Podcast: Guns in theatre

Ovation West’s Tim Kennedy on the Evergreen shooting and ‘Annie Get Your Gun,’ plus how guns are portrayed on stage, best practices and this week’s Colorado Headliners

With recent shootings in mind — particularly the one at Evergreen High School in Colorado — hosts Alex Miller and Toni Tresca take a look at how guns are portrayed in theatre. Also featured is an interview with Tim Kennedy of Ovation West in Evergreen, whose production of Annie Get Your Gun was suspended for its second weekend in light of the shooting.

Later in the episode, we run down our list of the Top 10 Colorado Headliners — shows opening around the state that caught our eye.

Chapter Summary

Episode Topic: Guns in Theater

Show Reviews & Discussions

[00:00 – 06:30] Opening & Recent Show Experiences

• Alex and Toni discuss their recent theater outings
• Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story at Town Hall Art Center – described as more tribute concert than theatrical experience
• Cancelled show at Curious Theater (Eureka Day) due to actor car trouble
• Impromptu evening at Renegade Brewing

[06:30 – 13:30] More Show Reviews

• The Thin Place at Betsy Theater – Toni’s rave review of Lucas Nath play, calling it one of the year’s best
• Merrily We Roll Along at Vintage Theater – strong performances but technical issues
• Conspiracy Circus – monthly sideshow at The Learned Lemur featuring fire swallowing and other acts

News Roundup

[14:00 – 17:45] Theater News

• Odd Knock Productions creating immersive venue in Rhino Arts District
• Miners Alley’s Assassins promotional video embracing negative reviews
• John Moore’s story about Marine Sergeant Michelle Crowe in Annie Get Your Gun amid Evergreen High School shooting

Main Topic: Guns in Theater

[17:45 – 26:00] Guns on Stage Discussion

• Chekhov’s gun principle as storytelling device
• Examples of guns in theater: August: Osage County, Assassins, Chicago, Hamilton
• Distinction between movies (frequent gun use) and theater (less common)

[26:00 – 34:15] Safety Guidelines & Best Practices

• Miners Alley’s approach to Assassins: replica guns, percussion instead of gunshot sounds
• Industry safety protocols:
  • Never leave rehearsal/performance space
  • Never aim at people
  • Chain of custody procedures
  • Locked storage requirements
  • No “playing” with props between scenes

Interview

[37:40 – 60:25] Tim Kennedy – Ovation West

• Discussion of Annie Get Your Gun production during Evergreen High School shooting
• Historical context of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
• Annie Oakley as highest-paid female performer of her era
• Buffalo Bill’s evolution toward cultural inclusion
• Production details: 27-person cast, extensive costume changes
• Educational outreach programming with local historians
• Upcoming season: improvised musical (November), Songs for a New World (February)

Colorado Headliners

[60:25 – 72:30] Upcoming Shows

Toni Headliners:

• The Enthusiasts, Buntport Theater, Denver, Sept. 16
• 12th Annual High Plains Comedy Festival, Various Venues along South Broadway in Denver, Sept. 18-20
• Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson, Apt. 2B, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Sept. 18-Oct. 5
• The Wood, The Arts HUB, Lafayette, Sept. 19-21
• You’ll Be Made of Ashes Too, Flamboyán Theatre, Denver, Sept. 19-27

Alex Headliners:

• Miss Manhattan, 19K Productions/CenterStage Theatre, Boulder Dairy Center, Sept. 19-28
• La Llorona, Chautauqua Park, Boulder, Arts in the Open, Sept. 20-Oct. 26
• Schoolhouse Rock Live!, Aurora Fox, Sept. 19-Oct. 18
• The Thin Place, BETC, Denver Savoy Sept. 12-28; Boulder Dairy Oct. 3-16
• The Happiest Man on Earth, Denver Center, Sept. 19-Nov. 2

Transcript

Created by our AI overlords; they make mistakes.

Contents

• Opening
• Show Reviews
• News Roundup
• Main Topic: Guns in Theater
• Interview with Tim Kennedy
• Colorado Headliners

Opening

Alex Miller: All right. Hello and welcome to the OnStage Colorado podcast once again. I’m Alex Miller.

Toni Tresca: And I’m still Tony Tresca.

Alex Miller: Yeah, and on this week’s episode, we’re going to talk about a more serious topic, guns.

Toni Tresca: That’s right, and specifically guns in the theater.

Alex Miller: Yeah, of course, guns are unfortunately in the news again right now, not that they ever seem to leave. This week’s interview is with Tim Kennedy with Ovation West. So they’re doing a production of Annie Get Your Gun. And he got on the line in our interview right as the aftermath of the Evergreen High School shoot. Of course, Ovation West is up in Evergreen. And three of the cast members from the show were at the school and he just found out they’re all okay. So it was a really interesting time to be talking to him.

Toni Tresca: Well, I’m glad to hear that everybody involved was okay. But that’s, I mean, that’s an emotional time to be talking with somebody. I just, yeah, thinking of that community right now for sure. We’ll dive more into that a little bit later in the episode and also talk a little bit more about John Moore’s story that he did about the show, focused on the actor playing Annie Oakley, Marine Sergeant Michelle Crowe.

We’re just gonna talk a lot about guns on stage, what’s the appropriate usage, how should we be thinking about them in 2025 when it’s kind of impossible to ignore in the world, in the real world.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yep, another John Moore story. John Moore, you live rent free in our podcast, as they would say. So we’ll get to that in just a moment, but first let’s talk about what we’ve seen on stage this past week. But I’m almost gonna mention it snowed in the mountains. So I think this is the time we always wait for when, you know, I think it was above 10,000 feet or something like that. So if you look west, you might get a look at some of that today. But yeah, on to theater.

Show Reviews

Toni Tresca: Sounds good. Yeah, we were both at the opening night of Buddy, the Buddy Holly Story over at Town Hall Art Center in Littleton.

Alex Miller: Yeah, so we were at that one and we were both gonna, I got to the Curious Theater on Friday night to see Eureka Day, but that show had been canceled for some reason. Do you know what happened there?

Toni Tresca: I do. I heard from a source close to the show that it was because an actor got stuck in Bailey. They had some car trouble and they just they were not able to get there in time. And I guess they don’t have any understudies? Question mark. Because they ended up having to cancel the show because of that.

Alex Miller: Wow, yeah, that’s unfortunate. Yeah, we got to the theater because I didn’t see the email in time, we recouped and regrouped and met you for a beer. So it turned out okay. So yeah.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, it ended up being a fun night. Me, you and your son Andy went over. It was Renegade Brewing over in the Santa Fe Arts District, which is a great hang. There’s never anybody there, though, based on our limited experience going. So do you want an empty bar to chat in? It’s a great place.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yeah, I know. Yes, that’s for sure. The opposite of when we went to see Buddy, we sat in the alley and the band started playing right behind us and that was the end of our conversation there. So anyway.

Toni Tresca: That’s true. We ended up having to turn to the TV, which was playing CU football.

Alex Miller: Yeah, neither of which we cared about. So, but anyway, so Buddy, the Buddy Holly story was, was kind of keen to see this even though, you know, it’s just a jukebox musical, but I’ve always thought Buddy Holly had an outsized influence on the history of rock and roll, even though his career was, you know, cut short and very, very young. But I just posted your review and you were pretty critical of the play or the musical itself, even though Town Hall mostly did a really great job with it. It was really, it was a great Buddy Holly concert is kind of what it was, but the story was just kind of almost non-existent other than, you know, the basic facts.

