Capitalism doesn’t always equal freedom, especially in the arts. That’s the bitter pill served up by Nagle Jackson’s The Quick-Change Room at the Denver Center Theatre Company. The message goes down easily–sweetened by Jackson’s piquant humor–but it burns in the belly. It’s a slow burn, too. The play demonstrates some…
There are worse places to be exiled than Paris, but Roman Polanski longs for sunny, featureless Los Angeles. It is, of course, a place haunted by the ghosts of Sharon Tate and the couple’s unborn child. But 25 years later, it is still the Emerald City. There, he remembers, deals…
Roman Polanski’s obsession with obsession itself may be the reason he’s stayed away from overtly political filmmaking: When you’re rooting around in the dungeon of the individual soul, there isn’t much time to talk about oppressive regimes. Seen in that light, Death and the Maiden is something of a departure…
There are few pleasures greater in moviedom than watching Albert Finney disappear into a character. In Suri Krishnamma’s A Man of No Importance, he does it again with such apparent ease that we forget his rollicking Tom Jones, the boozy diplomat of Under the Volcano, even the devastated classics professor…
Wednesday January 25 West meets west: The names of Sandy Greenhills and Urbana Asphalt West may not sound familiar to you, but you read about them all the time. In fact, this divorcing couple is regularly splashed all over the newspapers. But the bickerers are actually representatives of the urban…
Here in Colorado, we get more than our share of “pretty” photographs of the West. These brilliantly colored fantasies portray a land full of unspoiled scenery, snow-capped peaks, green forests and crystalline lakes. But longtime residents know another West that seldom makes it into coffee-table books or postcards: a vast,…
Mark Twain spins fitfully in his grave every time Bernard Sabath’s execrable The Boys in Autumn plays again. Now this effort by a third-rate artiste to project his meager talents onto the work of one of his betters is playing at the Theatre at Muddy’s. If it weren’t so dull,…
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, now at the Theatre on Broadway, makes a plea for compassion in these days of AIDS. But his ideas about how a lover can best express that compassion are sometimes questionable. Rife with in-jokes and written primarily for the gay community, Jeffrey is a kind of riotous…
We need only glance at the supermarket tabloids to find the current follies of the British monarchy. But long before the Prince of Wales wished he were a tampon and Lady Di got those riding lessons, there was George III, the fellow who dispatched the Redcoats to the colonies, wound…
Warner Brothers has been making tough, compelling prison melodramas on and off since 1932. This is hardly the golden age of identifiable studio style, of course, but you can bet your last nickel that the stingy coots who once ran the family business like a work farm would approve of…
Wednesday January 18 A stand-up kinda guy: Remember Tom Hanks in his role as a comedian in Punchline? The comic touch in his routines came directly from the funny bone of Barry Sobel, who not only coached Hanks in the fine art of making people roll on the floor but…
Hard as it is to admit, Denver’s alternative scene is aging. Well-established cooperative galleries such as Pirate and Spark are celebrating anniversaries well into the double digits, and many of their members now enjoy elder-statesman status. Housed mostly in shabby storefronts in cheap neighborhoods, these hardy urban survivors can seem…
The texture and nature of intimacy is the texture and substance of Shay Youngblood’s potent Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery at Eulipions Theatre. The story about a twelve-year-old girl and the eight “Big Mamas” who raised her reveals the hidden threads women sometimes weave into a community. Many of the…
The record book tells us that Ty Cobb was one of the greatest players in baseball history, and he was. His .367 lifetime batting average will never be approached. His record of 4,191 hits was finally broken by Pete Rose in 1985, but he still holds the mark for runs…
As usual, filmmaker Zhang Yimou is in hot water with the Chinese authorities–the kind of people who think freedom of expression means picking your own appetizer off the lunch menu. Zhang’s latest film, To Live, is a family epic that just happens to trace the agonies and ironies of the…
Believe it or not, Paul Newman will be seventy this year. That serves to remind us how long it’s been since the crass young cowboy called Hud and the Christlike rebel Cool Hand Luke passed into the realm of movie legend. It also tells us that the heroes of Newman’s…
Wednesday January 11 Be a sport: The next best thing to a tramp through the woods is a visit to the Denver Sportsmen’s Show, a five-day event opening today at the Colorado Convention Center. There you’ll find the indoor Wild Trout River, a slate of outdoor seminars, a fly-tying theater…
When I was around six years old, my mother took a class in oil painting at Emily Griffith Opportunity School. I have vivid memories of her bringing home boxes of smelly paint and handfuls of those tiny books filled with child-sized reproductions of the paintings of Renoir and Van Gogh…
Beware the ghost with a bargain: The price for the ethereal gifts he offers may be too high. The hero of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, now in a splendid new production by CityStage Ensemble, discovers just how high a price when he’s offered release from the sorrows of his…
The eagerness and all-out urgency driving John Singleton’s movies often overwhelm his common sense, but no one can fault the young filmmaker for lack of feeling or purpose. In Boyz N the Hood, Singleton threw himself into the streets of Los Angeles with both philosophical barrels blazing, and by the…
Susan Sarandon’s advisors shook their heads. Once you play a mother, they said, you’re stuck with mothers. You can’t go back. You can never outwit Tommy Lee Jones in court again. You can’t romance Kevin Costner in the bush leagues. You can’t rob convenience stores with Geena Davis. “That’s what…
Now that Cap’n Newt is steering the ship of state, how long will it take First Mate Helms to toss Pulp Fiction overboard and throw The Simpsons in the brig? While we wait for a little neo-Puritan backlash, here’s a safe, literate and, in places, self-righteous movie about the endurance…
