On a Friday afternoon in Grand Lake, the janitor sweeping the steps an hour before the Rocky Mountain Repertory Theatre’s 37th opening night also happens to be its artistic director. The flying dirt is as oblivious to Michael Querio’s title as to the impropriety of settling on his newly pressed suit.
As bingo letters are called out a few feet away on the lawn pavilion, one merchant after another stops by with goodies for the actors.
A week later in Crested Butte, a young man flips his truck while off-road four-wheeling. Chris Krueger, the only one who can operate the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre’s sound and light boards, has slammed his head, cracked two ribs and opened a gash on his knee. He stumbles 3 1/2 miles to the nearest road and flags down a motorist. To the hospital? “No,” Krueger says. “To the theater!”
Colorado has 13 theater companies that operate primarily in the summer, mostly in mountain tourist towns like Grand Lake and Creede. To tour these companies is to explore the essence of interdependent, small-town community. Here everyone, it seems, chips in. The librarian may be your lead actor. In Crested Butte, the volunteer ticket-taker also happens to be the town’s paramedic. Good thing.
Krueger arrives in time for that night’s performance of “Proof,” but he’s woozy. So when the play starts, he calls his mother on his cellphone and quietly asks her to please keep talking to him so he won’t pass out. He makes it to intermission before being ordered to the hospital by the EMT ticket-taker. Managing director Kim Goodrich and “Proof” director Paul Edwards give themselves a crash course on lights and sound for the second act. In theater, you do what you have to do.
The people who make small-town theater happen are just as dedicated as anyone on Broadway, because commitment is defined the same at 9,000 feet as it is in Times Square. Colorado’s summer companies have survived an average of 30 years (the statewide average is 14), which demonstrates not only the foothold these companies have within their communities, but their ability to weather change and hard times together.
The benefits are mutual. Colorado’s summer companies, including Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, drew nearly 100,000 theatergoers in 2004 and exceeded $1.5 million in ticket sales. The Creede Repertory Theatre is not only Mineral County’s largest summer employer with 60, it generates 18 percent of the county’s entire economy. Rocky Mountain Rep visitors pump more than $1 million into other Grand County businesses every year.
While some of the work is professional, some amateur, the term “community theater” takes on a different meaning in these towns. This is theater in which the entire community has an investment.
Grand Lake: Summer turns into life of love
It’s a tale as old as Colorado time. An Indiana girl promised a Michigan boy the summer of his life if he would join her in Grand Lake.
More like a lifetime of summers.
Sally Meyers had been a star at the Rocky Mountain Rep since 1998, and her boyfriend, Chad Scott, would follow her anywhere. The peripatetic lovers knew right away they would want to spend all their future summers in this majestic wonderland where Sally’s dad had performed back in 1968.
Their fate was sealed not in summertime but in a winter whiteout. Scott was determined to propose at Grand Lake’s Point Park, even if it meant a white-knuckle, 3 1/2-hour drive from Denver over Berthoud Pass in January 2004.
“I’ve been through a lot of Colorado snowstorms, but that was the worst,” said Meyers.
Scott proposed, Meyers said yes, (actually, she said a variation of, “heck, yes!”) and the couple, who both have performed off-season at the Country Dinner Playhouse, were married in September. Now Scott is managing director and Meyers is artistic associate and star of the upcoming “Honky Tonk Angels.”
Greeley: Nurturing a 71-year-old company
Roger Sherman was destined to become a historian. That’s his name fifth from the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, eight generations removed. “My cousin told me there is mobility in America,” Sherman said. “But not all of it is necessarily upward.”
Sherman’s master’s project 12 years ago was to write the history of the Little Theatre of the Rockies, at 71 the oldest theater company west of the Mississippi. “Ironically,” he said, “I never finished because it was so overwhelming.”
Sherman has nevertheless become both technical director and the caretaker of a story that could fill volumes. He especially likes the tale about how founder Helen Langworthy had to assign an assistant stage manager to make sure a young Nick Nolte made it to rehearsals.
