Get TIO in your Inbox!

Performing Arts

[click "Play" for Kelley Hunt's conversation with Susan]


Telluride Blues & Brews Fest favorite, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Kelley Hunt returns to town for a much anticipated return performance at the Sheridan Opera House. Show time is Tuesday, February 23, 8 p.m.

Kelley Hunt performs everything from hot bar blues to cool R&B in a big, rich, sexy, soulful voice reminiscent of pop/blues diva Bonnie Raitt. The singer naturally combines the influences of R&B, roots rock, blues gospel, folk and soul into her own style and sound, all wrapped up in a Midwestern identity: The sounds of the place she grew up, the grasslands of Kansas’ Flint Hills, are unmistakably there in her rhythmic piano phrasing and the earthy honesty of her vocal delivery. What’s more, Hunt turns a piano into a boogie woogie blaster, and now for something completely different, she adds electric and acoustic guitar to the show.
21 February, 2010 /
[click "Play to listen to director Krissy Smith talk about "Big Love"]

Image001 Telluride's SquidShow Theatre Company turns up the heat with its winter production of Charles L. Mee's "Big Love." (No, not that one. It's not HBO.) Performances are February 21, 22, 28, and March 1 at The Ah Haa School for the Arts (300 South Townsend Avenue). Show time is 8 p.m. Admission is FREE.


Mee is a playwright after Telluride's heart, the ultimate recycler. The writer/historian is known for radical reconstructions of found texts which he uses to create what amount to staged collages: "Big Love," based on "The Suppliant Women" by Aeschylus is a vaudevillian tragic-comedy that infuses the ancient text with pop songs, helicopters, dancing, singing, acrobatics and Mee's words.
20 February, 2010 /
[click "Play" to listen to Susan's conversation with Joe Pug]

Reflect2
Joe Pug

Jte_0909_120px
Justin Townes Earle
photo:Joshua Black Wilkins

The program at the Sheridan Opera House on February 20, (doors and box office 8:30 p.m. for 9 p.m. show) features two clear-voiced populist troubadours. Top billing goes to Justin Townes Earle, the son of Steve Earle, who in turn learned his craft from two Lone Star legends, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.


Since the release of his The Good Life two years ago, which charted on Billboard Country as soon as it debuted, Earle has been hitting the boards all over the world: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Fest, Chicago Country Music Festival, Americana Music Awards, Down Home in Norway and his debut on the Grand Ole Opry. The chip off the old block has also performed in the UK, Australia, and Scandinavia.


18 February, 2010 /

Mrs Robinson Fox
Tracy Shaffer as Mrs. Robinson

Editor's note: Telluride Inside...and Out now has a regular Denver contributor, Tracy Shaffer, for readers who may want a big city fix. Tracy is an abundantly talented playwright and well-known actress around the Mile High City, currently starring as the original coyote, Mrs. Robinson, in "The Graduate," which we got to see last Saturday (February 13). White hot always cool Tracy, not Benjamin, was the show's center of gravity, its heft and its raison d'etre. In a sleek production with minimal sets, the other rest of the cast became props to set off Mrs. Robinson's aria. The director, John Ashton, seemed to have pushed everyone else over the top to create cultural stereotypes of the 1960s  – The Successful, Golf-Playing Dutiful Dad; the Well-Intentioned, Hysterical Mom; the Rebellious Son. These contemporary riffs on Chaucer's archetypes allow the story of a complex woman's complex relationship with her daughter to emerge with greater understanding. Denver Post critic John Moore saw it differently: he saw underwear. We see his perspective as the emperor's new clothes, which Tracy describes in her  "Naked Truth."

My Naked Truth: Sex, power and ticket sales

by Tracy Shaffer

Much ado about wearing nothing in the Aurora Fox Theatre’s production of "The Graduate." In his Sunday column, Denver Post theatre critic John Moore took the Fox to task for "copping out" and clothing the star (though scantily) to suit its subscribers. The conversation was off and running.

17 February, 2010 /

(editor's note: Around the Viebrock house, Valentine's Day is a high holy day. So to celebrate, we are publishing works from Telluride regional poets, Enjoy!) And Love Said, You’ve Still Got a Thing to Learn, Dear, about Solitudeby Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer“When we...

14 February, 2010 /

(editor's note: Around the Viebrock house, Valentine's Day is a high holy day. So to celebrate, we are publishing works from Telluride regional poets, Enjoy!)Mirageby Sandra Dorr (from Desert Water)Years of shouting, slamming doors.Breaking the small dishes,leaving the room in mid-air --vanish into the ringing...

13 February, 2010 /

(editor's note: Around the Viebrock house, Valentine's Day is a high holy day. So to celebrate, we are publishing works from Telluride regional poets, Enjoy!)Not Just During Sunsets or in Candlelight, Butby Rosemerry Wahtola TrommerThere was that day in the grocery store beside the kiwis...

12 February, 2010 /

(editor's note: Around the Viebrock house, Valentine's Day is a high holy day. So to celebrate, we are publishing works from Telluride regional poets, Enjoy!)Even Though I’m Partial to Wordsby Rosemerry Wahtola TrommerOut the window, through snow, I see the irrigation ditch linedwith gray cottonwood...

11 February, 2010 /


Telluride's workplaces – The Sweet Life, Zia Sun, Telluride Ski & Golf among them – are the settings for the 33rd full-length musical production mounted by director Jen Julia's Sheridan Arts Foundation's Young People's Theater. "Job Story," performed by grades 9 – 12, opens Friday night, February 5 at the Sheridan Opera House. Two additional performances are Saturday, February 6, and Monday, February 8. There is no performance on Super Bowl Sunday. Show time is 6 p.m. nightly

In keeping with the populist zeitgeist, Jen's first thought was a musical adaptation of oral historian/radio broadcaster Studs Terkel's "Working," an exploration through monologues and vignettes of what makes work meaningful for people from all walks of life, from Lovin' Al the parking valet, to Dolores the waitress, from the fireman to the business executive. In the end, however, Jen decided the play's 1970s libretto and music were just too dusty for her hip teenage actors.

05 February, 2010 /