Buntport Theater

Season 3

Four people poking their heads through the backdrop with the Old English Poem Beowulf written on it.

Westword- Cutting Edge

Buntport Theater has fun with one-acts and paper props

Now that Buntport Theater has come of age and is attracting reliably positive reviews and large, enthusiastic audiences, the six company members have revived one of their earlier works, an evening of one-acts titled 2 in 1. The first piece, “This is My Significant Bother,” is a dramatization of nine stories by James Thurber; the second is an explication of the Cliffs Notes explication of Beowulf (it makes sense when you see it — sort of). These are both slight pieces, but they’re clever and entertaining, and the sets and costumes are as inventive as ever. It’s pretty much impossible not to have a good time at Buntport.

As the evening begins, four actors — Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan and Erin Rollman — are lying on a large bed, their left arms in perfect alignment on the coverlet, their hands conspicuously wedding-ringed. They manage to stay absolutely still as the audience arrives and settles in. Perhaps they’re asleep. One of the evening’s pleasures is the way the actors manage to move swiftly and soundlessly during blackouts, so that we’re always slightly surprised at where they’re each standing or sitting when the lights come on.

Although he apparently labored over their composition, Thurber’s stories are sketches rather than fully developed character studies or descriptions of events. They have the wistful, unfinished quality of his New Yorker cartoons, along with a misogyny so self-deprecating that it almost seems forgivable. If his women are all-powerful, soulless harridans, well, his men are pretty silly, too, and sometimes downright irritating. (Although, in a fable Buntport doesn’t attempt, it’s only the male of the species who’s capable of seeing a unicorn in the back garden.)

“Significant Bother” is not intended to be laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a sincere and gently humorous homage to Thurber.

A husband manfully protects his wife from a spider but cowers under the bedclothes when he hears a bat. A woman stands up in court and insists she deserves a divorce because of her husband’s habit of holding his breath. In one of the most absurd and amusing pieces, a police officer finds a woman seated in a car while a man crawls on the ground in front of the vehicle; they are trying to ascertain whether a human being’s eyes will glow in the headlights as a cat’s or dog’s would. In another car scene, this time inside the car, a couple fights over whether Greta Garbo is a more important cultural icon than Donald Duck and bickers about where to stop for a hamburger, the wife insisting that the eatery must be a cute one. Meanwhile, the car is emitting a threatening and unidentifiable noise. Yet another husband orders his wife into the basement so that he can kill her and make off with his stenographer. Wise to his plan, she gives him orders on how to accomplish the deed. All of this is interspersed with interesting renditions of such ’30s songs as “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” And the bed that anchors the play (in the very last scene, a man painstakingly smooths the sheets while his ex-wife discusses his failings with his wife-to-be) is manipulated by the Buntporters with their usual sangfroid, becoming by turns a car, a platform, even a cellar.

Perhaps the most interesting and unexpected piece is a mood story about a doomed love affair called “Evening’s at Seven,” which is told through a series of lighted tableaux separated by patches of darkness. It’s touching, original and sophisticated.

For the second play, the cast appears in front of a backdrop of text wearing dark-blue maintenance men’s outfits and tool belts that hold an arsenal of paper props. They proceed to act out the story of Beowulf, interspersing the action with textual commentary — and their own acerbic comments. In case you’ve forgotten, this Old English poem concerns the predations of a monster, the monster’s dam (or, as the Buntporters have it, “dam mother”) and a dragon. As always, the props are inventive; in this instance, they’re made entirely of paper. Beowulf’s army consists of a string of paper cutouts worn across Edborg’s chest like a bandolier; streams of paper representing blood from a wound are helpfully and multiply labeled “blood,” just as the paper crown bears the legend “crown.” The paper dragon is a thing of wonder. Periodically, we hear a voice reading from Beowulf itself and — though you’d need to know Old English to understand the words — the power and beauty of the text makes itself felt through all the loony shenanigans.

The acting is terrific, as always, though it concerns me a little that both Colonna and Edborg act so much from the neck upward. I’d like to see their voices and impulses coming from deeper in the body. In addition to the cast, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman helped create 2 in 1.

I’m getting tired of saying this, but if you haven’t attended a show at Buntport yet, you should. You won’t see anything like it anywhere else.

-Juliet Wittman, May 6, 2004, Westword

 

Four confused people wearing utility suits and utility belts with origami paper props hanging off of them are standing in a line. One of the people is wearing a huge Viking horned helmet made of paper. The helmet is covered in the word 'helmet.'

