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Bill Reed did a preview of a guy playing at the Studio Bee Showcase on Thursday, and his interview will dissuade you from ever considering a career in music.

Lauren Arnest (yes, wife of that guy who used to set next to me) wrote brief previews of a show at Smokebrush and a Chamber Orchestra concert.

Noel Black does our cover story, an overview of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, which is more than stereotypical chick flicks.

R. Scott Rappold does enviable research for his story about the All Colorado Beer Festival.

Nathaniel Glen waxes poetic about La Casita.

And Brandon tells you why you should tolerate Jim Carrey this season.

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CHANDRA LEE SCHWARTZ and DONNA VIVINO in "Wicked" / Photo by Joan Marcus

DENVER • Before buying a ticket to “Wicked,” you may want to ask yourself one question: Do I love, like or barely remember “The Wizard of Oz?”

Yes, the performances in “Wicked” are all top-notch and the production explodes on the Buell Theatre stage like a witchy Macy’s parade. But what drives this Tony-nominated über-hit, which plays through Nov. 15, is deep affection for the “Oz” canon.

In fact, if you’re a big enough fan to own a pair of ruby slippers — as at least one member of the packed house did on opening night — more the better.

But even then, this pat distillation of Gregory Maguire’s best-selling book rises only to the level of “Well, I’m glad I finally saw it.” That’s thanks, in large part, to a second act that has some clever moments but flounders to tie up loose ends.

Yes, I was surprised, too.

The production, which is making its third appearance in Denver, sets out to dazzle from the moment the curtain goes up. A mechanized dragon lowers over the stage, huffing and clawing at the air now and then. The set, which was designed to reflect W.W. Denslow’s illustrations for the Frank Baum novels, grinds and moves and shifts throughout the show like it’s had five Red Bulls too many. And Susan Hilferty’s costumes are gloriously quirky and quite beautiful.
There’s certainly plenty to look at.

A bullet train exposition handily takes care of the novel’s beginning, and the musical quickly settles into the stories of two key Oz witches — the lime green Elphaba (Donna Vivino) and Galinda (Chandra Lee Schwartz), — who are enemies, then best friends, then rivals, and because it’s a musical, friends again.

Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz (“Fosse,” “Godspell,” “Pippin”) has some nice moments with tunes that aren’t so much hummable as smart and very funny. “What is This Feeling?” and “Popular” are well worth adding to your iTunes queue.

“Don’t be offended by my frank analysis,” Galinda sings in the latter, her promise to renovate Elphaba’s all-too-thoughtful existence. “Think of it as personality dialysis.”

Both Vivino and Schwartz have excellent voices. And as a bonus, Vivino’s speaking voice sometimes reveals tinges of Judy Garland’s tremulous delivery. As actresses, they easily command the stage even in the midst of this three-card Monty of a set. Like Richard Kline as the Wizard and Randy Danson as Madame Morrible, both leads are funny and charming and quite likable.

But by the second act, “Wicked” runs into a storytelling ditch. Every song feels exhaustingly like a climax. The plot barrels along like it’s on a schedule to a happy ending, and rushing, willy-nilly, to connect the dots between “Wicked” and its source material.

Some of “Wicked’s” “Oz” touchstones are quite clever.

“There’s really no place like home,” says Elphaba early in Act 2. We laugh like it’s a family joke.

Although I’m sure the Ellie Caulkins Opera House couldn’t have accommodated this elaborate set, I selfishly wish “Wicked” had performed there instead of at the Buell. I left the two-plus-hour performance feeling like I’d been folded into the middle seat on a Trans-Atlantic flight.

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

“Wicked,” a Broadway touring production

When: Through Nov. 15

Where: Buell Theatre, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe streets, Denver

Tickets: $45 to $135; (800) 641-1222, denvercenter.org

Something else: Register for a daily drawing for $25 seats up to two and half hours before performance. Limit two tickets and in-person only.