LTR has staged more than 400 plays and musicals as an educational summer-stock company, made up today of elite University of Northern Colorado students, alumni and national guest artists, all performing five works together in 600- and 95-seat spaces. Its faculty includes legendary Loretto Heights mentors Tom McNally and Vance Fulkerson, and David Grapes, who wrote Denver Center Attractions’ current Frank Sinatra tribute “My Way.”
“The legacy of this company is really what it means to the rest of the state,” Sherman said. “Everywhere you see theater in Colorado, you are seeing people who have been trained by the people we have trained.”
Crested Butte: Actor loves leaving L.A.
Bob Puglisi was a Los Angeles actor who needed only one vacation in Crested Butte to realize maybe he didn’t really love L.A. after all.
“My wife’s parents had both just passed away, and that makes you think about what you want to do with your life,” he said.
Puglisi soon learned he would rather work by day as a librarian and by night performing for a company where the only ones who get paid are the directors and the kid from Western State College who builds the sets.
“I’m able to play roles here I wasn’t even
able to get auditions for in L.A.,” said Puglisi,
who just played the dad in “Proof.”
Creede: Brandt feels a flood of goodwill
Christy Brandt has been coming back to perform for Creede Rep every summer but one the past 31 years, making her one of the grand dames of Colorado theater. But you never really know your place in a community until you’re hurtling down a flume at 40 mph.
Nearly the entire town came to Brandt’s aid in 1983 during one of the worst floods in Creede history. Heavy snow runoff put Main Street under water. Brandt had found her dog, Junior, stranded precariously beside the town flume built to redirect the snow melt. But while grabbing her dog, Brandt was propelled into the freezing, 4-foot waters. As she was battered by the rock-lined flume, onlookers took to every bridge along the way. Six hardy heroes jumped in to grab her, but only one – the county judge – could stand up against the tide.
“I heard him say, ‘Don’t worry, honey, I got you,”‘ Brandt said. “Then I barreled right into him, and I could hear him say, “‘Don’t worry, honey, I’m right behind you!”‘
Brandt was rescued, treated for hypothermia and back onstage that night. The judge, though, was a might miffed to learn she had been clasping a dog rather than a baby.
“I have felt nurtured by this town from the very beginning,” said Brandt, who has performed in about 120 roles since 1973. The company was founded by students from Brandt’s alma mater of Kansas University in 1964.
Westcliffe: Anne Relph restored what was lost
Anne Relph moved to Westcliffe in 1992 and bought the dilapidated Jones Theatre as a way to honor her mother and to save it from becoming a laundry. The floor had broken through to the dirt and the ceiling was falling apart. “I said, ‘We’re going to make it clean and safe and see if anybody comes,” she said. “From my experience, once a town loses its theater, it rarely gets it back.”
Residents of the picturesque Wet Mountain Valley “an hour from anywhere” have been coming back to the Jones for films, music and live theater since. It’s an unlikely location for a performing arts center. Westcliffe and its sister town of Silver Cliff have 25 churches – one for every 40 people. Relph once was picketed for showing a “Harry Potter” film.
Relph’s mother wrote radio plays in Hollywood and Relph, then Anne Kimbell, performed on stages from London to New York to Denver’s historic Elitch Theatre alongside such legends as Vivian Leigh and Marlon Brando. But her greatest claim to fame – she says shame – was her starring role in Roger Corman’s first film, “Monster From the Ocean Floor,” in 1954.
Relph has completed a $650,000 add-on to the Jones, including a rehearsal studio, radio station and a swank apartment for visiting guest artists. This summer those visitors are three students from the University of Denver who work alongside the homegrown Westcliffe Players. With the help of Denver-based directors Chris Tabb and Tracy Shaffer Witherspoon, the quality steadily has improved. Relph still wants everyone in town to give acting a try.
“I want to work with local people because I want them to have co-ownership,” said Relph, who offers all the area’s 28 nonprofits one free night using her theater each year. The town of 500 has responded by buying 140 plush new theater seats at $100 a pop.
“When I first started they all called it ‘Anne’s theater,”‘ she said, “but now they call it ‘our theater.’ I like that better.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
