EDITOR’S NOTE: The following review was written in June 2008. Heritage Square is bringing “Retro Loud” back from Jan. 30-Feb. 22, 2009. The contact and ticket information at the bottom is still applicable.
Funny how, if you recycle something enough times, people eventually stop calling it a retread and start calling it a tradition.
When it comes to the Heritage Square Music Hall, I’m so pro-recycling, I’m green.
For a decade, Heritage Square has sustained itself with its ongoing “Loud” franchise — a silly collection of pop-music revues loosely stitched together by the thinnest of premises. And by loose, we’re talking a 30-inch waist holding up 48-inch jeans. And by thin, we’re talking Lara Flynn Boyle on a hunger strike.
This is theater that has you thinking nightcap, not thinking-cap.
It’s all based around snarky siblings Tom and Annie (T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer), whom we first met in 1998 as “teenagers” in their 1950s basement. Five sequels later, we have “Retro Loud,” a best-of rehash. I mean, tradition.
The occasion is Tom’s 60th birthday. (Mullin, the Music Hall’s co-owner and star, turns 60 himself in August.) The gang is reuniting for a “surprise” party, an excuse to revisit their 30 favorite pop ditties from previous “Louds.”
I can’t watch a movie twice, but I can listen to the same song a thousand times, one reason I never tire of the “Loud” shenanigans. It helps that the songs are as expertly performed as they are outrageously presented in costume and impersonation.
Super-cut Alex Crawford (a real-life grandfather) in glittery-gold parachute pants and sleeveless vest performing Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This”? Johnette Toye, back in those boots that clearly were made for walkin’? Rory Pierce as Roy Orbison? Mullin as Baby Spice — and Fat Elvis? Dwyer as Mamma Cass, Janis Joplin and, most pulse-racingly, Tina Turner? Not to mention those inexplicably riotous Village People.
Costumer Jane Nelson-Rud has seriously outdone herself. That, or taken up acid; not sure which.
Full disclosure: It takes nearly a half hour to get to the music, the dialogue transitions are groan-inducing, the multimedia extras are as primitive as your dad’s vacation slide show and, for some strange reason, Pierce’s popular Jimmy Buffett medley didn’t make the cut. But, hey, R.E.M. didn’t play everything I wanted them to, either . . . what are you gonna do?
Still, this is good-fun family entertainment. On Thursday, a couple was celebrating their 54th anniversary while a nearby woman was having her bachelorette party — both seemed to be having an equally good time.
“Loud” always manages to feel familiar and fresh at the same time. Annie still can’t remember the ingenue’s name (it’s Kira!), and she still singles out some poor stooge in the audience to play her long-suffering husband, Bobby Lee.
But the audience helps keep things new by providing some of the best lines. (When called out for having been married 54 years, that wiseacre hubby fired back, “Seems longer!”).
And there’s always fresh meat. This year’s “new boy” is Charlie Schmidt. He’s Annie’s nervous new lapdog, and let’s just say she can smell fresh blood all the way to the theme park’s Alpine slide. Schmidt fits in with this veteran ensemble with uncommon comic confidence.
The evening builds to a sentimental and uncharacteristically nostalgic homage to Mullin. Set against “We May Never Pass This Way Again,” “Retro Loud” starts to feel like a tradition that’s coming to an end. Let’s hope not. It’s OK that the cast is finally acting their real ages, as long as they never grow up.
As always, I left trying to recall an other company that sends its audience home so energized.
By the end of the summer, more than 200,000 will have taken in various “Loud” incarnations since ’98. That’s a tradition. As numbers go? Most theaters can’t touch this.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
Retro Loud
Pop-music revue Heritage Square Music Hall, 18301 W. Colfax Ave., Golden. Written by T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer. Also starring Alex Crawford, Rory Pierce, N. Randall Johnson, Kira Cauthorn, Johnette Toye and Charlie Schmidt. 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (dinner 90 minutes before). $23.50-$36.50. 303-279-7800 or
