There’s a lot more to leading an orchestra than podium skills, so if you think just anyone can wave that little stick around in time to the music, forget about it. That said, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra has had an extended honeymoon with exuberant, multi-faceted conductor Marin Alsop in the…

THURS, 5/13 Americans have no single governing persona, and that’s as it should be: The Land of the Free has no room for a goose-stepping, nationalistic identity. We’re mongrels. We believe in and are motivated by thousands of unique, different things, all sprouted from hundreds of intermingling and divergent cultures…

SAT, 5/15 Stamina is key at the Go Fast 24 Hours of BoulderSThe Run, during which more than 100 runners will race to complete as many 7.14-mile laps around the Boulder Reservoir as possible in 24 hours. “We’re hoping to attract a wide variety of people — those who are…

THURS, 5/13 Who’s had the longest continuous run on Denver television? Russell Scott is first by a big, red nose. As Blinky the Clown, Scott hosted Blinky’s Fun Club, a proudly anachronistic Channel 2 kiddie program, for 33 years. Although Scott has been absent from the tube since 1998, when…

Davy Rothbart, a 29-year-old hipster with one of those anemic, pencil-thin Honest Abe beards, is probably the nation’s most notable pick-up artist: He sees things on the ground, he picks them up. But unlike most of us, he’s created an entire cult around the random notes, lists, napkin doodles, snapshots…

MON, 5/10 Local comedian Josh Blue turns his disability into a laughing matter. Blue, who says he “puts the cerebral in cerebral palsy,” uses humor to help audiences overcome preconceived ideas about the disabled. And while he has recently caught the eye of scouts for David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres,…

FRI, 5/7 Hot rods, tattoos, nudie flicks and cartoons — such are the sources of inspiration for lowbrow art, a movement on display at tonight’s opening reception for Cute, Cuddly and Curvaceous, the inaugural show at D.C. Gallery. The concept of “lowbrow” art originated in the surf and custom-car culture…

According to Sandra Renteria, owner of Indigena Gallery, Denver is finally ready for Vodou art — readier, in fact, than she ever could have imagined. She first arrived in the Mile High City from Florida, where Haitian art is far more commonplace and, therefore, understood. But she once feared that…

FRI, 4/30 People are always telling country rocker Marshall Chapman: “You talk in song titles.” And she does. The thirty-year Nashville veteran, a tough, six-foot blonde of genteel Southern extraction who’s been a cohort over the years of everyone from Waylon Jennings to Jimmy Buffet, is a walking card catalogue…

SAT, 5/1 Wind will rush through your hair and icy water will spray your face at the Rocky Mountain Shootout, a two-day open regatta at the Cherry Creek Reservoir. The boat set embraces such bracing conditions. “The sailing community is surprisingly large here in Colorado,” says Joe Beierl of the…

Sometimes folks tackle a project even though they know it’s gonna be bigger, tougher and meaner than they are. That’s how it was for local artist Michael O’Donnell and the Historic Oriental Theatre: One day he looked at the now-empty north Denver movie palace, a neighborhood treasure he’d grown up…

FRI, 4/23 El Centro Su Teatro’s annual Neruda Poetry Festival and Barrio Slam events are all about instilling a new appreciation for literacy in Chicano youth through a series of in-school residencies designed to get kids excited about putting words together in a creative way. The wordplay culminates with tonight’s…

WED, 4/28 The best-selling novel Getting Mother’s Body, by Suzan-Lori Parks, holds a chorus of voices from cover to cover. Indeed, the replication of voice — from simple syntax to each character’s unique inner psychology — is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s forte, regardless of which medium she’s dabbling in. And…

FRI, 4/16 Soar past the second star on the right and find yourself joyfully lost in Neverland at the Colorado Ballet’s world-premiere production of Peter Pan. “I’ve been thinking about doing Peter Pan for a long time, but it’s a very hard story to tell because it’s very poignant,” says…

FRI, 4/16 Denver artist Jean Smith always had a knack for giving whimsy a three-dimensional shape, rolling slabs of clay into brightly glazed flowers and sweetly humorous wall plaques. But then her artistic career took an unexpected turn. “It all started when I bought this box full of bowling trophies…

Boulder musician and outdoorsman Loren Mach is a guy who’s thrown himself into his passions one by one: The owner of percussion performance degrees from the Oberlin and Cincinnati conservatories and a former percussionist with the New Mexico Symphony, he shucked a career on the skins to take a walk…

THURS, 4/8 According to Boulder dancer Ellie Sciarra, women tap dancers deserve an opportunity to strut their stuff under the bright lights of center stage. “The tap world is very male-dominated,” she says. “While we all know who Gene Kelly and Gregory Hines were, women tap dancers were traditionally just…

MON, 4/12 Siona Benjamin’s background is beyond exotic, a story no journalist could resist repeating. A Sephardic Jew who grew up in the Bollywood district of Bombay, India, she hails from a milieu that has been defined by a swirl of multiculturalism, including Western and Eastern philosophies and Jewish, Catholic,…

TUES, 4/13 While sexual assault is no laughing matter, supporters of Denver’s Rape Assistance and Awareness Program will share a jovial evening while raising money at tonight’s Give A Wit comedy benefit. “Our issue is so heavy — we were looking for a way to lighten things up,” says RAAP…

For Chip Walton and his Curious Theatre Company, staging a play like Inventing Van Gogh became an act of invention in itself. The time-traveling play, by former Coloradan Stephen Dietz, tells of a modern painter hired to forge Van Gogh’s final masterpiece. To take on such a work is not…

Celebrate personal freedom at “Banned: A Celebration of the First Amendment,” a performance by the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus. “We seem to be at a place in history where the First Amendment is somewhat under assault,” says DGMC artistic director Sue Coffee. “This is a really good topic for a…

THURS, 4/1 Expand your boundaries this weekend at the fifth annual Denver International GLBT Film Festival: Seeing Queerly 2004, which begins tonight with an 8 p.m. screening of the transgender film Transfixed. “This is our opportunity to bring cutting-edge queer films to the community at large,” says Greg Lovell, spokesman…