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…
Bruce Willis, psychoanalyst. That’s the first hurdle audiences must clear at Color of Night, and it’s not easy. Imagine Sylvester Stallone in the role of, say, a golden-hearted half-wit from Alabama who stumbles into the lives of presidents and pop stars. Envision John Wayne as Billy the Kid. Now think…
When a moviemaker wants to dabble in American social issues–but avoid confronting them head-on–the common refuge is the 1950s. That decade, growing gauzier and less distinct by the moment, has been reduced to a neat set of cliches suitable to the purposes of almost any storyteller burning to make a…
Wednesday August 17 King of the off-road: You could call it a last hurrah for summer mountain bikers, or it might just be a hearty affirmation of the popular sport. Either way, this year’s King of the Rockies Off-Road Stage Race and Mountain Bike Festival goes out of its way…
The siren call of stellar artists including Ed Ruscha, Red Grooms and David Hockney makes WORD, an exhibit at the Boulder Art Center, hard to resist. But this large show of text-based works fails to thrill, displaying many noncurrent (if not aged) creations, some that have been seen more than…
A great production of an excellent play can set you on fire with passion for the art form. You walk out of the theater knowing that something authentic has been uncovered about the very nature of human experience. And you realize that this particular revelation could only come via the…
When we first see old Chu, the bewildered father at the center of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, he’s doing what he knows best–steaming fresh fish in his sun-dappled garden, carefully roasting a just-plucked chicken, carving vegetables into exquisite rose-petal shapes. Lee observes these rituals in such concentrated, silent…
It has taken a couple of weeks to catch up with Andrew Bergman’s new comedy, but the rewards are still there. It Could Happen to You, a New York fairy tale about a sweet-tempered cop and a good-as-gold waitress who split a $4 million lottery jackpot, lightens up a bit…
Wednesday August 10 Tuff enuff: Listen to the album Strange Pleasure and you’ll wonder why Jimmie Vaughan didn’t leave the Fabulous Thunderbirds in the dust sooner. Vaughan, an able guitarist who’s lived in the shadow of brother and legend Stevie Ray, has finally come out on top with Strange Pleasure,…
So-called fine-art quilts are nothing new. Pop-art guru Robert Rauschenberg invented his famous “combine” series in 1955 by sloshing paint on a quilted bedspread. More recent high-art treatments of Granny’s handmade bed coverings include Judy Chicago’s ground-breaking feminist collaborative projects of the Seventies and the sad, enormous “AIDS Quilt.” Usually…
“It’s hard being easy,” remarks the prostitute in Erik Tieze’s new one-act, Motherlode, the first–and best–of three works by Colorado playwrights in the Changing Scene Theater’s Summerplay: Series 2. She’s wryly describing her own workload, of course. But the line also sums up the predicament faced by the play’s characters:…
Of all the summer musicals available this season, the best so far is Ain’t Misbehavin’, featuring the music of Fats Waller. The production now playing at the Eulipions cultural center erupts with energy, talent and intelligence. These songs are gutsy, wise and full of heart–earthy, sweetly romantic, at times patriotic…
If you liked Whit Stillman’s earlier comedy Metropolitan, in which a group of lamebrained debutantes and their sniffy dates sit around a Park Avenue living room drinking their parents’ whiskey and pondering the meaning of life, you’ll probably like Barcelona. The blue-blooded Stillman remains the only moviemaker in America who…