Toni Tresca: Absolutely. Yeah, I kind of acknowledge that I say it feels like a tribute concert more than kind of a theatrical experience. And I think part of that is due to some of the directorial choices, as I meant, as I kind of discuss in the piece. But a lot of it is really due to the kind of the clunky book. Buddy Holly only lived to be 22, which is pretty much all I knew about him. I knew that and the song American Pie that talks about his death along with the others. But yeah, exactly. And so I, but I didn’t really know much about him. So I was curious to see how a guy with such a short life would be, his experience would be theatricalized, how they would cope with, grapple with his legacy being cut short and how his music still resonates. And the answer is it really doesn’t. It’s just kind of a platform to play his music.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yeah, I guess if you really want the backstory, you should check out the Buddy Holly biopic with Gary Busey. A very long time ago, it was kind of what launched his career, was playing Buddy Holly. But yeah, it’s it really is a fun show and the audience really enjoyed it. People were like, you know, clapping and singing along and stuff like that. We were both and you mentioned this in review that we get a little tired of being cajoled into clapping and, you know, and singing and doing stuff like that, but maybe we’re just grumpy, I don’t know, grumpy critics. Yeah, sometimes I’m just like, come on, just let me watch the show. And you had some really interesting observations about just kind of where it could have gone and where it fell short. So, but yeah, it’s the kind of thing where like you can say all that, but it’s not going to influence anybody’s enjoyment of the show if they’re into the music. Yeah, that’s for sure. And then one that you went to that I missed because I had a sick pup was the Thin Place at Betsy at the Savoy and then they’ll be moving this one to the Derry Center later in, I think in October. So how was this one? This is a Lucas Nath play.

Toni Tresca: That’s right, and directed by the company’s artistic director, Jess Robly. I’ve got to say this is one of the best plays that I have seen this year. I’m so bummed that you missed out on it. Although I am very glad you got to take care of your dog, Macy, and I’m grateful she’s feeling better.

Alex Miller: Yeah, I’ll get to it. I definitely want to see this play.

Toni Tresca: That was what I was gonna say to you on the pod right now is like, I feel like you gotta make time somewhere in your schedule to get out to see this one. It is about 80, 85 minutes, no intermission. Yeah, I knew that would appeal to you. And it’s a four person cast featuring some of the best performances I’ve seen in the year, particularly from the lead, Madison Taylor who played Hilda. I wasn’t very familiar with her work. She has a lot of credits, like on screen though, she’s out in film and things like that. And she has worked with Betsy in, when she played Jo in their recent production of Little Women, but I didn’t see that one. So this was my first introduction to her. And she kind of plays this woman who Zulern is grappling with a lot of issues throughout the play. Her grandmother was kind of a medium and she kind of worked with her on kind of building up her third eye, which leads to her, after her death and her mother’s disappearance, kind of turning and befriending this seance person named Linda, who maybe doesn’t even believe the thing she’s saying, which kind of creates this interesting conflict.

And then it gradually evolves into this really psychological drama slash ghost story that’s an interrogation about kind of the gray areas in life and what we can really place our finger on and what we can’t. It’s done in a really minimalistic style. There’s basically no set aside from two chairs. And so the actors are really, it really relies on the performances of these four actors to kind of bring this what is ultimately a very slow-burn, searing, painful kind of personal ghost story to life. I don’t want to say, I’ll say more in my review, but I don’t want to say, I’m being careful with my words because I don’t want to spoil anything. There are some truly incredible theatrical feats that take place during the play and I don’t want to nod to them other than to say that they are present and they are very impressive.

Alex Miller: Excellent. Wow, I’m glad to hear that. So yeah, it sounded like a really interesting play. So it sounds like it was really pulled off well. So look forward to getting out to that one. And then you had a little bit of Sondheim time in the mix.

Toni Tresca: That’s right. I, my guy, I love Sondheim. And so when I saw that Vintage Theater was staging Merrily We Roll Along to kick off its 25th season, also it’s 186 production, which I know because Vintage pastes whatever number show they are at the bottom of their program, which I think is fun. That’s, it really shows how long the company has been doing and Vintage does produce a whole hell of a lot.

Alex Miller: They do. They are prolific.

Toni Tresca: And this production was staged by their artistic director, Bernie Cardell, and features really winning performances, I think, from its three leads, Jason Rex as Charlie, Patrick Case as Franklin, and new to me, Kara Morrissey as Mary Flynn. It’s this kind of sardonic, satirical showbiz satire that functions in reverse. So you see the characters at the end of their lives and everything is falling apart. And then you go back in time and see their friendship and it starts from this really beautiful, earnest place. And that’s kind of the tragedy of the piece is that you know where it’s going to end. These friendships are going to fall apart. And yet you see it gets sweeter and sweeter over time. And the three, and it’s really sold well due to the skilled direction of Bernie Cardell, of these three central actors who really make believably de-age in front of you through some skillful costume choices as well as their performances. And the relationships between the three of them are fantastic. So I just was very impressed by the acting and the ensemble singing for the most part, though there were some diction issues. Sondheim is notoriously tricky when it comes to how fast the songs are and how many words he places in there. And due to a combination of diction, as well as some sound issues that were persistent throughout the production, including some track. It was not live. There were not live musicians. They were using pre-recorded tracks. So there were some track issues, and then as well as some feedback issues on the microphones that they were using that kind of impeded hearing every single word. And then there were just some other kind of sloppy technical choices, including some clunky scenic design and lighting that kind of left some actors in the dark for long portions of the show. So I left feeling mixed on it. I felt that the performances were incredible, but the tech didn’t always live up to what was on the stage.

Alex Miller: Okay. And you also got out to something called conspiracy circus, which sounds really interesting. What is conspiracy circus?

Toni Tresca: So they are a sideshow. They bill themselves as the longest and only Colorado sideshow currently in existence. It takes place in the Learned Lemur, which is this oddity shop. It’s in the back room. You enter through a secret door behind the cash register. You go up these stairs through this immersive kind of odd experience into the back where they have their carriage house. It used to house ponies and now it has the freaks, as they call themselves, who come out and they do once a month a performance of really just some of the strangest things I’ve seen on stage in a while. Everything from like people swallowing fire while they’re stripping to people putting nails up their nose with a hammer.

Alex Miller: Oh dear.

Toni Tresca: And then, yeah, it’s really kind of disgusting, off the wall, bonkers stuff. And this company is going on their fourth year of doing the show. It will be their fourth anniversary in October. And I went and attended and chatted with the creators, as well as some of the performers, for a piece that I’m working on for Westword, kind of ahead of its four year anniversary.

Alex Miller: Wow, that sounds really interesting. Sideshow. I’ve never, I think I’ve ever even heard of a sideshow as being like a standalone thing like that, you know.

Toni Tresca: That’s what they said. They said that they kind of introduced the show with some history about how sideshows used to be off to the side of circuses and you pay a little bit extra and you get to go in and see all these natural oddities on display. But with circuses on the decline, there’s no sideshows anymore, really anywhere, no platform for that. And so these guys are kind of seeking to remedy that. And I got to say, they’re doing a fantastic job. The crowd, they’ve been selling out for pretty much every single show. The crowd that I was in there last night was mostly new people. So it’s constantly new people kind of discovering and showing up to this experience. Just, if you are looking for a novel night out, I guarantee you it’s always new. They never repeat any perform any acts. What I saw will not be on display again. You’ll get something totally new and freaky next month.

Alex Miller: Wow, I gotta get their shows in our calendar, because I’ve been…

Toni Tresca: Yeah, I hadn’t heard of them either. They said that they’ve kind of just been doing guerrilla marketing. They are very much, they’re punks in that sense. They believe in just hanging up posters and kind of letting people discover them through word of mouth.

Alex Miller: All right. Yeah.

News Roundup

Alex Miller: All right, well, let’s turn to the news. What do we have in the old mail bag or news bag or newsroom?

