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Best Tribute to Old Denver

Tilt-a-Whirl World

Lakeside Amusement Park creaks on year after year, slowly sliding down the path toward historical oddity. It's Colorado's very own Coney Island, and that's exactly what makes the place so charming. Local photographer Christina Ianni captured the broken-down park -- with the rickety old Cyclone and carny-favorite Tilt-A-Whirl -- on film, using toy cameras scrounged at five-and-dimes. The results were rich, magical photos that expressed the beauty and nostalgia of one of Denver's great cultural legacies. When they all hung en masse in Kirk Norlin Gallery, it was as if Ianni had captured not just the park, but the heart and soul of Denver.

Best African-American Treasure Chest

Stiles African American Heritage Center

Retired teacher and Colorado Preservation, Inc. State Honor Award-winner Grace Stiles rescued a once-dilapidated Victorian frame house in Five Points and reshaped it for the greater good. The Stiles African American Heritage Center is stuffed with Stiles's own special legacy for black Denver's youth: a haystack of pictures and artifacts that piece together the lives a dozens of the region's African-American historical figures. Stiles invites school groups to tour her mini-museum, and occasionally hosts lectures and Chautauqua-style performances for the public.

Best Museum Outreach Using a Virgin

Denver Art Museum

Courtesy Denver Art Museum
For several Decembers now, the Denver Art Museum has hyped an exhibition on Our Lady of Guadalupe by offering free Southwest Santos family backpacks, which include special games designed to encourage interaction with the artwork. Families can play Rhymes & Riddles or put together an Our Lady of Guadalupe magnet puzzle while taking in the museum's collection of Virgin-centric artworks, most of which are housed in the Spanish Colonial gallery. The idea is to attract groups that might not normally visit the cultural institution; free vouchers are available for some families. Organizers deem the outreach a success. Some might even call it a miracle.

Best National Appearance by a Colorado Treasure

Navajo Weaving Stamp

Last August, a selection from the Denver Art Museum was reduced to a tiny canvas, but it reached a global audience. An intricate 1940s Navajo weaving by master artisan Daisy Taugelchee was one of ten artifacts depicted in "The Art of the American Indian" stamp, a series of 37-cent stamps released by the United States Postal Service. The inclusion of Taugelchee's piece, which has a permanent home in the DAM's Native American Arts collection, lent a bit of Colorado cachet to letters sent around the world.

Best Development for Western Playwrights

Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region

Organized by Pamela Jamruszka of the Red Rocks Community College theater faculty, and with the support of the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the first Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region featured three intense days of panels, workshops, discussions and play readings. The series was designed to inform and inspire, and to begin the process of putting Western playwrights on the map.

Best Theater Production

The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?

Edward Albee's play about a man in love with a goat makes you question every assumption about sexual mores you've ever made. Just where are the boundaries between the permissible and the impermissible, and what do they mean in the lives of actual people? The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? is skillfully written, funny, silly, profound and disquieting all at once; the script includes one of the most extraordinary scenes in modern dramaturgy, as the wife who's discovered her husband's animal obsession careens from rage to helpless laughter, laughter to anguish and anguish to bitterness, breaking vases and furniture as she goes. Director Nagle Jackson gave this strange, daring piece a top-notch production at Curious, with an expressive cast, intelligent direction and an elegant set.

Best Dramatic Script

Inventing Van Gogh
Steven Dietz

Inventing Van Gogh unleashes a torrent of ideas about art -- possibly enough for a dozen plays. But its primary achievement is illuminating the artist's struggle to wrench meaning from a recalcitrant world, and to ransom his own soul. Steven Dietz's script incorporates historical fact without lecturing; bits of Vincent van Gogh's letters erupt into the text like cries from the grave. We're told that by the time van Gogh created his later works, he was squeezing paint directly onto the canvas rather than using a brush, and shaping it with such force that it retained fragments of his fingernails. There's something of this intensity in the form and content of the play itself, with its swirling structure, density of allusion and furious commitment to discovery.

Best Actor in a Drama

Brett Aune
Inventing Van Gogh

In a luminous portrayal, Brett Aune made Vincent van Gogh an essentially gentle and guileless man, a little uncomfortable in his own body. Aune possessed an arrogance that stemmed from the artist's bone-deep understanding of the rightness of his work, coupled with the insecurity of someone who has laid bare his heart and received only contempt and indifference in return. The image of Aune's van Gogh wandering into the night with four flickering candles on his hat remains indelible.

Best Actress in a Drama

Laura Norman
Angels in America

Angels in America's Harper is a pill-popping young Mormon wife who spends half her time yearning for her faithless husband and the other half in a fantasy. She could easily seem fey or just plain irritating. But Laura Norman moderated Harper's dopey ethereality with a wry humor and a sense of groundedness. Her interpretation was potent, but also wonderfully unassuming.

Best Supporting Actor in a Drama

Christopher Leo
Inventing Van Gogh

Christopher Leo gave two confident star turns in Inventing van Gogh -- as an unscrupulous art authenticator named Bouchard, and as the painter Paul Gauguin. Bouchard was self-mockingly mannered, effete in the most amusing way, while Gauguin was arrogant and thick-skinned. Both characters possessed a juicy vitality that served as a perfect foil for the other actors' lower-key interpretations. Leo was obviously having a lot of fun on stage, and his enjoyment was infectious.

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