Did you miss the road-show Phantom of the Opera? No problem: The Country Dinner Playhouse is presenting a far more spirited version of the classic horror tale, the excellent Arthur Kopit/Maury Yeston Phantom. For my money, it’s a better telling of the story than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s–or, for that matter,…
It will help if you like cruise-ship activities–conga lines, audience-participation skits and sing-alongs. Five Guys Named Moe, now at the Auditorium Theatre, is the kind of raucous musical designed to bring out the silliness in you. Jolly, extravagantly choreographed, riddled with jokes and sight gags, Moe is more music than…
Has Bernardo Bertolucci flipped out? The man who once explored the frontiers of carnal obsession (in Last Tango in Paris) and the fervid intrigues of Italian politics (The Conformist, 1900) began gazing eastward last decade, coming up with a gauzy Chinese head trip called The Last Emperor. That’s the one:…
Amid the clatter of summer blockbusters, Red Rock West is the kind of terrific sleeper that could get lost. That would be a shame. Here is a taut little thriller that depends on such classic virtues as the well-timed double-cross, clever plotting and vivid low-life characters, rather than on high-octane…
Wednesday May 25 Tool of the trade: L.A. band Tool gets the thumbs up from Beavis and Butthead–enough said. These alternative performers were the surprise of last year’s Lollapalooza tour, where they started out headlining the second stage and, on the strength of their blistering performances, moved up to the…
Fans of sophisticated contemporary sculpture will be delighted with the array of styles and media on display at Foothills Art Center. The 16th Annual North American Sculpture Exhibition fills the space with bronze, steel, wood, glass, ceramics and found objects, all material elements of 76 sculptural works from 66 artists…
Interesting, stimulating family entertainment is rare enough in Denver, so a sprightly show like Annie is welcome, indeed. Now playing at the Denver Civic Theatre, the musical revue offers local parents a breather from the inanities of television and a handy opportunity to introduce children to the excitement of live…
It’s all about power. The combination of skill, intelligence and soul-numbing, single-minded will that it takes to get rich in a capitalist society might propel one into the politburo in a communist society. So George Bernard Shaw speculated in his extravagant comedy of ideas The Millionairess, now in a hilarious…
This is what things have come to. Hollywood has spent $60 million on a Western movie derived from an old TV show that borrowed heavily from earlier Westerns, which were in turn based on dime novels that glamorized beyond recognition what actually happened on the American frontier. Naturally, the star…
Like his earlier films, Pedro Almodovar’s Kika is the kind of outdated bedroom farce that could only come from post-Fascist Spain, where artistic freedom is still a novelty. As in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and High Heels, this tale of a garrulous Madrid makeup artist’s sexual misadventures flaunts…
Can a quarter-century really have passed since Ratso Rizzo first sneered “I’m walkin’ heaahh!” and Joe Buck grinned at himself in the mirror, straightening the Stetson on that golden Texas rube’s head? Midnight Cowboy returns to the big screen this Friday for a one-week run at the Mayan, and its…
Wednesday May 18 Fit to be tried: The Regional Transportation District, which has a lot riding on the future, is throwing a Try Transit Week shindig that includes a little entertainment, a nostalgic look at the past and a good look at the future. Today, citizens can get a firsthand…
Human figures appear in representational art so frequently that new and exciting interpretations hardly seem possible. Even so, artists continue to render the figure, finding an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the body human. Three artists take over 1/1 Gallery with original, thought-provoking twists on the genre, infusing the well-worn…
Reinventing Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon has become something of an American pastime. The movie was a huge international hit, a brilliantly acted, visionary retelling of two Ryunsuke Autagawa stories. It was first remade in America in 1964 as The Outrage, a pretentious but still engaging version of…
There is so much to Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, it’s a pity there isn’t more. The Denver Center Theatre Company production is so rich in character, so well acted, so humane, so involving, it is difficult to say why it also just misses being completely satisfying. But then, the…
Yuppies hit the bottle, too. That’s the lesson of When a Man Loves a Woman, in which pretty Meg Ryan falls through a glass shower door, sweats out detox and fights to reclaim alienated husband Andy Garcia–all without messing up her hair or smudging her makeup. This is another gooey…
In Spike Lee’s sunny re-creation of Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 1974, laughing kids jump rope and play stoopball on spotless sidewalks. There’s always a parking place for the family car in front of the tidy brownstone. The neighbors may beef at each other about a little misplaced trash, but there’s not a…
Wednesday May 11 Bigger and better:Funsters John Flasburgh and John Linnel are better known to the world as They Might Be Giants. The quirky, goofy, hook-laden dynamic pop duo will make them all giddy tonight at the Ogden Theatre, located at 935 E. Colfax Ave. Tickets to the show, which…
Landscape As Metaphor, a show originally intended as a celebration of site-specific art, opens Saturday at the Denver Art Museum after more than two years of planning and construction. Such international talents as Judy Pfaff, Ursula Von Rydingsvard and Ed Ruscha scouted out locations in and around the museum in…
What a review of Love, Janis really needs is a rock critic, not a theater critic. The show at the Denver Center Theatre Company has plenty of hot moments, but works best as a re-creation of Joplin’s music, rather than her life. Nevertheless, Janis lives again. And all of us…
Singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, an enemy of sentimentality in all its forms, built an interesting career thrashing middle-class pretensions and undermining “good taste” wherever it reared its ugly head. His black, satirical songs scorched many a prejudice and failing in American society during the Fifties and Sixties, and while some of…
Ray Liotta does not bullshit, and he has zero tolerance for those who do. As a result, if you persist in asking him bullshit questions, you will be rattled. Not because of the 38-year-old’s spectacularly intense gaze (the dominant image of such diverse films as Something Wild and Dominick &…