Toni Tresca: Yeah, so first up, the immersive group, Odd Knock Productions, is transforming a 3,700 square foot storefront over in the Rhino Arts District into an immersive venue for new events. So over the next, over the four months, the group is developing a thing called Test Kitchen to produce three works in progress to kind of showcase their approach to immersive participatory theater. And each of these three performances are going to be written, directed, and devised in collaboration with the local cast and design team to create these three new immersive productions. And they’re doing this with support from Eden’s property, as well as the Rhino Arts District, and are currently in the process of raising about $20,000 to grow the creative team, hire local talent, and build the infrastructure necessary to kind of bring this space to life.

Alex Miller: All right, more immersive. It’s Denver’s the hot spot.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, absolutely. It’s for between them dirt off-center. There’s a lot of new spaces kind of popping up for immersive which is that’s definitely a change because Previously immersive have been very much nomadic and operating wherever they can.

Alex Miller: Yeah, I was just putting in Audacious Theaters new show and the calendar. And of course, they like to do taprooms, which is fun, but they’re not the greatest. They don’t really usually have a stage of any kind, so it’s just kind of ad-libbed. But that’s part of the charm of immersive. You never know where it’s going to pop up. But certainly having dedicated spaces has got to be on the plus side as well. So what else?

Toni Tresca: Well, in the sillier news, I kind of wanted to touch on a trailer that’s been making the rounds on social media about Miners Alley’s now closed production of Assassins. Did you get a chance to check out this trailer, Alex?

Alex Miller: I did, yeah. It was very long, I thought, for what it was. It seemed like it should have been about 30 or 60 seconds most, and it was longer than that. Yeah, they leaned into some of the bad reviews that they’ve gotten, not just from our review. I was a little critical of it, as well as I guess they had some audience members who said things like, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. So they were leaning into that, which I think is, why not? If you get a negative review, we always say, look, there’s usually something in the review that you could probably tease out that’s, you know, that’s decent unless you’re, you know, we don’t see too many like complete train wrecks that don’t have anything good to say about them. You know, audience members are, they don’t pull their punches. They’ll walk out and just say, my God, that sucked, you know? And, but you know, it’s a tough show to watch. And I think, you know, in this case, maybe it’s a, you know, that’s a good way to approach it.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, so the video was shared by John Houser, who was in the cast, and it starts very innocently with some video clips over the cast singing Everybody’s Got the Right, and then some text appears that says, some people have called it the must-see production of 2025, which is kind of referencing John Moore’s review of the musical.

Alex Miller: Yeah, absolutely, very glowing review.

Toni Tresca: And then more text appears saying, but others have said the worst play I’ve ever seen. The lady beside me said the same thing and do better miners Allie, which is seeming to like seemingly referring to comments that they have received from patrons, which are very funny. They don’t like you said, they do not pull their punches.

Alex Miller: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, well, all power to them to try and, you know, make some lemonade out of lemons there. What else? I guess that’s it for the news for now. We can jump into our main topic.

Toni Tresca: Totally. Yeah, kind of the, cause the final bit of news I wanted to discuss kind of segues into our main topic for the episode, Guns in Theater, as well as our interview this week. So I just wanted to kind of dig a little bit deeper into John Moore’s story about how Marine Sergeant Michelle Crowe, who is starring in Ovation West’s community theater production of Annie Get Your Gun in Evergreen felt while working her job as an ultrasound tech on Wednesday when she heard that an active shooter had opened fire at a nearby Evergreen High School, which is just a devastating event for anybody to process, but particularly somebody who has been close to guns and kind of violence. John thought she had it would have an interesting perspective on this, and she did. She and John says that her first thoughts were that three members of her cast, as you mentioned at the top of this episode, were at the school when the shooting began. A more are parents or teachers of the students who were there, and she wanted to know how were they. Her instincts were to protect the people around her. I thought that was just a really powerful thing at this time when every people can feel so divided. It’s important reminder that there are still people out there whose instincts are to protect and lean into the community, even in these moments of tragedy.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely an interesting perspective for sure.

Toni Tresca: And then the story kind of discusses Crowe’s history in the Marines and how, I thought this was very fascinating. After a year studying musical theater at a New York conservatory, financial uncertainty led her to sign up for the Marines, having never fired a weapon before, which to go from musical theater to the armed forces is quite a transition.

Alex Miller: Yeah, it certainly is.

Toni Tresca: And then that led into five years of service and then her journey back to theater ultimately. And the piece shares that following the news, Ovation West’s executive director met with a trauma counselor who had worked with the survivors of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. And then after that conversation decided to pause the run of Annie Get Your Gun for a week. The show is expected to resume September 18th and close, September 28th as scheduled, but nothing is definitive as its website reads, given the nature of the show, the board and staff of Ovation West will be assessing how and whether to move forward with the remaining performances of the production. More information will be forthcoming early next week.

Alex Miller: Yeah, or this week, I guess. But yeah, I mean, part of me thinks the show must go on and, you know, focused on guns even though it’s in a very different context of basically target shooting a long time ago still nonetheless all about guns guns in the title so

Toni Tresca: Totally. I think Crowe has a really interesting perspective on that because when John asked her what she might say to a young cast member who was looking for guidance in this moment, she says, quote, “I think I would tell them as a veteran, this is why things need to change. Because when Annie Oakley and all these Wild West people had guns, they were using them for different things. They were protecting their cattle. They were finding food for their families. Back then, it took two minutes to prepare a musket to fire one round. But all of those things have changed, and our bills and our amendments need to change with them, because what we said in 1775 and 76 doesn’t apply anymore.” End quote.

Alex Miller: Wow, that’s true. All right. Well, that’s it. Yeah, it was a really interesting story. And is there anything more on that?

Toni Tresca: No, I think I just encourage folks, if you want to know a little bit more about the situation and kind of how this community and this theater group is kind of thinking about the situation, I just encourage people to go read John’s piece on the site. But I think that kind of sets us up for the kind of digging into more of our main topics.

Alex Miller: Yeah, talk on guns on guns. Yeah, to talk about guns on stage.

Main Topic: Guns in Theater

Toni Tresca: Absolutely. So I know you wanted to kick us off kind of with a discussion about Chekhov’s gun to frame the conversation.

Alex Miller: Yeah, well, this is something that, you know, a lot of people in theater hear about this Chekhov’s gun thing about how, you know, he wrote about not introducing elements into a play or story that don’t have relevance or don’t get used. So in 1889, he wrote, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there’s a rifle hanging on the wall in the second or third chapter, it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” So, so, you know, it’s really it’s not so much about guns so much as it is about, you know, just making sure that stuff you introduce is used so that people aren’t wondering what the hell it’s doing there. But it just made me think it’s kind of, it’s one of those just sort of, you know, really common references in theater that we hear.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, I mean, it feels like good advice from a writing perspective. Don’t put something in your story unless you plan on actually utilizing it in a way that is effective and moves the piece forward. But I think with guns specifically, even though we could have been talking about really anything, like you said, it’s more of a point about story and story structure. It does seem kind of universal that if you pull out a gun, you’re kind of waiting for that thing to go off, or at least all attention is going to be on that thing when you introduce the element.

Alex Miller: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, lots of people talk about the depiction of guns and TV and movie and whether it’s part of our gun violence problem. On stage, guns are, I’d say, a little bit less common. You know, it seems like every, like, half of all movies involve guns, maybe even more. Not as much on stage play, but there’s still plenty out there.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, I would say that there are definitely examples of them, but definitely not as common as it is in movies. There’s no like action genre of plays in the same way that there are for films. So we don’t have a ton of that on the stage, but they do exist and not just in American theater. Do you want to kind of talk about some of the examples that you found for plays?

