Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden. Although the Denver Center Theatre Company had great success with Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, a novel that reads rather like an unfolding tapestry, its versions of Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird felt like lectures. But playwright Laura Eason has…
I had the perfect Christmas present plan for the out-of-towners in my life: kitschy Western-inspired accessories and home goods. I walked around town, looking for them. Talulah Jones sold necklaces with horseshoes and wood carved into antlers for wall decor, but that was it. Fancy Tiger’s Holiday Handmade Fair featured…
Update: Due to technical difficulties at the Giving First website, Colorado Gives Day has been extended until noon tomorrow. Go ahead. Knock yourself out giving! Read on: It’s Colorado Gives Day, and since the stroke of midnight, nearly 1,000 Colorado nonprofits have been collecting donations in just about any charitable…
Before writing The Descendants, and before indie-film-world-big-deal-director Alexander Payne turned her novel into a George Clooney movie, Kaui Hart Hemmings worked at Westword, selling classified ads. In 1999, right out of Colorado College, the Hawaii native got her first job with us. “Had no idea what the hell to do…
When I’m not interviewing drag queens, reviewing concerts and rating Santas for Westword, I’m working at Shirt Folding Store. For twenty hours a week, I fold shirts (and, more important, jeans) alongside other part-timers, who in their other jobs might be bank tellers, professional eBay auctioneers, art-history majors and spoken-word…
The sixth annual round of the USA Fellowship grants — fifty awards of $50,000 each — were announced last night in Los Angeles, and exactly one went to a Colorado artist: Michelle Ellsworth of Boulder, for her work in the field of dance. Ellsworth has an MFA in dance from…
It’s the season of shopping, and the jing-a-ling of purses and wallets can be heard all over the 16th Street Mall — all the way into the Denver Pavilions, our convenient downtown mid-priced clothing mecca. And just in time for the 2011 holiday shopping season, the newly opened H&M store…
As part of the event hoopla surrounding the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, Curious Theatre will be putting on a play about Still’s life. “[The Clyfford Still Museum] wanted to make a neighborhood artistic connection,” says Curious education director Dee Covington. Over a year and a half in the…
First lines are particularly important to Susan Orlean, which makes it that much tougher to start an article about someone who has written about almost everything herself. The New Yorker author’s most recent book, released more than ten years after her last extra-long-form non-fiction endeavor, The Orchid Thief, begins with…
The Red Ball Fashion Show filled the Exdo Event Center with good times and great fashions on Sunday night — and all for an excellent cause, the Colorado Aids Project. CPagano was there:…
If you’ve always wanted to be part of the Capitol Hill People’s Fair, this is your chance. Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods is now taking applications for the 41st incarnation of this popular annual event, which always features booths with handmade arts and crafts as well as food, non-stop entertainment and…
The Colorado Symphony Orchestra has been working hard to make it into the black for the 2011-2012 season by adding extra shows, making personnel cuts, pushing its fund raising and promising, in general, to do things differently. But it’s unlikely that a planned $90 million renovation of the Boettcher Concert…
The first ever Roller Derby World Cup, which concluded yesterday in Toronto, can be best summarized by the following chronological countdown of vicious verbs compiled from headlines at DerbyNewsNetwork.com:…
In advance of the January 17 release of Jason Heller’s first novel, Taft 2012, Quirk Books has offered up a gorgeously constructed film teaser. A glimpse into the fictional candidacy of a long-dead William Howard Taft, resurrected and running in next year’s actual presidential election, the preview features looming shadows…
The sports movie is rarely versatile: an outsider, or group of outsiders (wrong race, wrong gender, wrong species), have uncanny talent in their field, but the old guard (typically, white, old men), don’t like the change the new person represents. So the rebels have to use their talent to blow…
While the rest of the metro area is now all aglow for the holidays, the situation is still lights out for a beloved institution: Earlier this year, the Museum of Outdoor Arts pulled the plug on Hudson Holidays, the display at Hudson Gardens that had been orchestrated by Lonnie Hanzon…
Lights might be the best part of the holiday season: neighborhoods and business districts all lit up, more lights twinkling on trees and candles aglow in menorahs, kinaras and luminarias. And the enjoyment of those magical lights is a piece of childhood that never leaves us; as they turn off…
When Women’s Bean Project was hiring in June, over 150 women showed up hoping to find work and career training. Only twenty of them were hired. Bean Project hopes to provide jobs for women who can’t find them. Many have to rely on welfare. Some have a hard time overcoming…
Buntport Theater’s Kafka on Ice — created by the company in 2004 — combines events from the author’s life with incidents in his famous novella Metamorphosis (you know, the one that begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a…
Here’s the perfect way to end your First Friday festivities: Open Media Foundation will celebrate the fifth anniversary of Denver Open Media at its annual fundraiser. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. tonight at 700 Kalamath Street, and the event includes performances by Total Ghost (as seen at the Westword web…
The wind beneath your wings! The Birds of Prey World Cup — the only men’s FIS World Cup alpine skiing event in the U.S. this year — begins today at Beaver Creek, with the Men’s Downhill competition beginning at 11 a.m. and a U.S. Ski Team autograph session tonight at…
A Shirley Delta Blow show ain’t your momma’s drag tradition: though Saturday night’s performance at Hamburger Mary’s Club M is all queens, it’s not just glitter, choreography and lip-syncing. Blow and Co. bring a little comedy, some song and dance, and a whole lot of audience participation to the intimate…
