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Colorado Springs Arts Blog ~ All Things Artistic in Colorado Springs

‘Frankie and Johnny’ bares skin and a lot more

February 8th, 2010, 4:07 pm by wepstein

BY TODD WALLINGER

GRADE: B+

DETAILS:
“Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” by Star Bar Players
When: 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 20
Where: Five Star Decor, 310 Tia Juana St.
Tickets: $12-$15; at starbarplayers.org.
Additional info: Show features some nudity.


Two lonely New Yorkers get together for a brief hookup. At least it’s supposed to be brief. The man, however — a short-order cook with a quirky view of life and a mouth that won’t shut up — decides to stay, and it’s all the woman can do to get him to leave.

That’s the premise of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” an unassuming but delightful two-person play by Terrence McNally (“Ragtime,” “The Full Monty”) which opened off-Broadway in 1987.

At the time, the show received notoriety for its extensive, full-frontal nudity. There’s some of that in the current Star Bar production, but not a lot and it does serve an important dramatic purpose, highlighting the ease with which the characters shed everything but the seemingly impenetrable emotional barriers between them.
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Maybe you missed it: Superstars, right here in Colorado Springs

February 3rd, 2010, 10:14 pm by tmobleymartinez

BY T.D. MOBLEY-MARTINEZ

In retrospect, it was strangely appropriate that I ended up taking notes for this blog on the cover and insides of a New Yorker (thank you, Talk of the Town).

I’m talking about groundbreaking playwrights David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner and Suzan-Lori Parks, who spoke tonight at Colorado College’s Cornerstone Keynote Lecture, “Art, Culture, Politics.”

I interviewed all of them for a once-in-a-lifetime story (for me, anyway) that ran on last week. And I wasn’t surprised to find that, in person, they were very much like they were on the phone: Smart, funny and quite frank. And they ended up talking about many things that we discussed, which I credit less to my brilliance as in interviewer than to the slog of such gigs.

Same questions, same stories, same crowds.

I say, whatever. Theater historian Laurence Maslon, who moderated the me-newconversation, peppered the authors of  “M. Butterfly,” “Angels in America” and “Top Dog/Underdog,” respectively, with thoughtful questions and humor.

The fun, especially for a theater groupie like me, was watching the quiet way these giants of modern theater interacted. They are friends, their agent told me, but had never worked together. The affection was clear in small ways. And there was something so intimate (and oddly theatrical) about being there as Parks learned that Hwang and Kushner both came from musical families and played instruments.

“Do you still play,” she asked Hwang.

“No,” he said, scrunching his nose and suddenly sitting forward in his chair.  “I didn’t keep it up.”

What follows are some of my notes. Some are just snippets of thoughts. Some are quotes. Some are just my observations. It’s a poor substitute for the real “theatrical audacity” on that stage, but hey, you should have been there.

“You write what you know about what you don’t know.” — Hwang

Parks slouches back in her chair as they talk, like an arty kid in science class. Interested, but doing their own thing. “I say, write. You know, write.”

“Going into history is almost like going into psychology. You excavate the psychic past. … Like Suzan-Lori, I don’t think there’s much of a divide between the past and the present.” –  Kushner

Park’s alarm goes off. Twice. It’s to remind her to meditate. As she is throughout, Parks is disarmingly human — stuttering and repeating herself as she apologizes. “I’m sorry. Just ignore me.”

On whether they work with music: “I can work with any ambient noise,” Kushner says. “Jackhammers. But if music is playing anywhere, I can’t work. It says something about my relationship with my parents.” Everyone laughs.

Kushner isn’t often the first to talk, but when it does, it tumbles out. And he accents his references to Marx and Brecht with broad gestures, his fingers spread like he’s sifting the air with his thoughts.

“I write great chunks of silence.” — Parks

The tension between the real and the unreal. Acknowledging artifice. The kitchen sink on stage that everyone knows isn’t real, but becomes real during the action. If only for a minute. These playwrights like playing with that idea.

Hwang talks quicky, his voice elfen. He pats his hair when he talks.

Are we in the age of Obama? Yes, they say.  “We’re still allowed to be angry. The election was a little tiny corner of the first step. We’re angry because we want to be in the castle eating ice cream.” — Parks

“Nightmare people.” “Homegrown American fascism.” — Kusner

Scattered applause.

Parks is so theatrical.

“We’re gonna blow it,” she says of support waning for the new adminstration. “If  ‘Yes. Yes, you can’ can’t work, then we’re gonna blow it.”

“Super,” says Maslon at the end. “Complex stuff.”

Contact the writer at tracy.mobleymartinez@gazette.com or 476-1602.