Rocky mountain news- Buntport brilliant in reprise of ‘2 in 1’

Buntport brilliant in reprise of ‘2 in 1’

You Buntport-come-latelies will want to hie yourselves over to Lipan Street and see how it all began, as the seven-person collective resurrects its second show. With the two one-acts that make up 2 in 1, Buntport reveals that its group’s amazingly cohesive aesthetic emerged full-force, like Venus from the half-shell, wearing a Groucho mask.

The two works together also demonstrate the breadth of Buntport’s abilities, from wry ’30s charm to a postmodern spoof that provokes such deep guffaws smokers may want to take precautions.

In . . . and this is my significant bother, the short stories of James Thurber are adapted into vignettes drawn with the light touch of one of the author’s own New Yorker cartoons. Each one tackles the foibles of marriage from its own angle, with the actors in superb period performance.

Brian Colonna personifies the meek, retiring and henpecked husband. He preens with macho pride after swatting a spider, then cowers from a bat. In another story, after falling in love with his secretary, he informs his wife of his plans to kill her, his voice squeaking like a bad hinge. Then he capitulates as the wife dictates exactly how and when the murder will occur.

Erin Rollman’s Betty Boop eyes and Clara Bow lips are a fast-track back to the ’30s, as is a falsetto voice that cries out screwball. In a scene where others voice their thoughts, both she and Colonna perfectly embody the facial tics of a busy brain.

Hannah Duggan, frequently severe or frumpy here, can browbeat without being hateful, and Erik Edborg turns the leading-man image on its ear.

It’s a journey back in time from Thurber to Beowulf, but Act II’s Word-Horde is hilarity of the postmodern variety. Using words in the most ingenious ways as costumes, props and set, they offer up a Cliff’s Notes version of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem that has been the downfall of many a high school freshman.

Not an opportunity for humor has been missed here, but none of it is superfluous or comes at the expense of the actual tale of Beowulf. Massive sections are dramatized in summary (don’t miss the human boat or bloody attack on Grendel), followed by pithy “commentary,” aided by a checklist of themes and symbols.

It’s not imperative that you have read Beowulf; it’s only necessary that you have attended school to appreciate the sublime humor of the piece.

Offstage, the four actors are supplemented by Matt Petraglia, Samantha Schmitz and Evan Weissman. In this seemingly anarchic environment, a solid company has emerged that devises the most brilliant of visual and sonic effects, always remembering that theater should enlist multiple senses.

-Lisa Bornstein, April 30, 2004, Rocky Mountain News

 

Close up of a woman sitting on a large bed wearing a blue button up sweater. Her long hair is gathered up in a hairnet 1940s style. She is pointing at something in the distance.

Denver post- Buntport finds new laughs in its archives

Adjectives that would seem like useless hyperbole anywhere else often find their legitimate homes when referencing Buntport Theater’s work. The young collective presenting original works on Denver’s Westside really is uniquely talented, madcap with energy and originality, and, as some have said, “genius.”

But nobody’s perfect.

Buntport’s latest excursion is the old-school “2 in 1.” It’s a throwback on multiple levels, but mainly because Buntport performed the two original one-acts in 2001.

Remounts are good business when you’re Buntport and always attracting new audiences to your mainstage productions and the excellent, biweekly “Magnets on the Fridge,” which closed for the season last week. It gives newbies a chance to see the work that made the company what it is today.

But Buntport has moved forward and, dare I say it, matured a lot in the three years since these were first produced. The interim has seen multiple self-written and -directed full-length plays, one-acts, “Magnets” episodes and at least one musical for this company, one of the busiest in town. So reaching back into their short history has to come at a sacrifice.

Act one is “… and this is my significant bother,” the Buntporters adaptation of some of James Thurber’s short stories. They attempt to explore the American humorist’s literary world, which is full of insight into both relational psychosis and the mind of the individual Everyman in mid-20th century America. Although the series of stories operates partly on Buntport constants (including an excellent multipurpose set and the use of different storytelling voices), it doesn’t always hit.

The theater company is obsessed with style and period and varying their stories’ approaches whenever they can, so this – subtle scenes involving couples in bed, kneeling in front of a running car, or amid awkward conversations about loving and longing – is Buntport’s tribute to the America of “New Yorker” cartoons in the ’30s and ’40s.

And it’s fair to say that this style doesn’t work as well for Buntport (and its core audience) as, say, the detective aesthetic of the ’40s – the setting of their tight, seriocomic “McGuinn and Murry” – or the Elizabethan era that was home to its spoof on Shakespeare, “Titus Andronicus: The Musical!”

They hit most clearly in one short where Brian Colonna’s aloof husband tells Hannah Duggan’s hard nosed wife of his plans to kill her and marry his stenographer. “No, I’m not going to bed,” he quips toward the end. “I’m going to bury you in the cellar.” It’s the least subtle of the pieces, but it’s also the one that clicks on levels that venture beyond the players psychoanalyzing simple-minded, nostalgic, Rockwellian images.