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VISIT DENVER AND DENVER OFFICE OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

ANNOUNCE TWO-FOR-ONE TICKETING PROGRAM

Weekly Deals Provide Consumers With Unparalleled Discounts on

Upcoming Events and Entertainment

DENVER (October 21, 2009) – VISIT DENVER, The Convention & Visitors Bureau, in conjunction with the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs (DOCA), announce DENVER 2 for 1 TIX, a new offering aimed at providing residents and visitors to the Mile High City with discounts on tickets to award-winning theater, world-class museums, seasonal musical performances, and additional ticketed events.

The program creates awareness of Denver’s diverse cultural organizations and collects the city’s top values when value is king. Each week, deals from up to eight cultural and entertainment organizations will be featured online at www.DENVER2for1TIX.com, where Denver residents and future visitors can also sign up for a weekly e-mail.

“What a great way to kick off the fall-winter season,” said Melissa Marano, marketing director, Denver Center Theatre Company. “We are thrilled to be included in the launch of the DENVER 2 for 1 TIX program, delivering great offers for high-caliber theater in a new way.”

“Value is a great way to reach consumers right now, and the DENVER 2 for 1 TIX program makes it easier for our deals to reach new audiences and to stand out to current ones,” said Tonya Malik, marketing and public relations director, Curious Theatre Company.

Denver’s top theaters and cultural attractions will offer an ever-changing lineup of tickets, all with 2 for 1 discounts, including Denver Film Society at the Starz FilmCenter, Museo de las Américas, PHAMALY, Swallow Hill Music Association, Denver Center Theatre Company, the Hi-Dive, Curious Theatre Company, the Newman Center for the Performing Arts in the opening week alone.

“Denver has always had great offers for every price point, but previously, we didn’t have a way to share it with the public in a concentrated effort,” said Jayne Buck, vice president of tourism, VISIT DENVER, The Convention & Visitors Bureau. “The DENVER 2 for 1 TIX program makes it easy to find what’s new, what’s hot, where the city’s hidden gems and the city’s best deals are, all updated on a weekly basis.”

To be featured in the Denver 2 for 1 TIX program, participating organizations must make an offer of “2 for 1” or an equivalent discount (approximately 50 percent) on admission or tickets.

“Denver is a city that supports its arts and culture – we’ve got world-class museums, the second largest performing arts complex in the country, and a community that has voted for 20 years to dedicate tax dollars toward support of the Scientific & Cultural Facilities District,” said Erin Trapp, director, Denver Office of Cultural Affairs. “This is a way to help small and large cultural organizations showcase their great offerings and special savings to a much larger audience.”

The new program completes the one-stop shop for culture and entertainment already available at www.Denver365.com, which provides a complete listing of all events happening throughout Denver and the surrounding area.

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Kay WalkingStick's "Nez Perce Crossing" appears in the FAC's gorgeous new exhibition "Personal Paradise."

Over couches. You see a lot of landscapes over couches and fireplaces, in hallways — anyplace people need to create happy windows to a world that is definitely not right beyond the wall.

Which is just fine. Even the ancient Greeks craved a nicer view.

In the Fine Arts Center’s new exhibition, “Personal Paradise: New Perspectives on Landscape Painting,” curator Tariana Nava-Nieves proposes an interesting twist on that familiar rubric: that the landscape can be more than painted postcards of the natural world; that for four artists here, anyway, it’s a mirror.

At first glance, “Personal Paradise” isn’t so different from “At the Foot of the Colorado Rockies,” an exhibition across the hall of Western landscapes from the Missouri collection of Jim and Virginia Moffett. There are mountains, streams, trees, cows.

“The artworks are as much about the outside world the artists observe as they are about the artists themselves,” writes Nava-Nieves in the first wall text.

And certainly, Argentinean artist Julia Fernandez-Pol plays with a completely abstracted vision of the landscape. Fractured prettily into Impressionistic chips of color, they are both micro and macro, internal and external. Her color palette is seductive, but look closer: the hues are oddly off, like a bruise on the way to disappearing. Step deeper into the cove of trees that seems to be “Chaos in Green” (2007), for example, and you’ll notice that something not quite right drips from the branches and a blue-cheese mold seems to grow in one corner of the canvas.