Alex Miller: Yeah, just I mean obviously this is a very just couple couple picked up but Look Back in Anger by John Osborne where the character Jimmy Porter owns a gun. August: Osage County has multiple firearms in this family drama, Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh, extremely violent with lots of guns. I was trying to think of other Martin McDonagh plays like a Behanding in Spokane, I think it has a gun. But yeah, and of course musicals, Sweeney Todd is kind of more about razors, but I think there’s also guns in that.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, Chicago features the guns throughout that story. Hamilton dies in a gun duel with Aaron Burr. And then, of course, obviously, Assassins, also by Sondheim. And then also have another play example that I was just thinking of now is obviously like all those kind of Agatha Christie murder mystery-esque type things in which guns often do play a central role.

Alex Miller: Yeah. And they definitely do go off in the play. They are central to what happens.

Toni Tresca: And they definitely do go off in the play. They are central to what happens.

Alex Miller: Yeah, I think a lot of those times it’s only just one gunshot though, isn’t it? You know, it’s one murder or, you know, so not talking about like, you know, magazines with 100 rounds in it or something like that, you know, that we hear about in some other thing. No, no. So, but yeah, Assassins is a great example. I mean, I mean, talk about the guns in that one.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, there are so many guns in Assassins. And I was reading in kind of preparation for this episode, some people, there’s a piece that makes the argument that guns are not necessary to staging Assassins. And I don’t know, I kind of quibble with that notion a little bit that the presence of guns isn’t necessary. There’s a whole song called The Gun Song. And the whole thing is about the assassin, how these assassins did these things and these acts are depicted on stage, so it seems pretty tricky to kind of stage this show without at least having some physical acknowledgement of the guns.

Alex Miller: Yeah. Yeah. So so that one. Yeah, there’s I mean, there’s Julia Toby, her character walks out with guns, basically part of her costume. She’s got like she had like six, six or seven guns hanging off of her. But, you know, at some in some ways, you know, guns can be I think they can be used as a crutch, you know, sometimes like they’re like a lazy plot device like a deus ex machina, that’s easy way to end a scene or eliminate a character. And it’s especially true in movies, so I think it’s a good idea for writers to really question what the gun is doing there, R-E-E, Chekhov, and if it’s a legit or a crutch of some sort.

Toni Tresca: Definitely. And then if you do make the decision that a gun is necessary, like I just argued it is for Assassins, how do you choose what to feature and what is also pretty important too? That was a pretty big part of the conversation that I had with Miners Alley’s artistic director, Lynn Mathieu, and the musical’s director, Warren Sherrill, in my piece for Westword that I did, we discussed how they were going to be staging the play’s gun violence. And Len said, quote, “We’re using replicas, which is a between a gun that’s been decommissioned or had the firing pin removed because these things could never fire. They’re replicas. They’re fake guns.” And then Warren adds, “They’re real and they’re of the period, but impossible to fire.” And then the production also made the choice that instead of using realistic sound effects or ever pointing the guns at people, they were going to use simulated percussion to kind of mimic the sound of a shot without kind of actually being a real gunshot and risk retraumatizing anybody in the show.

Alex Miller: I thought that was a great choice. Yeah, just like a real sharp rap on a snare or something like that, that did all you needed to without the, you of course there’s, there’s a lot of gunshots in that show too.

Toni Tresca: Absolutely, yeah, I think particularly since so much of that play is symbolic and it’s out of time and out of world using that snare drum like they did to kind of articulate each of the gunshots when they were present really added to the metatheatrical kind of otherworldly quality of this particular production and like you said it was absolutely not necessary to communicate what was going on

Alex Miller: Right. So if you look at the practical side of things, so I mean, the worst case scenario is of course what happened in the film, shooting of the film Rust and someone was actually killed in a horrible accident. But there are a lot of best practice guidance from this weapon of choice and 2024 Western stage prop safety post because this stuff really does matter. I think the odds are thin, but you’ve just always got to assume that the gun is loaded unless you’re absolutely, you know, sure it’s a replica or something. It’s not a gun.

Toni Tresca: Absolutely. And so from kind of reviewing some of the best practice guidances, we put together a couple of the reoccurring rules, kind of tips that you can use to guide how you integrate guns into your performances. So they advise that rule number one, and this is pretty non-negotiable, is that prop weapons should never leave a controlled rehearsal or performance space. You don’t want to like go outside of the space and do outdoor improvs or promo photos when people have the guns on the sidewalk because people have been hurt or could misread what they’re seeing and when they see the guns there and just freak out. So you do not want to introduce even a fake gun into a public setting under any means.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yeah, it’s not, it could not even be that gun. It’s somebody else thinking you’ve got a real gun. And of course on stage, you know, you never aim at a person. You want to cheat the barrel upstage or off axis. The audience, you know, they won’t notice a difference and it prevents that what if thing from ever becoming a headline.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, and I think just adding onto that, like, I thought it was a good choice that Miner’s Alley did to not point the weapons at the audience ever. That’s a little slightly different than pointing it at each other, but I thought that was an effective choice, too. There are a lot of productions of Assassins in which the characters point the guns directly at people, but they made a really deliberate choice to anytime they were shooting, they were shooting upstage and away from the crowd, which I thought was very effective.

Another tip that they say is that actors should never play with the props either and stage managers out there are probably going, well that’s always a rule. Actors should never play with their props anyway, but let’s be real. That doesn’t, not, those rules are not always followed. So, but when you have a fake gun, absolutely, absolutely. It’s a slightly different thing if you’ve got a rubber chicken versus a prop gun. So.

Alex Miller: Yeah, if you’ve got a rubber chicken, I mean, you might be really tempted.

Toni Tresca: They say no dry firing between scenes. Don’t twirl it. Because if you do those things, that’s how those delicate mechanisms break. And then people can get hurt or scared or you just, it’s just not cool.

Alex Miller: Yeah, and this thing called the chain of custody. So the prop gun isn’t part of the costume. You pick it up from the stage manager right before the entrance and you hand it back when you exit. And that’s the best practice. So every handoff includes a visible chamber check.

Toni Tresca: And then they also recommend having storage specifically for these guns whether or not they fire They think they want you to just they advise having it in a locked room with one person kind of in charge of loading cleaning and tracking these things each night And I mean if you and if you can’t afford that if that’s like a barrier to entry then maybe you cannot afford to have guns in your show

Alex Miller: Yeah. Yeah. And you probably shouldn’t even think about having, you know, like a gun that produces like a bang. You know, the real firearms should only be used if you’ve got a qualified armorer, which, you know, nobody has in theater for the most part. And blank, blank fire replicas like mine was, I was using are just safer. But, you know, those other kinds can produce hot gas and loud reports, which, you know, I think, you know, burns hearing risk and, you know, audience members being disturbed by it and all that kind of thing.

Toni Tresca: Like, we’re not, obviously when we’re saying that, like, we’re not talking about the shows that come through the Buell. They’ve got the budget, they maybe have a qualified armorer who’s with them, but most theaters fire, non-firing replicas, plus the kind of designed sound or percussion effects like Miners Alley did with Assassins, are likely the safest path forward. Because you get the story beat without actually endangering the cast or potentially risking traumatizing the audience, which given the number of shootings that have happened in Colorado, it’s something that’s on the mind of people here. It’s impossible to look away from for anyone in the country, but it’s ever present here.

Alex Miller: It’s a raw nerve, you know, and it’s a different time. You know, I mean, if you really do think blanks are essential, there’s got to be a lot of safety built in, you know, never firing near anyone’s head or clothing, clearing the danger alley of people, inflammables, maybe ear protection for the shooter. It’s probably more hassle than it’s worth. But, you know, there may be times when it really, really makes sense. But I think I think it’s a great example of again, Miner’s Alley, just, you know, the drum. The drum does the trick.

