Over the past year, many of Denver’s most powerful and insightful theater productions have been political in nature, displaying a passion for justice without resorting to propaganda: My Sister in This House, Six Degrees of Separation, Star Fever, Parallel Lives, God’s Country, The Interrogation, Oleanna, Death and the Maiden and…
Resignation to suffering is the best playwright Hugh Leonard can offer as resolution to the accumulated pain of a lifetime. But the strength of his humanist viewpoint in A Life lies in its cultivated compassion. The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of this gentle reflection on one man’s life and the…
As the story goes, Wayne Wang’s Smoke, that fascinating loaf of life set in and around a Brooklyn cigar store, got such a grip on its authors and actors amid last year’s shooting that no one wanted to let go. So they didn’t. With just six more days of filming…
It has been half a century since the star-struck gangster Bugsy Siegel arranged a screen test for himself (alas, his gifts lay elsewhere), and more than two decades since assorted soldiers from the Lucchese and Gambino crime families stood around the Godfather set giving Mafia style tips to Marlon Brando…
Wednesday October 18 The big Chile: Chile encompasses Andean heights, prairie-like pampas, the still-wild bottom of the world at Tierra del Fuego and the cultural mysteries of Easter Island–all co-existing within the lean South American nation’s boundaries. Interpreting this kind of diversity is a major task for members of Ballet…
Expressing a variety of minority views through art is the goal of two exhibits currently on view at Golden’s Foothills Art Center. According to center director Carol Dickinson, the shows also are intended to reflect how minority artists can use their art to “triumph over victimization.” The Holocaust is a…
Several current local shows zero in on the renewed vitality of abstract art in the Nineties. Chief among these are the group exhibit Reinventing the Abstract, at the Mackey Gallery, and a single-artist display, Gary Passanise, at the CSK Gallery. In the Mackey show, gallery director Mary Mackey includes her…
Director Israel Hicks zeroes in on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with fervor and style in his new telling of the classic tale at the Denver Center Theatre Company. He has the temerity to set the greatest of Shakespeare’s cautionary tales in old California (instead of old Verona), with Spanish dons…
Toward the end of John Guare’s tragicomic Landscape of the Body, one of the characters tells us that the mystery is always greater than the solution. This sentiment (seen most recently in the movie thriller Seven) may be oh so au courant, but it may also be a dodge–a way…
The reading public–O, endangered species–grows understandably wary every time screenwriter, director and cast get their collective hooks into a bona fide literary classic. It doesn’t happen every time, but some of the world’s most dreadful movies have dropped stillborn from some of the greatest books. Who can imagine Tolstoy’s reaction…
Wednesday October 11 Things to do in Denver before you’re dead: Denver’s annual fifteen minutes–or in this case, ten days–of Hollywood glamour and glitz begin today, when the Denver International Film Festival kicks off with a big premiere. In what is getting to be a tradition for the fest, it’s…
It truly is fall in Denver, and the trees themselves are coming down along with the leaves. Given this loss to our visual environment, it’s some solace that another, more expected feature of autumn also has arrived: the start of high season for the art world. This year in Denver,…
Thomas Merton, it’s fair to say, was an individual worth writing a play about. An American monk who lived a hermetic life out in the woods, he nevertheless kept up a mighty correspondence with many of the greatest writers of his age during a literary career that ran from 1941…
It may be juvenile, brash and silly here and there, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ultimately transcends its own naivete with delightful exuberance and dazzling production values. From lyricist Tim Rice’s humor to Webber’s sweet pop tunes to the sophisticated lighting and set designs, the…
Gus Van Sant, best known for the junkie street fantasy Drugstore Cowboy and the quasi-poetic road movie My Own Private Idaho, is a hipster first and last–a contemporary Jack Kerouac with a Panaflex pointed at the Nineties. So the swipes Van Sant takes in To Die For at celebrity worship…
The eighteenth Denver International Film Festival gets under way October 11 at the Auditorium Theatre with the local premiere of Woody Allen’s new film, Mighty Aphrodite–in which Allen and Helena Bonham Carter play a married couple with plenty of, well, marital problems. The festival closes nine days later at the…
Cushioned by money and blunted by convention, Dead Presidents lacks the raw thrill that catapulted the Hughes brothers’ first film, Menace II Society, onto critics’ Best Ten lists and into the consciousness of an America obsessed with race and violence. Like many filmmakers on their second outing, Allen and Albert…
Wednesday October 4 Powell to the people: Harlem-born to Jamaican parents, Colin Powell joined the army, eventually rising to the rank of four-star general. His mastermind role during Operation Desert Storm catapulted him into the public eye; now his possible presidential candidacy is discussed in a tone well above a…
Museum-quality art can often be found at LoDo’s Robischon Gallery. Rarely, though, are the gallery’s three display spaces all devoted to the work of a single artist, as they are in the current exhibit John Buck–New Work. The special treatment is warranted, given Buck’s formidable artistic output of the last…
The third play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Broadway Bound, is only ankle deep. But the wading is both more pleasant and more interesting than in the first two plays in the series, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. This last play is about writing–the desire, the tedium and the…
In a Pentecostal church near 11th Avenue and Acoma Street in downtown Denver, a corps of volunteer carpenters is busy building the only Elizabethan-style stage in Denver–and a one-of-a-kind theater arts facility. The church, where a small congregation still holds services on Wednesdays and Sundays, was recently purchased for $200,000…
Easy Rollins, the smooth private eye at the heart of four Walter Mosley novels, occupies the same city (Los Angeles) and the same period (the fertile 1940s) as his celebrated counterpart in the detective trade, Philip Marlowe. Both of them are stained by the violence of their antagonists and, quite…