Like all of Fernandez-Pol’s work here, “Chaos” is explosively organic. Turn your back and you’d swear pieces were reproducing and rearranging themselves. Are they portraits of a place you’d never want to go — or are they the fevered (and obsessively well-crafted) machinations around her own personal grain of sand?

Either way, they’re pretty spectacular and endlessly engaging.

On the other end of the spectrum, the work of Idaho rancher Theodore Waddell sticks closest to traditional landscape in wide-open depictions of land and sky and nature. “Monida” (1999) is typical — a stunning triptych of soft colors, blurred black cows and Big Sky scale. Like just about any work that steps away from strict realism, standing close breaks the forms into pure pattern, an expressionistic slurry of paint, color, form and sometimes what amounts to just the hint of a mountain horizon line. Standing back draws it all into a view that’s almost like side-of-the-road poetry.

Is it significantly more than an “extrospective” process, as the curator suggests? I’m not so sure. Still, Waddell slyly slides into the work, like a ghost content to watch and not be seen. They are straight-out beautiful.

Nearby, Mexican painter Eric Pérez takes a few more steps away from painterly reportage with luminescent images of empty beaches, orchards and urban storms. But even before you notice the man treading water among tsunami-size waves or the dog poised nervously as rain approaches, you can feel there’s something amiss in these worlds. Here, the landscape is certainly a malleable stage for his concerns, whether emotional or social. Too often, though, the work swings from obvious metaphor (“Sierra Gorda, 2007,” in which a mountain threatens to slide on a swimming Pérez) to a narrative that most Americans would find inexplicable (“Mexico, 2008” depicts a real life event, the wall text says the rape and murder of 73-year-old Ernestina Rosario in Veracruz).

While Pérez is pinpoint specific in his psycho-real spaces, nearby, Kay WalkingStick, who is part Cherokee, makes richly painted and broadly imagined vistas which are often paired with apparent Indian patterns, as in “Nez Perce Crossing” (2008) or “Wallowa Mountains, Winter” (2003). These are confident images, muscular even, and focused on exploring duality. Of control and the uncontrollable; of faith and reason; of the land and the people.

“Personal Paradise: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape Painting”

When: Through Dec. 6

Where: The Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.

Admission: $10, $8.50 seniors/students; members free; also, free admission on Oct. 20

A tour of the show with curator Tariana Nava-Nieves at 6 p.m. Nov. 17, $7, $5 members

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The full-ish house cheered, wooped and clapped as the orchestra leaned into the opening strains of John Williams’ indelible score for “Star Wars.” You could almost feel the synapses sparking as memory, story and music all coalesced in that one all-too-brief selection.

Unfortunately that kind of transportive moment was all too rare Saturday night as the Phil kicked off its out-of-the-box pops season.

The evening, which also celebrated the All Pikes Peaks Reads 2009 space programming, started with conductor Thomas Wilson’s voice over the Pikes Peak Center’s invisible sound system.

“This is Captain Wilson of the space station philharmonic,” he started.

Then Wilson, wearing a blue, NASA-style jumpsuit, made his entrance descending on a tether from the stage rafters.

It was just the beginning of Wilson’s affectionate MCing of repertoire that he obviously loves. The orchestra followed suit with only a few missteps, including occassionally muddy sound in the brass section and akimbo pacing between the soloists and the rest of the orchestra.

The first selection set the tone for most of the evening: “The Twilight Zone: The Movie” was a nice enough but anonymous piece that begged for storytelling to fill in the musical picture. Ditto for “The Last Starfighter,” “Lost in Space,” “Total Recall,” “Predator,” “Cocoon” and even the main theme from the new “Star Trek” film.

Which made me wonder if scores can really stand on their own. They’re made to support and further on-screen action so any complexity would likely be lost in the shuffle, or worse, distract from the story.  So what are you usually left with? Melodic pleasantries. Rousing marches. Mood-setting interludes.