Toni Tresca: Absolutely. These guidances also recommend not staging any struggles, drops, or throws with a weapon. If the story needs those, particularly if the gun is supposed to go off during a kind of confrontation, rethink the prop that you’re using or potentially move that bang off stage so that you can avoid some of those issues.

Alex Miller: Yeah. And yeah, one more backstage cultural note pointing a prop gun at someone on or off stage, just like any other thing, but is just a big no-no and should be grounds for immediate removal from production and set that expectation on day one and have everyone sign the protocol.

Toni Tresca: I think that’s just a kind of a, I think that makes sense if it’s just, if you kind of create that culture that it’s not cool to do that and there will be repercussions, then I think you can just get everybody on board with that idea. And then one final note, audiences read body language. So if people are awkward or uncomfortable with the gun or they may be there, they’re going to read that. So carry the long, if you have a long gun, like a rifle like the hunters do with the barrels, never sweeping people or the house.

And then they also advise, I thought this was interesting, not to use the rifles as a cane because they say it looks wrong and it signals unsafe habits to people. Cause they’re like, no real hunter ever uses that. And it’s one of the most annoying pet peeves that they have as I was, and I was like, that’s interesting. Okay.

Alex Miller: Who would do that? I mean, I guess if you like broke your leg out in the woods and you know, but yeah, don’t use it as a cane unless you absolutely have to. So bottom line, you know, it’s just like the everywhere else treat every prop gun like it’s real assume the worst case physics and design the effect so that the story lands without putting anyone in harm’s way.

Toni Tresca: Absolutely.

All right, well, I think we are going to leave it there. We’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will have our interview with Tim Kennedy from Ovation West to hear his take on all of this. Although I do want to note the cancellation had not been announced at the time of this interview.

Alex Miller: Right. And then later in the episode, we’ll have our Colorado Headliners. So stick around. We’ll be right back.

[Commercial break with sponsor messages]

Interview with Tim Kennedy

Alex Miller: Hey, we are here with Tim Kennedy from Ovation West. Welcome to the OnStage Colorado podcast,

Timothy Kennedy: Thanks so much, thanks for having us.

Alex Miller: Yeah, so you’ve got a production of Annie Get Your Gun up at the Evergreen Theater there with Ovation West. We were just talking as we got on that there was a shooting at Evergreen High School. And I guess a couple of kids were shot. We don’t know what the status is. But you said none of the kids, because there are kids in your show, none of them were involved in that shooting. At the same time, we just heard that Charlie Kirk was shot. So it’s kind of an interesting day to be talking about Annie Get Your Gun.

Of course, Annie Get Your Gun was written a long time ago in a very different time when gun ownership wasn’t so fraught, but still makes you think, doesn’t it?

Timothy Kennedy: Yes, definitely. You know, one of the interesting conversations we’ve had about this show is that, you know, the Wild West in some ways kind of has had a part in forming our ideas of guns in this country. And so, you know, this show is very present in that sense. Of course, no one actually shoots at a single person in the show. It’s all the clay pigeons and balloons and things like that. Yeah, when we study our history in America especially in the Wild West guns have been a large part of it and I think has formed some of our ideas of understanding of gun usage.

Alex Miller: Right. And you know, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Annie Get Your Gun, but it’s not so much about guns as it is about, it’s kind of about female empowerment, you know, and her getting up on some of the guys and besting them and things like that, isn’t it?

Timothy Kennedy: Yeah, the history behind Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill, Frank Butler, all of the people in this show. Sitting Bull, there are so many amazing things. I’ve been, honestly, I’ve enjoyed every second of the amount of research that I got to do, especially because we have a lot of history in this area with Buffalo Bill being buried here in Lookout Mountain and even just studying his life and what he learned over a period of time about how he had a power in entertainment to lift people up and to lift women up. Actually, Annie Oakley was the highest paid female performer of her time and she was the second highest paid performer of her time, Buffalo Bill being the only other person who got paid more than she did.

And so there’s a lot of really cool stuff. He also was very, very adamant that Native Americans get paid equal to their white counterparts in the shows. And then at the end of his shows, he really moved to try to lift up the Native American community, help celebrate their culture and their traditions in front of white audiences. So there’s a lot of beautiful history behind this show.

Alex Miller: Wow. Okay, yeah, I know that he was doing that. I thought maybe there was some people who thought that the Native Americans were treated not the greatest in terms of how they’re presented as always the aggressor and things like that, or is it my understanding that’s not quite…

Timothy Kennedy: Definitely. That was the case early in the show because he thought that’s what the audiences wanted to see. And he probably wasn’t wrong that white audiences wanted to see white people beating Indians in warfare. Unfortunately, that was very much a part of his show in the very beginning of it. He did learn over time and actually one of the really amazing stories is that he would allow them to perform the ghost dance, which if you know anything about Native American history, the ghost dance was actually outlawed by most federal and state governments because it was seen as a form of protest against Caucasian people. And Buffalo Bill knew that and he actually allowed them to perform it as a part of his show in front of 20,000 people in an audience.

And he saw the value, not just even of Native Americans, but he brought in people from Arabia, from Mexico and South America. And he had over nine countries represented at the height of his show, and kind of later in its years, where he wanted to not just showcase their talents and the things that they did on the stage, but also their culture so that we might understand each other just a little bit better.

He was also funnily enough a huge proponent of the women’s suffragette movement and Annie Oakley wasn’t even a proponent of that. She believed women needed independence and that they should learn how to shoot guns She taught over 15,000 women in her lifetime how to shoot a gun. But when it came to the suffragette movement, she didn’t see the importance of it. And so she didn’t spend a lot of time She didn’t fight against it, but she also didn’t come out in support of it. We’re Buffalo Bill and she actually disagreed on that and he was a huge proponent of women getting the vote.

Alex Miller: That’s interesting. So the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was really quite a phenomenon in its time. What were the years that it was active?

Timothy Kennedy: Wow. So it started in the late 1850s, 1860s. He had a number of different incarnations. He actually went bankrupt numerous times throughout his career and had to kind of restart a number of times. But he started with a number of different kind of partners and then ended up just going on his own. At one point he had developed a show with Wild Bill Hickok.

And it was an interesting combination of both a circus and a vaudeville show. It kind of sat right in the middle of those two things. But of course, showing off the skills of what he knew, which was being a person who did a lot of hunting and things in the Wild West. Of course, some of the also complex history of Buffalo Bill was he was a soldier that killed Native Americans. And he also was one of the big people who killed a lot of buffalo out of needing to try to take away the food sources of Native Americans to take away their power. So there is a lot of complexity. And one of the things that I’ve definitely learned in this story is that all of our history is complex and when we choose to only listen to one part of it that’s when we really start to get in trouble that as we as we look back at our history we have to be okay with embracing the complexity of our history that it doesn’t make one person all bad or all good but there are bad parts and there are good parts to all of our history and the more we embrace that and continue to talk about it the better we are as a humanity.

Alex Miller: Right. Yeah. Well, that’s really interesting. Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s in one way, it’s just kind of a warhorse old musical. So this came out in 1946 as an Irving Berlin music and lyrics. And it’s been around for a long time. I was looking at some of the videos on Ovation West website. It looks like a pretty big production with lots of costumes and big dance numbers and all that. How many people are in this cast?

Timothy Kennedy: We have 27 people in the cast and yeah, it’s a big cast. Yes, the costumes take up the entire backstage area. There are racks of costumes in every single nook and cranny because of the amount of changes. Pretty much every character has at least three changes in the show. And many of them have up to eight or 10 because the ensemble really tells the story as of a traveling troupe of players in Wild West, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show telling the story and it is, I want to be very clear, it is not historically accurate. But what I love about the show is that it gets you excited to learn more about these amazing characters.