They get closer to comfort with act two, “Word-Horde: A Dramatization of the Study Guide to Beowulf,” which could be called “Compleat Text of Beowulf (Abridged).”

With the help of an ominous, omniscient voiceover acting as the voice of reason, the four Buntporters (Colonna, Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman dressed in black and yellow mechanics scrubs, an homage to Cliffs Notes) act as the Everyman student circa 2004, mumbling obscenities and frustrations underneath faux-sneezes as they work their way through the text line by line … almost.

Like “Titus,” “Beowulf” lends itself to the self-deprecating, fast-talking production style. It’s olde, wild and weird, and the Buntport players – whose outlandish writing is more concise and pointed here than in the first act – seize every opportunity to poke fun at the book and themselves.

They perform against the backdrop of an enlarged version of the aged text. Props and costumes made of paper, handily attached to their tool belts, help move the story forward. And the audience gets a treat – we’ll call it Buntport spectacle – when it comes to the dragon at the end of the story.

The two shorts work better as a pair than they would work alone. The night gets off to a slow start. But it builds with Buntport’s incredible attention to detail, such as Duggan’s tuning the car radio in the first act, a pantomime timed perfectly with the audio. And it closes with a laugher.

Not genius, especially when held up to their previous work. But still not a bad night of theater.

-Ricardo Baca, April 30, 2004, Denver Post

Denver Post- Buntport just a bit off with ‘McGuinn’

Every time the Buntport Theater takes to the stage with its latest original production, you can all but tape-measure the leap in its rapid development as an innovative, intelligent and comic young theater company.

But that does not equate to a satisfying evening for its audiences every time out.

Buntport is a 5-year-old company that presents only ensemble works of its own creation. A glorious musical adaptation of “Titus” performed in a transformational van put Buntport on the local map in 2001.

Last year’s Kabuki-esque “Cinderella,” featuring actors changing form and character before our eyes with a script written entirely in gibberish, helped Buntport win The Denver Post’s Ovation Award for best new work.

“McGuinn and Murry,” its 13th and latest production, is easy to like but nearly impossible to love.

In some ways the play is both spoof and homage to 1940s Raymond Chandler-style film noir. Its malleable magic is immediately evident not only in the way two terrific actors (Brian Colonna and Erin Rollman) slip in and out of the skins of eight (by my count) characters, but more impressively in the way one simple, large office desk spins, splits apart, expands, collapses and unfolds into seven distinct and often surreal settings.

But “McGuinn and Murry” is more clever in concept than in execution. It falters in the one department where Buntport has been above reproach. The writing, so consistently taut and clever in nearly every previous staging, lacks its usual confidence, precision and wit. The dialogue is uncharacteristically repetitive and only occasionally rises to the witty repartee of the period it satirizes (A terrific exception: “Let’s all put our pieces down before someone squirts metal”).

Worse, the constant yelling establishes a tone that goes beyond the tough-talking demeanor of the day and strangely into the realm of the cold and mean.

As a result, we have exasperating characters telling a tiresome story that becomes intricate to the point of oblivion.

McGuinn (Colonna) and Murry (Rollman) are a pair of hard-boiled detectives, partners seemingly patterned in the vein of Nick and Nora Charles, minus the sexual tension. They are so underemployed they make up fictitious crimes to solve. When McGuinn says, “Even our pretend cases are dull, doll,” he’s not kidding.

But one morning, a series of misunderstandings propel the plot on a course that is part “Maltese Falcon,” part “Murder By Death” and part “Three’s Company.” After his wife has gone missing, the whiskey-soured McGuinn comes to believe he may have played a part in her disappearance.

The charm of the production is also its downfall. Audiences watch as the realigned set pieces take us to unexpected locales. With four sticks and some rope, for example, the desktop cleverly becomes a boxing ring. While most settings are grounded in reality (a restaurant, nightclub, park), others are straight out of “Being John Malkovich” in the way they play with spatial distortion.

The desktop rises to become the front door of an apartment where, when McGuinn walks in, he immediately finds himself atop a kitchen counter. In the evening’s extended climax, the desk turns into a miniaturized skyline where, from our faraway vantage point, we see a chase played out with Matchbox cars.

But these brilliant transformations require so many long and choppy set changes that they sabotage the storytelling momentum. The payoff requires far too much patience.

But even on an awkward opening night, it was clear Rollman and Colonna are two of the best and smartest performers working in Denver.

Rollman has the most fun of the two, playing characters such as an uptight Murry, McGuinn’s ditsy wife Budge and an uncanny “Fat Man” – an oxygen-deprived old fight fixer. She also has the best lines, such as when, as Budge, she discovers a letter advising McGuinn to get rid of her. “I don’t think my husband should be receiving a letter like this … not at the house, anyway,” she says in a sublime moment.

