Turn Up the Dial

During The 1940’s Radio Hour’s last appearance at the Arvada Center in 2004, love was most certainly in the air. Production leads Joseph Bearss and Shannan Steele met playing a match made on stage — a connection eventually mirrored by real life. Now married, the couple reprises their role in…

The Bird Is the Word

Leave it to Boulder to become the testing ground for something as antithetical as “bus birding,” but that’s what’s happening, thanks to EcoArts Connections, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and the Regional Transportation District. With help from artist and “re-naturalist” Brian Collier, the collaboration is yielding a…

Close Up

Internationally famous portrait artist Chuck Close is perhaps best known for his photo-realist paintings. But as Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something shows, he’s also an accomplished photographer. Organized by the Aperture Foundation, this show, at the Loveland Museum and Gallery, brings together a group of the…

Clyfford Still Museum rates a rave in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has a rave review of the Clyfford Still Museum today — its second piece on Denver’s new facility in as many weeks. The first, Daniel Grant’s “It’s Not Easy Being Single,” published on November 17, talked about the difficulties of dedicating a facility entirely to the…

Winning Movember: How I learned the true meaning of the month

Just as the cherry blossom opens in April, so has the brilliant lip foliage burst forth this month — even in November, traditional harbinger of winter’s cruel silence. Indeed, this Movember has seen more mustaches than ever bloom and grow like the lovely edelweiss, and as the month draws to…

Reader: A bitch is a bitch even in Mormon country

Comedian Lori Callahan is not getting rave reviews for her video mocking the current “I’m a Mormon” campaign, the appropriately titled “I’m NOT a Mormon.” “To me, it feels like a cult,” Callahan says of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explaining that the sketch was designed not…

Forget Julie & Julia: Which movie would you watch 365 times?

Lawrence Dai will be watching Julie & Julia for the 365th time at 8 p.m. tonight at the Jones, as part of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s quirky Off-Center series. In addition to the screening, there will be free beer and unelaborated-upon shenanigans involving onions; tickets are $10. Julie &…

Colorado comedian Lori Callahan sticks it to the Mormons

Even though we may have made the “wrong assumption, wrong conclusion” about the onslaught of “I’m a Mormon” billboards across the state, comedian Lori Callahan still sees a correlation. She can’t help but think that as the election draws closer, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s faith has a lot to…

On Q: See Avenue Q for cheap, tonight only!

Denver’s Vintage Theatre took on a major project when its members decided to take on Avenue Q: The Tony Triple Crown-winning adult musical featuring Muppet-like puppets, made from scratch with big, flappin’ dirty mouths, isn’t cheap to to stage, nor is it your everyday song-and-dance…

Reader: Kathy Griffin isn’t worthy of a Muppets cameo

The Muppet Movie is doing boffo box office; the puppets alone are enough to draw the crowds. But during their lengthy career, the Muppets have also cozied up to many celebrities — including the quintet profiled in our “Five most memorable Muppet movie cameos” post. DustyD One of them was…

Personal artwork from printer Mark Lunning at Space Gallery

Mark Lunning founded Open Press, a fine-art printmaker, in 1988, and since then, he’s been the facility’s master printer. But he’s also an artist in his own right, creating prints, paintings and sculptures. All three types of work are on display in Mark Lunning: New Paintings, Prints and Sculptures at…

Now Showing

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…

Now Playing

Cannibal! The Musical. Cannibal! The Musical began life as a movie written by pre-South Park and Book of Mormon Trey Parker, back when he was a film student at the University of Colorado. It starred Parker himself and Matt Stone, and later evolved — or perhaps degenerated — into a…

The arty, spare Inni follows Iceland’s Sigur Ros

Fellow anthemic NPR darlings Arcade Fire and Radiohead might fiercely divide public opinion, but there aren’t a lot of Sigur Rós haters: People either love the Icelandic post-rock band or are content to let their ethereal sounds fade into the background. It follows that there probably aren’t going to be…

Le Havre takes a sentimental look at the port city’s working class

Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is something of a comeback for the Finnish filmmaker. His warmhearted comedy of underdog working-class solidarity, made with a mixed Finnish-French-Senegalese cast in the French port city Le Havre, was the most warmly received movie — at least by the press — shown last May in…

Escanaba: 1922 nicely caps off the Jeff Daniels trilogy

I’d missed the first two installments of Jeff Daniels’s Escanaba trilogy — Escanaba in da Moonlight and Escanaba in Love — so I had no idea what to expect from Escanaba: 1922, which was written last but is a prequel to the other two. I had a vague idea that…