It could have been, so easily, Cheez Whiz. But The Who’s Tommy, now playing at the Buell Theatre, has evolved into a brawny rock hymn to reconciliation. “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” is not so much the solipsistic demand of invisible youth it originally was but rather…
Whenever moviegoers do time in prison–or the nuthouse–they almost always run across that one transcendent inmate who sets the others free with his soaring spirit. He may be called Cool Hand Luke or Randall Patrick McMurphy or Papillon, but he’s always the soul of liberty–and the bane of authority. He…
If you want to move up in the superhero pecking order, as Belgian hulk Jean-Claude Van Damme does, you’d better outslug Sly and outshoot Schwarzenegger. You must snap more necks than Steven Seagal, and just in case you hear Chuck Norris closing fast, it’s wise to keep your killer kicks…
Wednesday September 14 Tommy, can we see you? Yes, we can. Pete Townshend’s brilliant and durable rock opera, Tommy, transformed over the years from its beginnings as a concert vehicle for the Who (the piece has since been reincarnated as a smash recording, a classical recording, a ballet and a…
Spontaneity, politics and confrontation marked much of the street theater and performance art of the Sixties and Seventies. And like many artists who came of age in that free-swinging era, L.A.’s Glugio Gronk Nicadro was drawn to art that encouraged direct interaction with the viewer, literally off-the-wall art forms that…
David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, now playing at the Boulder Art Center, might be seen as an argument against a career in the theater–sort of a parent’s tool to persuade the aspiring actor in the family to go to law school or become a sanitation engineer. But since…
Beatle boys John and Paul each loved their mum–and they each lost her. That’s one of the key themes running through Lennon and McCartney: The Day They Met, a new work by Denver playwright Michael A. Miller now being performed at the Mercury Cafe. Miller implies that the common loss…
Bruce Beresford, the Australian-born filmmaker who specializes in cultural collisions, has been very quiet since Driving Miss Daisy dominated Oscar night a couple of years back. Those who saw Rich in Love, the only movie he’s made since then, are in pretty select company. More likely you remember this director…
Transplant the classic Western Shane to a ranch in modern-day Argentina. Spice it up with local politics. Add horses. And sheep. And freight trains. There. You now have a pretty fair take on Adolfo Aristarain’s A Place in the World, an engaging coming-of-age story wherein the filmmaker also manages to…
Wednesday September 7 The thrill of the hunt: No matter what side of the hunting dispute you straddle, a new book written by nature writer Ken Kerasote should prove fascinating. In Bloodties: Nature, Culture and the Hunt, Kerasote relates his experience traveling with Inuit hunters in Greenland and explores the…
This state’s prairie lands appear remote–spare, spacy, even boring. But Last Chance to Cope–photographs of Colorado’s northeastern plains on which sit the actual towns of Last Chance and Cope–finds a lot to look at out where most of us see nothing. This exhibit, now on display at Emmanuel Gallery, is…
The production of Crazy for You at the Buell Theatre cranks up a full head of steam–and the rest of us have to run with it. Fortunately, most of the time the sprint is worth the effort. After all, the music is George Gershwin’s and the lyrics are Ira Gershwin’s…
Before last week’s Denver preview screening of A Simple Twist of Fate, theater employees handed out little packets of Kleenex to the audience. Cute studio promotion, no? Prepare yourself, the gesture said, for a real tearjerker, a rare opportunity to bawl your eyes out in the dark and go home…
It seems a bit early for hotshot director Quentin Tarantino to beget a school of imitators, but then, instant genius is a cheap commodity in the slam-bang world of pop culture. Roger Avary is Tarantino’s pal from his days as a video-store clerk in California, as well as his writing…
Wednesday August 31 Evil lurks in Arvada: Local author David Van Meter set his new book, Necessary Evil, in suburban Philadelphia, which is where he grew up. But we can only hope the similarities end there–the psychological thriller is a gruesome tale about a boy-next-door type who turns into the…
What is real? What is illusion? Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre poses these questions in its presentation of Tony (Angels in America) Kushner’s adaptation of French playwright Pierre Corneille’s miraculous L’illusion Comique. Kushner’s brilliant update of the 1636 play, redubbed The Illusion, is funnier and more relevant to a contemporary audience…
Raining Stones, a bittersweet comedy by Great Britain’s Ken Loach, is another bow to the tenacity of working-class people trying to keep their heads above water in hard times. Working in the same sort of grimy, northern city (Manchester, this time) where an earlier generation of British “kitchen sink” directors…
Those who have followed Oliver Stone’s bombastic career know that the reckless loudmouth in him usually gets the best of the deep thinker. Every intriguing conspiracy theory in JFK seemed to be inundated by a flood of bilge. Every pointed comment about the greed of the Eighties in Wall Street…
Wednesday August 24 Mambo king: Denver’s best-kept secret this week may very well be the two nights of outdoor performances being put on by Tito Puente & His Latin Allstars at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Puente, a master timbalero and bona fide living legend, has been making incredible music–Latin jazz,…
Artists Who Are Indian, the year-long exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, showcases strong new works of art, some exploring vital spiritual issues and all produced by living Native Americans who reject artistic stereotypes for the freedom–and equality–of the cutting edge. The seventeen contemporary pieces assembled for the show’s second…
One of the best jokes in playwright Jane Wagner’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe is found in its title. The question is, just how intelligent is life on earth? Now in an exuberant production at the Avenue Theatre, Wagner’s play asks more questions…
Everybody has a story–sometimes several stories. But a good story isn’t enough; you have to know how to tell it well. So a retired sailor named Ralph discovers during the course of Ralph’s Play, the first and best of two one-acts now playing at the RiverTree Theatre. Denver playwright Pat…