That all works, though, when you come upon pieces tied to scores (and films) that are milestones in our cinematic collective consciousness — anthems like Williams’ “Star Wars” or David Arnold’s “Independance Day” or even Arnold’s yearning “Stargate” or Jerry Goldsmith’s icy and uncertain “Alien,” the latter being the most musically interesting and unexpected piece of the evening.

Not everything needed to be a blockbuster, of course. And the fact that this was the second concert of the same theme (the first in the Spring timed to the beginning of the All Pikes Peak Reads program) probably narrowed the choices.

Even a few more of the sci-fi canon –  “ET,” “Superman,” “Star Trek’s” TV theme, “Jurassic Park,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and others — would have taken the evening from pleasant enough to the kind of exciting and enriching entertainment that opens doors to more challenging orchestral music.

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29th Annual Breckenridge Festival of Film

If you have never been to a film festival (or even if you have), the nearby town of Breckenridge is hosting one of the most exciting, most intimate, and most inexpensive film festivals in Colorado. This year it runs from Thursday, June 11 through Sunday, June 14.

There will be seven premier films, including the Colorado premier of Woody Allen’s new film, Whatever Works.
But the real attraction of the BreckFilmFest is the 63 independent films being shown. These are films that you will not have a chance to see anywhere else in Colorado. The independent films vary from 6 to 111 minutes long. They are divided into eight categories: comedy, short comedy, drama, short drama, documentary, GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, & transgender), latin, and spiritual.

One very special guest attendee this year will be actress AnnaSophia Robb, the fifteen-year-old star of “Bridge to Terabithia.” Her new film, “Race to Witch Mountain,” will be shown Saturday afternoon, and Robb will be available to answer questions from the audience. Another special guest attendee will be the writer and director, Jonathan Glatzer, who’s premiere film, “What Goes Up,” is being shown Friday evening at the Festival.

One of the big attractions to attending a film festival like this is the chance for you to speak to many of the film stars and directors. You and other members of the audience can ask questions about the meaning of the film, how it was made, and much money it cost to make the film, and similar questions.

For a detailed description of each film, a schedule of when each film is being shown, and pricing information, go to the BreckFilmFest web site at www.breckfilmfest.com.

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See what she found out on her blog.

Post from: Colorado Springs Arts Blog

Mayor Rivera talked a lot about green industries and athletics, but I didn’t hear one word about arts and culture.

A recent study by the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR) estimated that the nonprofit arts industry and its audience have a $94.7 million economic impact in the greater Colorado Springs area each year and generate 2,639 jobs.

The local athletics presence pales in comparison. Think about it. When a corporation decides to locate offices or headquarters, the quality of the cultural landscape is almost up there with a trained workforce.

In the Dream City: Vision 2020 results I’ve seen so far, a vibrant cultural scene figures in so many of the discussions. I was thrilled to hear the mayor quote from a Mike Moran’s Dream City column about his ideas of a vibrant sports scene here in the year 2020. But I’m surprised I didn’t hear at least a nod to all that’s going on and needs to go on to build an exciting center for the arts.

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But it’s being replaced by something that sounds even more weird and wonderful: “Return to Forbidden Planet,” a rock and roll musical loosely based on the classic 1956 science fiction movie, which in turn is loosely based on William Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST. The musical, written by Bob Carlton, combines a hilarious mish mash of Shakespearean verse with two dozen classic rock and roll songs of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Sounds awesome. I’m such a fan of both that play and the film.

TheatreWorks will hold auditions Sunday, June 7, from 1-4pm in the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater at the UCCS campus.

Each candidate should prepare 16 bars of song and be prepared to read from the script. A piano accompanist will be present.

Some roles in this production have been cast, but many others are still open, including the part of the lovely Miranda, a teenager in love, Ariel, the singing robot, and a back-up spaceship crew of doo-wop singers.

The show will be presented in a nightclub format in the Gallery of Contemporary Art for eight performances on Friday and Saturday nights, Aug. 14-Sept. 5.

All auditions are by appointment, which may be scheduled by calling THEATREWORKS at 255-3232 or emailing theatreworks@theatreworkscs.org

For more details about TheatreWorks’ season, click here.

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