REVIEW: ‘Legally Blonde’ flaunts vibrant highlights

February 3rd, 2010, 3:46 pm by twallinger

 

Becky Gulsvig goes pink in the national tour of Legally Blonde

Becky Gulsvig goes pink in the national tour of Legally Blonde


 
 

“LEGALLY BLONDE”

GRADE: B+

  • When: 8:00p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:00p.m. and 8:00p.m. Saturdays, 2:00p.m. and 7:30p.m. Sunday, Feb. 7, 2:00p.m. Sunday, Feb. 14, runs through Feb. 14
  • Where: Buell Theatre at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, 1245 Champa St., Denver
  • Tickets: $35-$125; 1-800-641-1222 or www.denvercenter.org

Turning movies into stage musicals has been one of the more egregious, if inevitable, trends in musical theater these last few years. In order to attract a sizable audience–admittedly an increasingly difficult task in this day and age–Broadway producers have been chucking the new in favor of the familiar.

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Wood Work

February 3rd, 2010, 3:36 pm by tmobleymartinez

symbios2

"Symbiosis," Rodney Wood, oil on panel

“SYMBIOSIS”
What: Paintings by Rodney Wood
When: Opening reception 5:30 p.m. today, runs 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday
Where: A joint exhibition at the Modbo and Rubbish Gallery, 17c East Bijou
Tickets: Free; 633-4240
Something else: 7 p.m. Saturday, cello and vocals of “Lisa’s Show” and Mango fan Django at Rubbish; 7 p.m. Saturday Judeth Shay Burns, Andy Tanner and breakdancing by Soul Mechanics at the Modbo; and artist talk at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the Modbo.

BY T.D. MOBLEY-MARTINEZ
During his 15 years in Colorado Springs, Rodney Wood was a lot of things to a lot of people: teacher, curator, art maker, art promoter. But not long before he left for Santa Fe in 2006, Wood became passionately committed to being one thing. A painter.

It’s obsession,” Wood says as he picks through the boxes of paintings leaning against a wall in the Modbo. He glances back and laughs as if he’d realized he wasn’t just talking to himself.

Wood is back for an unusual joint exhibition at the Modbo and Rubbish Gallery, which share an opening tonight. The 40 oil-on-panel images in “Symbiosis” take viewers through his moody oeuvre, a style probably best described as magical realism.

Wood finds the box he wants and tugs “Alluvion” out of its bubble-wrap sleeve. As he leans it against the wall, the woman in the blood-red gown emerges from the glare, her leg cocked and a Mona Lisa smile on her still face. This ersatz Ophelia floats there, seemingly having drifted to a spot just off a muddy bank. The dark water ripples around her as if she’s sending out little pulses of yearning — or is that amusement?

It’s a hands-down exquisite painting, but one with a kind of silky subversiveness. Something isn’t quite right here.
That’s Wood — or at least what he strives for in paintings so realistically rendered that you’d be hard pressed to find a single brush stroke. That seamless perfection, that breathtaking beauty is the feint he hopes will draw you into his enigmatic world of over-friendly butterflies, black weather, skulls, velvet-skinned women and animals in oddly human settings.

“A lot of painters like to talk about line, about light, about color, about texture,” he says. And the paintings are beautiful, he’ll admit, but for him, these are about considerably more than that. “But I’m trying to talk about emotion.”

And even as contemporary art wades deeper and deeper into the ironic, anti-beauty aesthetic of post modernism, Wood looks backward to heady, classicist notions of what is art.

“Duchamp once said you learn the rules, you practice the rules, you bend the rules, you break the rules and then, and only then, can you make your own rules.”

Wood is breaking his own rules now.

“Those are the rules that tried to prevent me from picking up painting. You can do this, but you can’t paint. Not anymore.”

He followed his eyes

But in 2002 or ’03, an exhibition of Vermeer’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., woke something profound in Wood.

“We waited in the freezing drizzle, literally for hours,” he says of waiting in line for tickets with his father. Donald Wood, who the younger describes as a cowboy, was not amused. “There was something about the process that got his attention, though. He said you can close your eyes and feel these paintings. He got it.

“It wasn’t an epiphany, but it reminded me of the power of art,” Wood says. “I’m incredibly judgmental about my own work, but (I thought) maybe I’m not aiming high enough.”

Rodney Wood

Rodney Wood

Those kinds of little nudges kept happening, prodding him to rethink a life of making his own work fit between the demands of daily life; what he called all his “crazy tangents.”

So Wood, who never took a painting class, started painting. And painting and painting.

