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…
Half Native American and half African-American, the title character of Carlyle Brown’s Buffalo Hair struggles to make sense of his racial identity. That internal battle, refracted in the lives of several other mixed-race characters, forms the central conflict of this fascinating historical drama. The regional premiere at Eulipions offers an…
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a whinefest under the best of circumstances. The four characters reveal their secret sufferings in convoluted party games and end by eviscerating each other’s fragile emotional guts in a stupefying alcoholic haze. Despite the entertainment value inherent in such fireworks, when the…
At the movies, it’s open season on literary figures. In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, we got an earful of cult heroine Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liners, which was to be expected, and an eyeful of her alcoholic self-pity, which was not. Tom & Viv is an even rougher piece…
Want to foul up your next crime thriller? It’s easy. First, go down to the Florida Everglades at midnight and find some alligators. Next, reheat a big, dangerous slab of Cape Fear, add a humid chunk of In the Heat of the Night and a racially motivated miscarriage of justice…
Wednesday February 15 Speech! Speech!: As spokesman for the rootsy, politicized rap group Arrested Development, the man known only as Speech has made it his mission to introduce young black fans to the group’s difficult activism. So along with fellow Arrestee, Terrie Axam, he helped produce Fusion, a multimedia spinoff…
At the end of the opening-night performance of Grease, former Monkees heartthrob Mickey Dolenz hushes the applauding audience at the Temple Buell Theater and says, “If you like us, tell your friends. If you didn’t like us, tell them you saw Cats.” I saw Cats. The very best thing about…
Playwright Robert Shaver sets his new play, Slavia and Hugo, in a horrific, blood-smeared, body-littered clinic. An atmosphere of degradation and torture lurks, monsterlike, and with it the anti-war message of this harsh absurdist parable. War waged against civilians is the most atrocious war of all, and this ardent production…
Trying to revive the Western may be a fool’s errand. As revisionist historians will be happy to tell you, Manifest Destiny is as dead as John Wayne, and any hombre crazy enough to say otherwise will get the bellyful of hot lead he deserves. The real problem is that while…
That major-league enigma lying ninety miles off the Florida coast doesn’t often come into clear focus–not for North Americans. Aside from our occasional whiffs of its embargoed cigars and its stubborn, last-ditch socialism, Cuba remains terra incognita almost four decades after Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries shook the…
Wednesday February 8 Morph for your money: Face it, parents. If you don’t take your kids to see the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers–Live, they may never forgive you, because for them, a chance to see those colorful, megapopular TV teens conquer evil in person is more than compelling, it’s necessary…
The mysterious Internet, a computerized environment once inhabited only by government scientists, is becoming more and more consumer-friendly. Although the cyberhighway can be jammed with trivia, its potential is enormous–particularly in the field of visual arts, which can be lonely territory. Off the Highway, a show of photographs at Rule…
In playwright Keith Reddin’s Nebraska, even peacetime military life can be hell. And this Industrial Arts production leaves the viewer drained as Reddin delves into the loneliness, insecurities and futile adulteries plaguing the lives of his characters. The world these people inhabit is fraught with tension, fear and the terrible…
When a man lives under a cloud of fear, forever expecting a deluge, he may not notice that he’s already soaked to the skin and trembling. In the caustic comedy-drama Later Life, now in a superb production at the Avenue Theater, playwright A.R. Gurney masterfully reveals how fear has affected…
The pioneer trail blazed by Thelma & Louise several winters back is developing into a superhighway. Boys on the Side is Hollywood’s latest plunge into female bonding, and it confronts every meaningful women’s issue you can think of with such single-minded fervor that you start to wonder if the whole…
As soon as Cochran and Shapiro get done with this thing in L.A., they could get a call from Catherine de Medicis. Patrice Chereau’s noisy costume drama, Queen Margot, casts Catherine as the heavy in the bloody wars between Catholics and emergent Protestants in sixteenth-century France and in the palace…
Wednesday February 1 Belly up to the barre: Dancers from twenty colleges converge on Boulder this week to learn, perform and compete at the American College Dance Festival. But before the fledgling hoofers are put to the test, they’ll have a chance to see six of Colorado’s most accomplished professional…
