Last week, Susan Froyd offered the “Fifteen best Denver ART moments in 2011” — a compendium of seriously praiseworthy events over the past year that elicited precisely one comment. Meanwhile, the comments keep coming in for Jef Otte’s “Ten best moments in Denver arts: 2011.”…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
Phantom. While playwright Arthur Kopit and composer Maury Yeston were still putting together Phantom, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Operatrundled onto the scene, and their backers vanished — along with any chance of a Broadway opening. This Phantom is much smaller-scale than Webber’s, with less spectacle and more emphasis…
With a chewy title to tip us off, director Carl Colby’s compelling and tricky portrait of his late pop, The Man Nobody Knew, streamlines and connects two vital relationships — one familial, the other between a man and his country. A former OSS officer who parachuted into Nazi terrain, the…
A doggedly overwrought production less felt than facile, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is an essentially uninvolving prestige adaptation. It might be perverse to accuse a tearjerker as accomplished as Spielberg of being unfeeling. But the overcalculation with which he mechanically trots out one of his most familiar tropes for what…
A Dangerous Method, the title of David Cronenberg’s viscerally cerebral new film, is something of an understatement. As cataclysmic as it is, this historically scrupulous science-fiction romance concerning the discovery of the unconscious mind might have been titled War of the Worlds or The Beast From 5000 Fathoms. Adapted by…
The Westword office is closed until Tuesday, December 27, and this blog will be taking a break until then — although Show and Tell writers are definitely out and about, experiencing everything this city has to offer. We suggest you do the same; there are hundreds of activities featured in…
Bicycle vs. Homing Pigeon vs. Moped from Village Voice Media on Vimeo.We’ve been rolling off lists this week like there’s no tomorrow, and maybe there isn’t, considering that pesky 2012 Mayan prophecy and all that. Earlier this week, Jef Otte presented his 10 best moments in Denver arts list, riffing…
If you missed kART Across America at the Denver Starz Film Festival, the time you have left to see it on the big screen is limited. So if you can avoid your holiday plans for one more day, see it tonight. The film, directed by Denver natives and thoughtful funny…
Travis Parr, the local artist best known for making Icelantic skis into mountain masterpieces, opened a major new solo show, The Landscapes of Perception, at Spacejunk Art Centers last week in Bayonne, France. The show runs through January 28, capping a French tour which included stops in Bourg-Saint-Maurice, Grenoble, and…
Sandi Calistro got her first tattoo in Maine when she was sixteen, and later decided to become a tattoo artist. Accompanied by her dad, she came to Colorado and sold her flash sheets (the sheets of art on the wall of a tattoo parlor) door-to-door at tattoo shops. A local…
All the cheesy commercials on television might make you think that everyone is at home baking cookies with their perfect families, but that’s not the case! No, no, no. There is plenty to do outside of your home, all for less than $10. In fact, here are ten such events…
Call it a quarter-life crisis: Andy Raney does. Because before watching the documentary that resulted, it’s slightly difficult to imagine why two adult males — Raney and co-creator Jeremy Make — would travel the United States in a used and dilapidated golf kart named Christine for a hundred days, moving…
The Black Actors Guild was originally founded by five juniors at the Denver School of the Arts who were frustrated with the available material and also by the stereotype of the black actor, according Ryan Soo, the guild’s director of operations. “A lot didn’t apply to them, and a lot…
It’s been carilloneur Robert Gift’s thankless task each Christmas for the last thirty years or so to whip the City and County Building’s recalcitrant Robert Speer Memorial Chime into shape: Comprised of ten mannerless and hopelessly untuned bronze bells, the instrument — if you can call it that — has,…
Yes, it’s getting deep around here — and we’re not just talking about the snow. If you’ve missed the discussion of Jef Otte’s “The ten best moments in Denver arts: 2011,” it’s just the thing to heat you up on this cold winter day. Among the weighty issues that have…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius eases neophytes’ discomfort by creating the cinematic equivalent of an amuse-bouche. Although many of the technical aspects of the silent…
Any new production of West Side Story has to stand up to the dozens of high-school productions we’ve seen over the decades, as well as our communal memory of the movie and intimate knowledge of the score: Sing the first phrase of “Tonight” or “Maria” or “I Feel Pretty” to…
Josh Blue is back. The comedian who got his start in Denver went on to claim victory on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, placed eleventh in Comedy Central’s stand-up comedy showdown, and starred in Comedy Central Presents: Josh Blue, which first aired in March. And now he’ll be at the Comedy…
You’re guaranteed a white Christmas Eve at Winter Park. “The families who come here for Christmas Eve have been coming here for years, and sometimes even for several generations,” says Rachel Anderson, spokeswoman for the ski area. “It’s a great tradition, and a fantastic way to spend the holiday on…
So, fellow Jews, have you chosen which Christmas Day matinee you’re going to hit before downing the traditional repast of sesame chicken and moo goo gai pan? Nobody suffers through the holiday season more gallantly than you do, braving the annual onslaught of ho, ho, ho and jingle bells with…
Hal Aqua likes to call the music he plays with his party band, the Lost Tribe, “nouveau klezmer.” That’s because, like classic klezmer itself, it’s already a mash-up of cultural influences — but then takes things a step further, fusing klezmer with the more contemporary grooves of rock, reggae, salsa,…