“It was purely an experiment,” Woods says. “I didn’t care if I failed. I wasn’t deciding that afternoon, I think I’ll be a painter now. I was just painting.”

Then you have to ask what people always ask him: How did you learn to paint like that if you never had a lesson?

“I think it’s a lot about the eyes. I’ve been at it for so long and seen so much art, my eyes kind of guided me through the process.”

Familiar problems
In October 2006, he mounted a show called “Magical Reality” at the Rubbish Gallery. It was his hello and goodbye to the local art scene.

“We lost a great role model for younger artists,” says artist Tom McElroy. “He never gives up, and he also never allows excuses to deter his artistic expression/ambition.”

“I knew too many people here,” Wood says of why he left. “I was too connected to too many people and try as I may, I wasn’t good at saying ‘no.’ I felt, as an artist, I needed to find a way to immerse myself and painting required that.”

But as Wood talks about his time in Colorado Springs, he returns to the lack of contemporary galleries, the inability for artists to make it on art alone, the failed attempts to foster art here, Wood sounds freshly frustrated.

Sean O’Meallie met Wood in ’94, when the young artist approached the gallery owner with his work. Wood, he says, was a foot soldier for the arts here.

“He’s very passionate,” O’Meallie says. “He put his whole heart into this thing. But when circumstances work to defeat you over and over again, you have to protect yourself. I think that’s what he’s done — and again, admirably so.”
Wood admits he was simply tired. “It was just time for someone else to fight the fight.”

After living in Santa Fe for two years, he moved to Ruidoso, N.M., to be around for his dad, who had developed health issues. And to paint, of course. He’s a full-time artist and lives a streamlined life able to accommodate the inevitable gaps between paydays.

Wood has had a handful of shows since he moved — in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, in Newberryport, Mass., and Nashville and has two invitational exhibits in Denmark in the next year. He says he hasn’t found long-term representation yet.

“‘It takes courage to put one of your paintings on the wall,’” he says one of the dealers told him. “‘It’s about emotion and (it’s) not decorative and says something not subtle about the owners.’”

He shrugs.

Here and gone again
You have exactly three days to see “Symbiosis.” Then, Wood drives whatever hasn’t sold back to Ruidoso.
It needs to be an event, they say.

"Aegis," Rodney Wood, oil on panel

"Aegis," Rodney Wood, oil on panel

“It’s the immediacy thing,” Wood says. “I like that. You snooze, you lose.”

Brett Andrus nods. He’s co-owner of the Modbo and a recently converted acolyte of Wood’s work.

“It’s like a tornado just comes through town,” Andrus says. “Young artists are just going to be blown away with this work.”

Wood looks around the gallery. It’s his first time here: Andrus opened it in April 2009, after a split with Rubbish.

Wood’s not sure what’s going where. The smaller paintings, like one of a tangle of sunflowers and a woman with opaque blind eyes (“That’s a Rodney choice”), may stay at the Modbo, which is more intimate.

Or not, Wood says. “You know, I’ve hung more than 300 shows. (Arranging the work) is more of an art than anything else.”

He’s happy to be back, says Wood, who’s cell number still starts with 719. He’s especially pleased with having a show at Rubbish and the Modbo — “alternative art spaces more devoted to art than many commercial galleries.”

“It’s a unique arrangement,” Wood says of the joint exhibition, which includes splitting commissions. “I’ve never even heard of something like this before.”

Still, “Symbiosis” is something of a departure for both galleries, which typically show the relatively inexpensive work of emerging artists.

“The city is finally looking,” Andrus says, hinting at his gallery’s success, “so we need something to look at.”

And the prices, which range from $1,500 to $11,000.? Will they alienate patrons used to spending considerably less?

“I don’t care,” Andrus says, shaking his head. “People have forgotten value. People think it’s OK to want to pay $80 for a piece of art. … This is a different level of quality.

“I can’t let the market dictate everything. If I did, art would be free.”

Andrus has gone all out, printing more than 3,000 reminder cards. He hopes to draw people from the northern part of town. The fact that many people there tell him it’s too far to his downtown gallery-performance space makes both men shake their heads.

Apparently, some things don’t change.

For printmaker Jean Gumpter, maybe the show will change things — if only a little. “He’s maintaining his role as a community builder by getting a lot of people to go to those galleries,” she says. “Maybe they had never been or didn’t even know it’s there.”

