For those of us who don’t live in the immigrant world and interact with it only rarely and in routinized ways, the realities of immigrant life are hazy. Now and then a news story knifes through the haze: hundreds of workers deported seven years ago after raids at meat-packing plants…
In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never fully defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
“The New York Times calls it ‘You had me at Wes Anderson,'” say the credits of Saturday Night Live’s recent Wes Anderson horror-film parody, The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders. By assembling the usual suspects of every Anderson film (pastel aesthetics, mod soundtrack, Owen Wilson) while mocking the public’s appetite…
While the surge in popularity of the Denver comedy scene can be mostly attributed to the catalogue of top class talent in the city, a lot of that talent wouldn’t be reaching as wide an audience without Sexy Pizza’s Kayvan Khalatbari. The marijuana activist and Denver Relief MMJ dispensary founder…
Defending the Caveman. This is a low-key, low-budget one-man show, part standup comedy, part general nightclub act. Written by Rob Becker, the piece has been appearing in intimate venues around the country for several years. Becker was inspired by the comment he frequently heard from women that “men are assholes,”…
I’m not giving anything away if I tell you that Philip Dawkins’s Failure: A Love Story is about three sisters — the Fail sisters — who all die in the year 1928, but not before each in turn has fallen in love with the wealthy, affable and apparently aptly named…
In Yasmina Reza’s Art, four wealthy, educated men fall out because one of them has acquired an all-white painting. The discussion in Catherine Trieschmann’s The Most Deserving isn’t conducted in such polished sentences, and the cast of characters is rural and far less privileged than Reza’s; even Edie, the possible…
Unless you are the star of a Broadway production, you may never be this close again to the fabric that weaves a theatrical fantasy. Today the Denver Center Theater Company will host Theater Threads, a luncheon that’s a fundraiser for its arts education program. Diners will be treated to an…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
Praise the Lord! When the national tour of The Book of Mormon comes back to the Buell Theatre tomorrow for a three-week run that continues until November 24, it will bring back the ticket lottery that was so popular the first time around. A limited number of tickets for each…
After six grueling months of weekly competition that whittled 140 comics down to one, the 2013 Comedy Works New Faces Competition has a winner in Jordan Doll. He’d delivered heavily talked-about performances at UMS and High Plains, and there had been a lot of hype in the comedy scene that…
Vigil opens with an old woman in a bed and a looming figure in the shadows of the doorway behind her. It looks like a true Halloween scenario — the big bad wolf approaching the helpless grandmother — and this impression isn’t altogether off, because the intruder is indeed a…
After the Revolution. Playwright Amy Herzog enters a very specific world in After the Revolution: the passionate, close-knit, hyper-idealistic world of Jewish Communism in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century. For these activists, Soviet Russia was a model. But when Khrushchev denounced Stalin during the…
It’s no secret that Denver’s comedy scene is thriving, and today the seventh annual Denver Improv Festival begins a five-day run of shows, workshops and parties that has attracted comedians from across the U.S., including Convoy from Los Angeles and Switch Committee from Chicago. See also: James Clark of Governor…
It’s probably the biggest cliche in the history of dating: You’re looking for someone with a sense of humor. But since it has nothing to do with money, social stature or good looks — things people are often most insecure about in dating — why is humor such a big…
It’s been a long ride since last spring, when the Comedy Works New Faces Competition 2013 began. And now, with 130 comics eliminated, we’re down to the final ten, who will compete tomorrow night for a cash prize and the prestige of joining the ranks of previous winners, including Ben…
Every comedian has to deal with being vulnerable in front of a crowd of strangers. But few of them have as tough a job as transgender comedian Jordan Wieleba. While her comedy colleagues and large swaths of the Denver scene are endlessly supportive of, and charmed by, Wieleba, the club…
Anyone over 25 remembers him as heroic single dad Danny Tanner on Full House, or the jolly host of America’s Funniest Home Videos. But anyone plugged into standup comedy over the last decade also knows him as the desperately foul-mouthed comic with jokes so vivid and foul he makes William…
Eve Ensler — who will be in Boulder for a benefit for LOCAL Theater Company on Friday, October 11, is known to Coloradans primarily as the author of that raucous, liberating and unflinching theater piece, The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed several times in the Denver area — as…
Yes, it’s true. Over the weekend, one of the interchangeable blond anchors on Fox and Friends reported that, despite the WWII memorial being closed during the government shutdown, “some things are continuing to be funded . . . President Obama has offered to pay out of his own pocket for…
After the Revolution. Playwright Amy Herzog enters a very specific world in After the Revolution: the passionate, close-knit, hyper-idealistic world of Jewish Communism in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century. For these activists, Soviet Russia was a model. But when Khrushchev denounced Stalin during the…
