The public made unprecedented expenditures on public art and public buildings last year in Denver. But you wouldn’t know it to look around. The biggest plum, both in terms of cost and lost opportunity, was Denver International Airport, born of the dreams of former mayor Federico Pena. The site plan…
Sometimes a play can leap through the centuries and land gracefully in our midst. But it takes a crack cast to handle antiquated language forms and old-fashioned sentiments. To work really well, a revival must speak some fundamental truths about the human condition. The Triumph of Love, an eighteenth-century farce…
The French loved him when America all but deserted him. But who cares what the French think? Now Jerry Lewis is enjoying a revival of public favor guaranteed to increase an already endless ego–fully displayed in the slick and (mostly) charming Damn Yankees. Even the death of his erstwhile sidekick…
The abundance of golden light flooding James Foley’s Two Bits lets you know right away that you’re in trouble. Nostalgia trouble. That light, which never lets up, is the same color as sap, and there’s nothing quite so sappy as a memory movie in which an aging man looks way,…
Mel Brooks has clearly lost a step in recent years. But before writing him off as the literally 2,000-year-old man, have a look at Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It’s a satire that has some of the old Brooksian flash and fizz. The Guinness Book of Records tells us there…
Wednesday December 27 Bored games: The most interminable part of the holidays begins right about now, when the tree begins to shed and the novelty of new bikes and Barbies begins to wear thin. But there are ways to prevent cabin fever from taking hold. For instance, there’s nothing like…
The distinction in Oliver Parker’s new film version of Othello is that Shakespeare’s tragic hero is being played for the first time on the screen by a black actor. Despite seeming out of his depth for much of the proceedings, Laurence Fishburne brings raw, lusty power to the great role,…
The four disparate filmmakers who contributed episodes to Four Rooms apparently have one thing in common: a nasty streak that won’t quit. Set in a down-at-the-heels hotel on New Year’s Eve and loosely linked by the presence of a scummy bellhop named Ted (Tim Roth), all the vignettes are resolutely…
BEST TEN OF 1995 1. The Usual Suspects. Bryan Singer’s dark, twisting crime thriller restores the old glory of film noir, then presses on into uncharted territory with Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri in tow. Best advice: See it twice. And look out for…
Wednesday December 20 Chicken feed: How does this sound for holiday fare that’s loud, boisterous, anarchic and silly? A bunch of parents and their kids show up for a play. Only instead of sitting and fidgeting, they get on stage and play the leading roles. At the Chicken Lips Comedy…
How lucky Robin Rule must be. No sooner had she moved her namesake gallery from the Siberia of an off-street spot at the Icehouse in Lodo to her new location at Broadway and 1st Avenue, across the street from the Mayan Theater than her new neighborhood was heralded in Denver’s…
The most important community theater arises out of a community’s need–and El Centro Su Teatro is a prime example of what the best community theater should be. Producing original plays in Spanish and English, Su Teatro draws on amateur and trained performers to give voice to the Hispanic community’s struggles,…
Most of the holiday shows now playing in Denver are secular pieces that capitalize on the season’s frenetic nostalgia but have no commitment to its meaning. But there is one authentic Christmas piece in town: Black Nativity at Eulipions. The play by poet Langston Hughes has a doubly emotional edge–a…
If you’re going to put a bearded lunatic wearing a suit made from banana leaves in your movie, the lunatic probably should be Robin Williams. He’s from another planet anyway, isn’t he? If you’re going to run a herd of elephants, rhinos and zebras down the main drag of a…
Many Americans who spent the better part of three decades with Richard Nixon may not want to give him three hours and twenty minutes more of their time now. But Oliver Stone, a moviemaker who’s always had more nerve than sense, is betting that the familiar Nixon ambiguity–half idealist, half…
The relief and joy most South Africans feel at the passing of apartheid in their country is everywhere reflected in Darrell James Roodt’s new film adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country. Nelson Mandela himself has endorsed it as “a monument to the future.” Co-stars James Earl Jones and Richard Harris…
Wednesday December 13 Silver screening: Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, going to the movies was an event to be treasured, rather than a cheap thrill pocketed easily at any corner video-rental store. A gentle bow to the bygone heyday of great movie palaces everywhere, the…
Many galleries go the route of the easy-to-do group show in the month of December, because it provides viewers with a wide variety of potential gift selections and because the holidays are overflowing with other kinds of seasonal events. Only during the dog days of August–a time when no one…
One of the great art soap operas of the past year has been the acrimonious split between Open Press, the respected printmaking outfit, and CSK Gallery, one of the newer kids on Wazee Street. Since December 1993, the printmaker and the gallery had been joined at the hip, sharing the…
They’re baaaack. With the just-opened Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Czech director Pavel Dobrusky and Norwegian counterpart Per-Olav Sorensen have once again brought “process theater” to the Denver Center Theatre Company. The first of their offbeat pieces–Stories, based on Isabel Allende’s novel The Stories of Eva Luna–was a delightful, technically brilliant bit…
If there’s anything Michael Mann savors more than the closeup so tight you can count the pockmarks on a hit man’s nose, it’s the betrayal so violent you feel like taking a shower after watching it. Martin Scor-sese and Quentin Tarantino notwithstanding, writer/director Mann is Hollywood’s real master of street-hardened…
Four decades and a year after Humphrey Bogart won Audrey Hepburn’s hand in a sparkling comedy of manners called Sabrina, Sydney Pollack has tempted fate with a $50 million remake. Luckily, Pollack’s been around: The man who directed Tootsie, Absence of Malice and Out of Africa wasn’t afraid to pay…