And just a really quick note, yes, Irving Berlin wrote this in 46, but it was actually produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was actually one of their first ventures of being producers on the Broadway stage, which I think is a pretty cool thing of musical theater history. And then just so you know, we’re doing the 1999 revival, which was on Broadway starring Bernadette Peters and Tom Wopat from Dukes of Hazzard.

And that version definitely took a serious look at the representation of Native Americans in the original. If you look at the 1946 version, you definitely see an interesting take on Native Americans because our understanding of Native Americans really had not evolved to the point of where it is today.

And so there are both songs and dialogue that were rewritten or just taken out completely because of challenges to the piece. I’m grateful for that revival because I do believe that the history behind these people need to be continued to be told. So, and I’m not gonna say it makes the piece perfect.

There’s definitely still questions of just even how Sitting Bull’s dialect is written into the script by the way he speaks and stuff that as we’ve been speaking to some of the Native American educators and experts in the area that we talked to that they even still question how much that really needed to be in there and that sort of thing. We also did make one major change in the show Sitting Bull is referred to as a Sioux warrior.

And to Native Americans, that word is seen as a degrading word because it was really created by white people. It means snake in the grass. And so it really is a term that they choose not to utilize.

And so we changed that to Dakota Warrior because the term was meant to be an overarching term of a number of tribes that Sitting Bull ended up speaking for and kind of helping out during his lifetime. And so we wanted to honor where those tribes were, which was in South Dakota. And so in speaking to a lot of Native American experts, they said that that would be the more appropriate term to call him a Dakota Chief or Dakota Warrior.

So we did still do our best to try to be as respectful as possible. We also, all of the fully blooded Native characters in the show, we cast with Native American actors. And we really lucked out with some amazing human beings who have taught us so much about their culture and reminded us that, you know, unfortunately we try to take any culture and kind of put it down into something very small, but each of these people come from different tribes and different backgrounds and experiences with their native background. And so we worked really hard to make sure their stories were incorporated into how we told the story. A lot of them are wearing some of their own tribe’s jewelry and clothing to just really honor their contributions to the show and bringing their culture into the show as well.

Alex Miller: Wow, well, that’s cool. It sounds like you put a lot of thought into it. So, you know, it’s often when I’m doing these interviews, it’s before the show’s open, but this one is up. What kind of response are you getting from the audiences?

Timothy Kennedy: So far we are getting lots of great responses, people are really enjoying it. You know, one of the challenges of a show like this is that unless you just majorly cut it, which, you know, we did make some cuts to some of the dance numbers and things like that, but we wanted to honor the original material, at least from the 1999 revival, and so we didn’t cut any of the songs.

And so because of that and copyright it does make the show a little long so these older shows end up running you know two hours and fifty minutes to three hours depending on how much laughter we get from the audience but this show is so funny and one of the things of course that many audience members are surprised by is they walk out and say I knew every one of the songs of that show and that doesn’t happen when I go to a musical very often but you know every song in this show is just such a hit by Irving Berlin and so it’s a shame this show doesn’t get done as much due to some of its other challenges, but it really is a show full of jukebox favorites.

Alex Miller: Yeah, that’s got there’s no business like show business which I didn’t realize was from that show anything you can do I can do better. The girl that I marry. So yeah, definitely some things that if you’ve been around for a while you might you might recognize these songs so great well so Annie Get Your Gun is running all the way through for September 28 so you still got plenty of time to go see it. I wanted to shift over and talk about you so Ovation West is one of the state companies that you know has done lots of great work over the years but it seems like they’ve been a little quiet. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. You’re the new resident director. Is that similar to artistic directors? How is that different?

Timothy Kennedy: Yeah, I think, you know, when we started talking, they wanted somebody to come in and produce a whole season and try to help vision a season. So that’s really where the title came from, because I’m basically the resident director for this season. I think artistic director, resident director are very similar and it might over time change to that as we keep looking about where they’re headed. One of the real realities is, you know, producing theater post pandemic has had its own challenges and then producing theater in the mountains has its challenges, trying to get audiences, you know, excited about what we’re doing. And so one of the things that they asked me to do was to come in and kind of really look at what they have been doing and what they could be doing and kind of vision where their theater department could head.

And we’re taking a serious look at how we bring audiences in and where our audiences are coming from and who we want our audience to be. We’re relooking at the vision and mission statement and really questioning what does that mean for the theater department and how we had in the future. You know, there’s a real challenge right now in these, what we call semi-professional theater companies where, you know, you’re not a fully, you know, equity size house and you’re also not a completely community theater because you are having to pay people to try to, you know, maintain the quality of the performers that you’re attracting and that sort of thing. And so, you know, how do we survive and where do we spend our money and how do we make sure we have the resources we need to do that?

So all of those are things that we’re figuring out. I’d love to tell you that we’ve got it all figured out, but this is my first show with them. And even though I’ve actually directed for them almost nine times now prior to this, I was only brought in as the director for that one show. And then I finished the show and walked away. Now I’m gonna be a part of actually looking at what happened kind of evaluating that and then making decisions about how we move forward based on our ticket sales and our audience response. Luckily, Annie Get Your Gun, it’s just such a beautiful show about people. And there’s so many different personalities, but people can really see themselves and humanity in these people who are struggling with ego, struggling with, you know, can a man let a woman be better than him? You know, unfortunately, I’d like to say that that was a problem in 1946 and we figured it out by now, but we haven’t.

And so we still struggle with that one of the cool things about our leading lady who’s playing Annie Michelle Crowe She was actually one of the original lionesses in the military She was on the front lines of Afghanistan for two full tours So she knows exactly what it’s like to be a woman’s trying to fight her way into a man’s world And and get respect and stuff and so she’s brought a lot of that into our show and has allowed us to really have some cool conversations about the struggles women still have to be in occupations and situations which we continue to think are much more male dominant.

Alex Miller: Right. Yeah. Another cool thing about this show that I noticed on the site is that they’re doing a lot of after show and even some pre-show talks. Can you talk about what some of those entail? And they’ve got some kind of special guests coming in and stuff.

Timothy Kennedy: Yeah, so one of my backgrounds is in education and outreach. I spent six years building the education and outreach program for Pensacola Opera early in my career. And then when I moved here, I did a lot of teaching artists work and education outreach for a number of different companies, including Loveland Opera.

And so when I came to Evergreen, I told them at Ovation West, the first thing that we’ve got to do is really make sure that we’re pairing education and outreach experiences. Because I believe the way that the arts survive in our world today is by helping people understand that they’re still relevant.

And so if we can create conversation around the shows that we’re producing and help people get invested in the topics or the history or whatever is related to the show, that that’s how we continue to bring importance to why people should spend their time and money in theater. So creating these conversations, especially because the Wild West is such a large part of the history of Colorado and Evergreen happens to be celebrating their Sesquicentennial this year, 150 years of being a city. And so we thought what a better way than to talk about the history of this time period and what was going on when Evergreen was being settled as a city. And so we have been very lucky to work with the Buffalo Bill Museum and History Colorado.

And a number of other individuals who have connected us with local historians and authors and Native American educators and advocates. And so we have a number of them coming. We already did our first one this past Sunday with Philip Gover from History Colorado, who talked to us about sensationalism of Native Americans in our entertainment in America and then we’re going to be hearing from Bill Friesen who’s an expert and author on Bill, Buffalo Bill as well as Annie Oakley and then we also have on our closing show, I’m so excited, there’s a wonderful author who’s going to be coming from Netherlands who has written a number of books on women cowboys and women in the wild west and I’m so excited to hear what she has to say. She’s a very great speaker and she’s currently in the Netherlands, which happens to have a sister city relationship with Evergreen. And she’s actually doing an exhibit on wild west women in the Netherlands. So in addition to teaching us about that, she’s going to be telling us what it was like to tell a bunch of Europeans about wild west women in America, which I’m excited to hear about.

