It might seem odd to find it in a theater instead of a smoky bar, but the Denver Center Theatre Company’s It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues is a scintillating piece of work. The songs have been carefully chosen to illustrate the history of the blues with all its hot…
The hit movie The Madness of King George has stimulated popular interest in eighteenth-century England, which had a rich theatrical tradition of its own–witness Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The Industrial Arts production of this Georgian comedy, though a bit thick at first, soon opens a bright window on…
The over-the-top comic strip Tank Girl became an instant cult sensation when it hit the streets of London in 1988, and it wasn’t long until kids on this side of the Atlantic started eating it up, too. No surprise. The futuristic action heroine created by self-proclaimed layabouts Jamie Hewlett and…
Between the uptight harangues of the New Right and the P.C. nitpicking of gay activists, it’s a wonder that anyone can get a mainstream movie involving homosexual life past the popcorn stand. To hear all the noise surrounding Philadelphia, you’d have thought the entire cast of characters had half the…
Wednesday March 29 Gimme five: The modest Five Points neighborhood, now a light-rail hub, has been around for a long time, but you may not have paid it much mind until you zipped through it on one of those shiny new LRT cars and took a good look around. Chances…
Denver city librarian Rick Ashton’s been taking so many bows lately for “The Big New Library,” which is on-time and on-budget, that he really ought to do an aerobics tape. Forgotten in all this excitement is the fact that had it been left up to Ashton, Denver wouldn’t have gotten…
Anton Chekhov’s first play, Wild Honey, is raucous, intermittently charming, sometimes scathing and terribly clunky–the original is said to take six hours to perform. This production by Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre is the short version, translated and adapted by gigglemeister Michael Frayn (Noises Off). But while Hunger Artists does a…
The great French playwright Moliere hated doctors, and more than 300 years after he wrote The Imaginary Invalid, his scathing ridicule of the profession still stings. The Denver Center Theatre Company’s new production aims its darts at medicine’s present as well as its past, and it hits the mark with…
The most talented young filmmaker in Canada may never attract mass audiences, but he gets under the skin in ways almost no one else can. If you’ve seen Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts or The Adjustor, you know his territory is a psychosexual mindscape where people act out personal rituals, where…
Some fans of Stephen King’s horror fiction–stuff he cranks out at a frightening rate–will probably see Dolores Claiborne as another serving of King Lite. The novel, and Taylor Hackford’s radically altered movie version of it, are decidedly non-supernatural and non-gory. Here, in fact, we behold the bestselling Mr. King in…
Wednesday March 22 Time to quilt: If you’re the sort to wonder why there’s a National Quilting Day in the first place, a visit to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum might shed some light on the subject. The museum will celebrate the occasion with a myriad of demonstrations today from…
There’s a good reason why Denver’s Dale Chisman is frequently described as one of the most important painters in the American West. But in his latest exhibition, he demonstrates (again) that he is also a virtuoso printmaker. Chisman’s One Man Show, at 1/1 Gallery, is filled with marvelous work in…
The clouds of the baseball strike have cast a shadow over the long-awaited opening of Coors Field on March 31. More than likely, the new ballpark will be inaugurated with replacement players instead of the real Rockies. But at the art galleries that line Wazee Street west of the ballpark,…
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…