‘12 Angry Men’ proves powerful despite flaws

February 3rd, 2010, 2:55 pm by wepstein

012910-angrymen

GRADE: B+

“Twelve Angry Men” by TheatreWorks
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, 2 p.m. Feb. 6 and 13, runs until Feb. 14
Theaters: Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater, University Hall, UCCS, 1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway
Tickets: $5-$25; theatreworksCS.org or 255-3232

BY TODD WALLINGER

I have a confession to make. Although I love everything the classic drama “Twelve Angry Men” attempts to do — that is, extol the ideals of innocent until proven guilty and one man against the mob — I’ve always felt it falls far short of what it should have been.

Reginald Rose’s play is, of course, one of the great ensemble pieces of all time, and it does tell a compelling tale. A jury is called to pass judgment on a 16-year-old boy accused of killing his father, and for most of the jurors, it’s a foregone conclusion that he did it. But one man stands alone in questioning his guilt and takes it upon himself to convince the other 11 jurors that there’s room for reasonable doubt.
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Manitou Art Theatre replaces ‘Art Dog’ with ‘Honeymoon Period’

February 3rd, 2010, 12:19 pm by twallinger

 
YouTube Preview Image 

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Manitou Art Theatre has postponed “Art Dog”–originally scheduled to run Feb. 11-21–and replaced it with a single weekend run of “The Honeymoon Period is Officially Over,” a one-woman show featuring British playwright/actress Gemma Wilcox.

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Hear great conductors play Mozart’s “Magic Flute”

February 2nd, 2010, 11:15 am by tmobleymartinez

 ”‘THE MAGIC FLUTE’ ON RECORD”
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11
Where: The Sound Shop Audio/Video, 7 E. Cimarron St.
Admission: Free but reservation required; 633-9373

Opera Theatre of the Rockies’ production of “The Magic Flute” will be bolstered by six “Mozart’s Magic” special presentations exploring a multitude of aspects surrounding the Feb. 27  and 28 performances at the Pikes Peak Center. Even the great composer himself will chime in on the festivities. The fourth event leading to “The Magic Flute” features a survey of the great recordings of this masterpiece through recorded history compiled and presented by Opera Theatre marketing consultant David Sckolnik. Hear excerpts from acclaimed performances conducted by legends such as Beechum, Haitink, Solti, Klemperer and Boehm. SOURCE: Facebook

Tickets now available for all 2010 Butte Theater events

February 2nd, 2010, 8:22 am by twallinger

 

Mickey Burdick (left) and Mel Moser (right) will bring back the Off-Broadway two-man comedy Rounding Third

Mickey Burdick (left) and Mel Moser (right) will be doing the Off-Broadway two-man comedy Rounding Third


I’ve already talked about Thin Air Theater Company’s 2010 season, but they want to let everyone know you can now buy tickets online for all of their shows, and you get a 15% discount if you buy tickets to all four of their shows. Tickets for the baseball comedy “Rounding Third” must be purchased separately.

The Butte Theater will be also holding a fundraiser Saturday, February 13 and Saturday, February 20, featuring acoustic music and a gallery showing of the works of local artists.

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REVIEW: “Sweeney Todd” blockbuster fabulous

February 1st, 2010, 11:02 am by tmobleymartinez
Eryn Carman and Alan Osburn star in the Fine Arts Center production of "Sweeney Todd."

Eryn Carman and Alan Osburn star in the Fine Arts Center production of "Sweeney Todd."

A complicated set, a demanding score and an extremely talented cast made for a compelling evening of theater Saturday when Stephen Sondheim’s masterful “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” continued its run at the Fine Arts Center.

It was a tour de force — on stage, behind the scenes and in the pit.

For more, click here.

King Tut arrives in Denver this summer

February 1st, 2010, 10:28 am by tmobleymartinez

The only such figure found in the Antechamber, this shabit is one of the largest of the servant statuettes. The inscription records the shabti spell from the Book of the Dead, ensuring that the king would do no forced labor in the afterlife. Credit: Sandro Vannini

The only such figure found in the Antechamber, this shabit is one of the largest of the servant statuettes. The inscription records the shabti spell from the Book of the Dead, ensuring that the king would do no forced labor in the afterlife. Credit: Sandro Vannini

In July, King Tut’s treasures take up resident at the Denver Museum of Art, which will be its only Rocky Mountain appearance in this tour.

 

 

 

DAM members get to see it first. Member tickets will go on sale in March. DAM members will also have the first opportunity to purchase tickets for their preferred visit date and time. To join the DAM, call 720-865-5000 or visit denverartmuseum.org/membership. Additional details about the King Tut ticket sale date will be posted on the DAM website.  

Members also will receive priority registration for summer camps and classes, including camps and classes focusing on the King Tut exhibition. Member registration for the 2010 summer session will begin March 9, with nonmember registration starting March 16.

SOURCE: Denver Museum of Art press release

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