Alex Miller: Oh, wow. So that’s Kate Turnbaugh. And that’ll be closing night on Sunday, September 28th. So great. Well, it sounds like this one’s going great. I know you’ve got some things to think about with Ovation West. Do you know what the next show is going to be there yet? Are you still working on the season?

Timothy Kennedy: Yeah, we have our whole season for this year set. So our next show opens November 1st and that is going to be a completely improvised two act long form musical theater piece. So we’re going to be improvising a brand new musical every night using the audience’s suggestions and we’ll be doing it in long form style. So if people understand short form style, which is much like what you see in kind of a competition improv show like Whose Line Is It Anyway or one of those kind of shows.

We’re going to be in long form, so these characters will be built out through a full two act musical theatre piece. So we’re really excited about that. It’s kind of our attempt at going into the improv world, but also an attempt at trying something new and seeing if we can engage audiences in a different way. And then our closing show of the season is going to be in February, and that’s going to be Songs for a New World, Jason Robert Brown’s musical, which is a beautiful piece about people who are at those moments of turning points in their lives either by force or by choice where something new is about to happen to them whether it’s they’re making a choice in their life and it’s going to change their life or the world around them is changing and they’re having to be forced to be willing to look at new things and it’s it’s Jason Robert Brown’s first musical he’s of course well known for Parade and The Last Five Years and Honeymoon in Vegas and a number of other great shows

But this show he wrote when he was in his 18 and 20 year old area and he played it off Broadway the first time at the age of 21. And it’s a beautiful piece with great music, kind of feels a little bit more like popular music, stuff you’d hear on the radio, but really explores humanity in a new way at those moments in our lives where we’re being thrust into something new.

Alex Miller: Wow, that’s great. Yeah. I wasn’t familiar with that particular show, but I love this instant musical that you’re going to be doing in November. That sounds like an awful lot of fun and all kinds of other stuff. Of course, Ovation West also has the Evergreen Chorale as part of it. And you’ve got this great facility in Center Stage up there in Evergreen, which is a really cool facility. I know it’s a little old. It’s over, I think, 100 years old or something like that, but it’s decent.

Timothy Kennedy: We’re 101 this year.

Alex Miller: Yeah, it’s a decent size. What’s the backstage like? Does it have decent tech and room in the back?

Timothy Kennedy: We have two large dressing rooms, so we have basically have one male, one female dressing room, and then we have what we call our green room. In this show, our kids have a dressing space that’s cordoned off with screens in the green room. So, I mean, I would like to say it’s huge. It is not. But one of the beautiful things is because we’re celebrating this history of Evergreen, we’re learning a lot about the history of how these buildings came to be. The original people who performed 100 years ago, community theater in this space, used to either dress in buildings where they had to walk from the other building to the theater once they dressed, sometimes through rain or snow and stuff and so we don’t have that problem anymore. We are going to be kicking off a wonderful campaign for refurbishing the building. We received a $50,000 grant from History Colorado to redo the roof and we thought that was a good time to also look at some of the other structures and insides of the building and so we’re going to be re-looking at the lighting system, our sound system and things like that. Our seats definitely need a little bit of work because some of them are not as comfortable as they used to be after being sat in. So, you know, it’s a great space to see a beautiful space that’s been performing or hosting performing arts for over 100 years. And we seat about 120 people. And so it’s a nice intimate space to see theater as well, because no matter where you sit, you don’t feel like you have a bad seat or that you can’t see. And so it’s really a very homey space and it fits this western show so well because of the interior wood and everything and it really creates a space where people can really get involved in the theater in a very intimate way.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that theater. All right, well, Tim Kennedy, resident director at Ovation West, Annie Get Your Gun is running through September 28th. So thanks so much for joining Onstage Colorado and talking about this show. It sounds like a really great, great experience.

Timothy Kennedy: Thanks so much for having us and thanks for being an advocate for the arts in the area. We need that.

Alex Miller: All right.

Colorado Headliners

Toni Tresca: All right, enough about guns. Let’s get to this week’s headliners. These are some of the shows of interest that are coming up in the next couple of weeks or so that we think you should check out. Alex, what do you have to start with?

Alex Miller: Yeah, this first one was one that we had in our calendar that I hadn’t noticed. Miss Manhattan. So this is from 19K Productions and Center Stage Theater, neither of which I think I’ve heard of. It’s gonna be at the Boulder Dairy Center, September 19th through 28th. So it’s a, this is a brand new musical inspired by the true story of Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel. So allegedly she was cursed as a child and she had this meteoric rise to fame, knew the Rockefellers, the Whitney’s, the Astor’s, but her fall was punctuated by scandal and murder. Do you know anything about these production companies?

Toni Tresca: I do. So this is the group that’s by Graham and Christina Fuller, who did the That Parenting musical that was making the rounds in Colorado and then eventually went to Off-Broadway last year. This is their follow-up. I saw a staged reading of this production. My gosh, I want to say about a year ago. It was in Louisville in the center stage, downstairs theater, very early. It’s kind of parallel stories, there is a class of children who are learning about this figure, and then it cuts back to the actual historical accounts themselves.

Alex Miller: Yeah, well, it sounds pretty interesting.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, and it’s always cool to see new work debuting here in Colorado. They’re trying it here before hopefully maybe they’re, it seems like the goal is to kind of take this back to New York like they did with their other show.

Alex Miller: Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Toni Tresca: My next headliner is The Enthusiasts. This is happening over at Buntport Theatre in Denver on September 16th, so today. And it features, this is a reoccurring show that they do at the theatre that features three people doing quirky, fun presentations on topics that they are enthusiastic about, followed by a brief question and answer period with the audience. And in this installment, all three presenters will be exploring the themes and or plot points from True West by Hugh Hsu, which is the 2025 One Book One Denver selection. So they’re kind of, it’s kind of like a book club almost discussing the ideas of this book that everybody in Denver has been suggested to read or pick up. And so it’s going to feature three presentations by Isaiah Bousseth, Sophia Song and Kelly Shorten Queer.

Alex Miller: That’s great.

Toni Tresca: Okay. All right. My next headliner is this is the last show of Arts in the Open in Boulder. This is a takes starts off at Chautauqua Park and involves like a hike. And this is a show called La Llorona or it’s two L’s. So maybe that’s Llorona in Spanish. I don’t know. But it’s a reimagined story about this chilling legend that draws the audience into a world between myth and reality.

So that sounds like kind of a good spooky season thing. So this runs September 20th all the way up to October 26th. So great time of year to get out.

Toni Tresca: Absolutely. My next headliner pick is the 12th annual High Plains Comedy Festival. So this annual event happens in various venues along South Broadway in Denver. It was founded in 2013 by Denver comedian and writer Adam Cayton-Holland. And the festival features a mix of local and national comics performing throughout the city, but with a pretty big emphasis on that Baker neighborhood.

Alex Miller: Right, and it looks like the kickoff is actually at Buntport on the September 17th, where they’ve got like, yeah, the narrators.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, I saw that the narrators is kind of serving as the unofficial kickoff this year.

