Wednesday November 16 Jazz on the rocks: Thought-provoking, avant-garde music hasn’t exactly been a mainstay here in stolid old Denver, but that seems to be changing. More venues mean more variety, and as concert halls blossomed in the last year or so, so did the fare. In that spirit, the…
When Marcel Duchamp found an industrial bottle rack and proclaimed it art, he transformed fine art from an activity for a privileged few to one that everyone–and almost everything–can play. Almost eighty years later, people still delight in “found” objects, abandoning the formal grind of academic art to celebrate the…
Farce can be insipid drivel or sublime madness, depending on the play and the wit of the director. Fortunately, Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the University of Colorado-Boulder is more sublime than insipid, more caustic madness than silly drivel. And though this production can lose its way…
Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, now at the Theatre at Muddy’s, exposes the murky side of scientific inquiry. Even professors of archaeology, we learn, can be despicable and put their egos before the well-being of others. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Somebody really does have…
To hear David Mamet tell it, his two-character play Oleanna is such a lightning rod that, all over the country, couples who come to it wind up shouting at each other in the lobby and often leave separately. Judging from the public-radio interview I heard recently, Mamet is quite taken…
The new-wave ghouls who inhabit Anne Rice’s vampire novels don’t back off from the traditional threats. Wave a crucifix in the face of one of these doomed, androgynous wanderers and he’ll coldly laugh it off. Drive a stake into his heart and he’ll come right back at you, bloody in…
Wednesday November 9 All keyed up: Classical music will never seem the same after you’ve attended one of Jeffrey Siegel’s Keyboard Conversations, an annual mainstay at the Arvada Center, 6901 Wadsworth in Arvada. The internationally known pianist’s popular lecture/concert series, beginning its 1994-1995 season tonight at 7:30, combines Siegel’s renditions…
After a decade spent isolated in a Highlands barrio, Spark Gallery, the oldest of Denver’s cooperative art spaces, gained a new lease on life two years ago with its move to the industrial-grunge neighborhood near the Paris on the Platte coffeehouse. The once-sleepy Spark now buzzes with activity: A recent…
OpenStage Theatre’s production of The Philadelphia Story, now running in Fort Collins, proves once and for all that unemployed rich people dashing about trying to find true love in romantic comedies are no longer interesting. Whenever their plight did engage us in the Hollywood films of the past, it was…
A fine paradox has risen in the Mother Country: Some of the most expressive British films now portray characters who are notably inexpressive, buttoned up and repressed. Last year, Anthony Hopkins’s stoic butler in The Remains of the Day, paralyzed by his devotion to Stiff Upper Lip, won hearts and…
That rumble you hear down in the laboratory is mad Dr. Branagh putting a charge into the tragic creature De Niro. Whether we need it or not, there’s a new Frankenstein afoot, and it’s a freak of nature. Kenneth Branagh, the British boy wonder who’s given us a pair of…
Wednesday November 2 Signs of life: A bout with spinal meningitis left Peter Cook permanently deaf at the age of three, but that hasn’t kept the Chicago performance artist from expressing himself. This amazing dynamo’s Flying Word Project–a funny, topical and sometimes surreal poetic interpretation incorporating sign language, gestures and…
To be an innovator in today’s art world takes more than skill, knowledge and talent–it also helps to know how to focus an electron microscope or calculate the frequency of a microwave transmitter. These seemingly nonartistic techniques are only two elements involved in the extraordinary creations at the Arts Innovation…
Reckless, now running in Boulder in a biting, smart production by the Actors Ensemble, might have been called Relentless Christmas–so much of the action takes place on consecutive Christmases and so many of the events are cataclysmic. But although Craig Lucas’s hilarious play skewers the season’s sentimentality, it isn’t about…
Education is more than it’s cracked up to be. And while Educating Rita, now at the Denver Civic Theatre, suggests the traditional ingestion and regurgitation approach can be improved upon, it never says how. Playwright Willy Russell’s effort may be fun to watch, especially with such engaging actors, but its…
Set a pack of Yankee filmmakers down amid the weeping willows and sultry heat of rural Mississippi and there’s no telling what they’ll come up with. In the case of The War, it’s a movie about poverty. And the relentless tug of family love. And coming of age. And post-traumatic…
Unrepentant beef eaters, contented non-joggers and connoisseurs of the dry martini will probably love it. So will earthly folk who don’t give a hoot about the alignment of the planets or the present whereabouts of Werner Erhard. In fact, virtually anyone who thinks that the humorless orthodoxies and freshly minted…
Wednesday October 26 Hollywood and race: Young African-American filmmakers may have recently carved a brilliant niche in the artistic life of the nation, but you might not know about their predecessors from the cinema’s earlier days. “Midnight Ramble,” tonight’s episode of PBS’s The American Experience, delves into the “race movies”…
She stares out of the canvas at the viewer–at nothing. She seems frozen in a moment of deep anxiety, preoccupied with her thoughts. Who is she? In a sense, she is the artist, for this is an intensely realistic self-portrait. But at the same time, this woman and the other…
The McCarthy era stunk. If you don’t believe that, be sure to catch Red Scare on Sunset at Industrial Arts Theatre. The satire by Charles Busch imitates the style of Red-scare films (I Married a Communist, et al.) that fed American paranoia during the Fifties. Ironically, these propaganda films were…
Mocking sacred cows is a venerable tradition in the arts, and as long as it’s done without any discernible taste (but with a good deal of wit), it satisfies our sense of the ridiculous without betraying original works. Remember Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales From Shakespeare? Like that perverse piece of…
Every time you start hoping Dr. Kevorkian will pay a house call on Woody Allen, the filmmaker miraculously returns to form and gets everybody laughing again. Witness Bullets Over Broadway, the third movie Allen has completed since The Troubles started. It’s a Runyonesque farce combining Roaring Twenties theater folk, potato-nosed…
