against this background, the great novelist wrote the tale of a slain hero of the Napoleonic Wars…
Wednesday March 15 His climb to fame: Ed Webster braved sheer walls and severe frostbite scaling a new route up Mount Everest’s Kangshung Face in 1988. But even the loss of eight fingertips and three toes hasn’t dampened the climber’s enthusiasm for difficult missions. Webster will share his mountaineering adventure,…
The Denver Art Museum has undergone a radical reorganization in the last few years. Huge amounts of material have been shifted among the curators, and a major beneficiary has been Dianne Vanderlip’s Contemporary department, which gained more than just a prefix when the word “modern” was added to its name…
Playwright Kevin Kling creates a special brand of one-man show out of the raw material of his own life, then tempers it with the insights of famous literary and scientific geniuses. The result is new myth–stories that hit you like fables, tingle your spine, challenge your assumptions and tickle your…
At the Cafe Noir, everyone wears black and white–or they get picked on by the actors. The cast of this interactive theater piece, now being staged by Mystery Cabaret West at Catalano’s Catered Affair, helps serve and clear a four-course dinner during the intermissions while carrying on a constant, teasing…
I once spent a morning in Los Angeles with Sam Peckinpah, watching him breathe fire. On the table in his hotel suite lay a stack of dirty dishes, an unkempt pile of movie scripts and a huge, unsheathed knife. There was also a .45 automatic the size of a toaster…
For decades social psychologists, campus film historians and other pests have been cooking up elaborate theories about how the Z-grade giant insect flicks of the 1950s were really reflections of our deepest Cold War fears, or that the disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s, with its swarms of killer bees and…
Wednesday March 8 Finn and dandy: At the heart of the updated Finnish folk sound of Varttina are the voices of four women harmonizing in the kinds of timbres that last took your breath away when sung by the Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria. But these saucy Finnish ladies have punched…
Pity Denver. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of American cities–it can’t get no respect. Regardless of what’s done here, negative national attention seems to follow. DIA is the most recent case in point. The new airport is nationally renowned not for its radical and dramatic design or its cutting-edge technology, but…
The production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Country Dinner Playhouse is clean, lively, ingeniously choreographed and fetchingly performed family entertainment. But this rollicking story, based on the 1954 MGM film of the same name, does require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, particularly for adult women…
Kevin Barry tries to zero in on a painter’s life in The Secret of Durable Pigments, now in its premiere production at the Changing Scene. The playwright creates a number of interesting little portraits–the artist’s mother, his best friend, his kindly old aunt–but his portrait of the artist as an…
There are plenty of good reasons Once Were Warriors has become the most successful film in New Zealand’s history, outgrossing The Piano and the Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park. Shock value is only one of them. Lee Tamahori’s searing examination of a contemporary Maori family facing extinction in the brutal urban…
How’s this for a comic premise? A Jewish American princess finally gets engaged to her longtime boyfriend. While everyone pushes to set the date, her nagging questions about marriage in the Nineties all come to a head with the discovery that every member of her family is having an extramarital…
Wednesday March 1 Pretty plies: Ballet doesn’t have to be stuffy anymore. When the dance company Ballet Eddy Toussaint U.S.A. hits the stage tonight at the Arvada Center, led by its progressive, Haitian-born choreographer/namesake, you’ll be bowled over by a high-energy balance of ballet and jazz steps taken to an…
Mountain McClintock never took a dive–it’s the one thing the aging boxer is proud of, the one shred of dignity he still owns. But the hero of Rod Serling’s sagacious Requiem for a Heavyweight has a dignity he doesn’t recognize, a small flame of intelligence that blazes up for one…
Truth hides in the details. The regional premiere of Parallel Lives, at Jack’s Theatre, zeroes in on the particulars of women’s lives, especially as they interact with men–and gets the Big Picture right. Based on The Kathy and Mo Show, by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy, this feminist sketch comedy…
The pleasures of Shallow Grave, a stylish black comedy disguised as a bloody thriller, are strewn so playfully about that they feel effortless. The characters, a trio of twentysomethings sharing a roomy flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, are so snotty and amoral that we’re never burdened by any pretense of liking…
That Irish charm school the movies have been conducting of late is still in session. The Secret of Roan Inish, an innocuous bit of Hibernian whimsy featuring a little girl’s vivid imagination, a kindly fisherman/grandfather who likes to pass on the family myths and a boy who’s mysteriously floated out…
Wednesday February 22 Be bop: Tonight may mark a first–we’re willing to bet there’s never been a collaboration between an orchestra and a Denver cartoonist. But when Tom Blomster’s Mostly Strauss Orchestra tunes up for tonight’s Freedom Concert, it’ll be Westword’s own artiste-about-town, Kenny Be, providing the visuals. Be’s series…