Alex Miller: Yeah, yeah, so that’s cool. A lot of Buntport news. My next one is Schoolhouse Rock Live at Aurora Fox, September 19th through October 18th. So this is directed by a friend of the pod, Kelly Von Asprey, new artistic director at Performance Now, formerly of Flat Valley Players or Theater Arts. So this is Relive the Magic of Your Saturday Mornings with Schoolhouse Rock Live, which is like, I don’t know how many people, this is like when I was a kid, this was on. It was like, you know, I’m just a bill sitting on Capitol Hill or whatever. So this is a, it’s a, you know, they kind of take that this animated series to life on stage and, and yeah, I, I curious to see what that’s all about, but yeah, that’s a, that’s a property that was just kind of a, I don’t know. It was like a throwaway in between other cartoons. They were just kind of like shorts with these little informational things for kids about government and other things. So it’s interesting that it’s had such a long life, staying power, that’s even a musical.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I didn’t know that it was originally broken up. I have only seen the kind of School of Rock compil- not School of Rock. Schoolhouse Rock, excuse me. The compilations on DVDs of all the little specials together. I remember the I’m Just a Bill and Conjunction Function.

Alex Miller: Conjunction Junction, yeah.

Toni Tresca: Conjunction Junction, okay, I guess I don’t remember it that well.

Alex Miller: What’s your function? Hooking up words and making them function. Yeah, I’d like to see it. You know, I’m not sure is it for, I guess it’s for all ages if they’re doing it as in their big space there, but I think matching kids would like it as well.

Toni Tresca: I picked this next headliner just for you, Alex. It’s a Sherlock Holmes property, which I know you love. It’s Miss Holmes and Miss Watson, apartment 2B. It’s being done at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. This production has been done in the Denver metro area recently by Betsy and it features oddball female roommates Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson, who join forces and emerge from the COVID pandemic fog as deeply codependent, quasi dysfunctional odd couple adventure duos who solve mysteries and kick butt, but they soon come face to face with a villain who seems to have all the answers.

Alex Miller: You know, I know the show has come under criticism being a little too just ridiculous, but I kind of, I really enjoyed it. It is very, it is silly, but it’s a lot of fun. I would definitely not mind seeing that again someday. Next one is the kickoff show for the Denver Center Theater Company’s season. This is The Happiest Man on Earth, September 19th through November 2nd. So this has got a story about a man who came of age in Nazi Germany and his remarkable escapes for three different concentration camps. So pretty heavy duty stuff, recounting the horrors, his struggle to bury the past, how he discovered the key to truly living. So yeah, I’ll be at that one, and I think you will be as well pretty soon here.

Toni Tresca: That’s right, yeah, I’ll be at the opening night and I’m planning to review it for on stage. Very curious to see this one myself. It sounds like a truly just unbelievable story. So be curious to see how that is staged and how they make it theatrical. Because it does sound like it could be sort of a bummer if…

Alex Miller: Yeah.

Toni Tresca: My next pick is the world premiere of a new play. It’s called The Wood and it’s taking place over at the Arts Hub in Lafayette, September 19th through the 21st. It’s kind of a spooky one. It follows a young girl who comes of age and she discovers a haunting weight terrorizing her small town. While the rest of her family remains in denial, she’s left to navigate this sudden darkness on her own. Is it simply the trickster shadows of The Wood? Or is this nocturnal evil closer to home than she thinks? The play is written and directed by Gabby Glidwell, following its reading in the 2024 Fresh Looks Festival by Shifted Lens that took place over in Aurora.

Alex Miller: Okay. All right, cool. All right. My last one is one we already spoke about so I won’t say too much about it The Thin Place at Betsy. So this one’s gonna be at the Denver Savoy running through it’s open now. It’s going through the 28th of September then it’s gonna move over to the Boulder Dairy in October October 3rd through 16th. So and look for Tony’s review on the onstage Colorado website here pretty soon and it sounds like it’ll probably be kind of a rave

Toni Tresca: Yeah, no, I mean, I guess I can spoil it here. Yeah. It will definitely be a rave. It’s one of my faves. It’s definitely been one of my favorites of the year. I’m honestly considering going and checking it out again when it moves to Boulder, just cause I’m curious to see how they do some of the staging in the Dairy Center and what needs to be adjusted because there are some really interesting things that they do in that space that I’m curious to see how, how they do it in a different one.

Alex Miller: Yeah, that’d be really interesting. I’ve never done that, seen the same show moved into a different space. I guess maybe I have in some ways, but this is definitely something that Betsy does that few other theaters are doing right now. Occasionally, someone will bring a show from one place to another, but Betsy’s been kind of making a practice of this, because I know Mark and Jess, so they kind of want to spread the love into the Denver area, not just Boulder, because I think Mark Stobie’s like, he’s like, Boulder people hate going to Denver and Denver people hate going to Boulder. And I’m like, I think that’s kind of true.

Toni Tresca: That is accurate. Yeah, very, very true. It’s funny. I grew, cause I grew up in a very small town and so I would have to drive like 30, 45 minutes to go to like entertainment or like a grocery store that wasn’t a tiny little Walmart. And so it’s always bonkers to me when people like complain about the drive from Boulder to Denver. I’m just like frame of frame of reference is very different.

Alex Miller: I know, you I lived in Summit County for many years and I came down to see shows in Denver all the time and drove through many a blizzard to get to see live theater in Denver. And it’s just, I guess it’s just, you know, whatever you’re used to. And now I’m, now that I live, you know, in the, in the metro area, getting from where I live on the South side and Highlands Ranch to Boulder is a huge pain in the ass sometimes. Coming home, not so bad because there’s not as much traffic, but yeah, it can be brutal.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, traffic is definitely, I understand the traffic factor. My final headliner this week is You’ll Be Made of Ashes 2 by Flamboyant Theatre in Denver running September 19th through the 27th. And this is a new Puerto Rican ghost story by up and coming playwright Bailey Schlickman. It’s a horror comedy that focuses on Puerto Rican sisters, Avalyn and Liana, who are brought up in California by a mother who was fleeing a broken marriage and tried to raise the girls as American. The sisters have been estranged for years, but are brought together when their mom dies under mysterious circumstances. Tensions reignite and intensify after their mother’s death when a spirit begins haunting the sisters. Spooky.

Alex Miller: And so this takes place at the Three Leaches Theater and formally Jesus Christ, why can’t I? So this takes place at the Three Leaches Theater, which I think it’s technically in Lakewood, but formerly the home of Benchmark Theater and before that, home of the Edge Theater. So that’s where this one will be staged.

Toni Tresca: That’s right, yeah. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to make it out to this one, but I hope that it gets another staging, because it does sound like a really fascinating premise.

Alex Miller: Sounds cool. Yep.

Toni Tresca: Okay, that brings us to the end of our show for this week. Alex, what’s up next on the pod?

Alex Miller: Well, next week we’ll have one of our bonus episodes, which means we’ll probably just talk about some shows. I think we’ll both be at Eureka Day at Curious since we missed it this past weekend, so I’m sure we’ll be talking about that. Plus, our long-awaited interview with Jason Ducat to talk about sound. And I reached out to him and I said, I’m sorry, Jason, we just had some stuff that was more timely for shows that were up. And so he was like, no worries. So he’ll be on next week to talk about sound design. Also, upcoming reviews to look at include aforementioned Eureka Day, Buddy, The Thin Place, Merrily We Roll Along, all from Tony, and then Cabaret at TheaterWorks in Colorado Springs. I think April is doing that one. So lots of stuff coming up on the site.

Toni Tresca: Yeah, and if you want to stay up to date on all of that, as well as what’s going on in theaters all across the state, subscribe to the OnStage Colorado Theater Blast, which is our newsletter that comes out once a week, and rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening now.

Alex Miller: Yep. All right. That’s it for this week. Thanks so much for listening. I’m Alex Miller.

Toni Tresca: And I’m Tony Tresca and we’ll see you at the show.

OnStage Colorado Podcast – Episode: Guns in Theater