Colonna’s Phillip Marlowe-like McGuinn draws somewhat on Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Jackie Gleason, but he’s at his best when he’s simply being himself.

There is every likelihood that with pros like Colonna and Rollman, “McGuinn and Murry” might still find the right comic tone. But even if it is not Buntport’s best work, Buntport on an off-night is still better than a night at many other theaters in town.

-John Moore, January 09, 2004, Denver Post

A 1940’s looking detective wearing a fedora hat looks off into the distance dumbfounded with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth while his female partner looks worryingly at him.

Boulder Daily Camera- Noirish ‘McGuinn and Murry’ is clever, but that’s it

Buntport Theater is a group of young theater artists who located to Denver after going to school together in Colorado Springs. The company has carved out a niche for itself locally with a clever brand of comedy and a reputation for prolific output since it moved into its current space in 2001.

And, as evidenced by last week’s opening, Buntport already is an important addition to the local theater scene, if for no other reason than its youngish audience, significant for an art form that tends to rely on an older crowd for its patronage. The opening night sell-out crowd for “McGuinn and Murry,” the company’s 13th original production, was made up largely of people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom already were familiar with and sold on Buntport’s particular sense of humor.

In “McGuinn and Murry” that sense of humor is equal parts silly and clever. It adds up to an admirable production, but one that doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

The play is done in 1940s crime novel style, a la Raymond Chandler and his noirish stories. McGuinn (Brian Colonna) and Murry (Erin Rollman) are partners in their own detective firm. When they can’t drum up any business they resort to creating some of their own. Murry sends a playful note to McGuinn’s home, but Mrs. McGuinn intercepts it and suspects her husband is cheating on her. Mrs. McGuinn has a lover herself, but nonetheless, her suspicions drive her dramatic accusations, which set the quirky detectives into investigative mode.

While Rollman and Colonna star in “McGuinn and Murry,” the company’s five other members – Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman – also receive writing, design and directing credit.

There’s a vibrancy to the group’s effort, including the writing. The script is as smart as it is whimsical, a mix of postmodern irony and hard-boiled ’40s repartee. McGuinn longs to get “the dust of this dirty town off my feet,” but he’s also aware that his current investigation “folds in on itself in a self-reflective manner,” a wink to the audience that he’s aware of the show’s noirish conventions.

And the genius of the play is that the whole thing – the dialogue, the plot, the characters and even the set – keeps folding in on itself in a self-reflective manner. The main stage piece at first serves as the door and office table for the McGuinn and Murry agency, but the contraption, built with several hidden compartments and attachments, unfolds and refolds into the McGuinn’s kitchen, a nightclub, a park bench, an Italian restaurant, and a boxing ring.

Likewise, the actors play dual characters who are mirror reflections of each other – Murry and Mrs. McGuinn are dead ringers for each other, as are McGuinn and Pauly, Mrs. McGuinn’s lover. And the dialogue is sprinkled with funny little lines where the actors comment on what’s taking place with their characters or the story.

One of the best scenes comes when Colonna and Rollman maneuver the set piece into a cityscape that serves as a backdrop for a road trip. They move matchbox-sized cars along a dirt miniature dirt road that sprawls out before the city while playing seven characters who inhabit the cars.

Overall, Colonna and Rollman succeed at pulling off the era’s style, the sharp wise-guy tone done in that ’40s noirish mode. Both understand where the humor is in the script and play it with ease. And they don’t miss a beat as they work the set into its different configurations, no small feat.

Ultimately though, cleverness is all “McGuinn and Murry” has going for it. Great comedy sheds some light on the human condition, however whimsical. But this show’s creators are content to serve up whimsy and cleverness for their own sake. As a story, it’s too convoluted to make a deep impression, and while the show is good for a laugh, it’s neither a lasting nor a cathartic laugh. It’s like a meal that tastes good, but still leaves you hungry.

-Mark Collins, January 9, 2004, Boulder Daily Camera

Close up of two 1940’s. The man with a cigarette dangling from his lips and the woman looking at him with big eyes.

McGuinn & Murry

GUMSHOE HIJINKS

In the 1940’s, people smoked cigarettes, conducted witty repartee and solved crimes. Or so it sometimes seems, anyway.

(more…)

Westword- Detecting Noir • Buntport stalks laughter

McGuinn and Murry is a spoof of those ’40s detective movies in which the men wore fedoras and the women had gams. It’s a lighthearted, skimming take on the genre that’s neither cliche-ridden nor weighted by scholarship. The helium that keeps this smart, entertaining trifle aloft is Buntport Theater Company’s irrepressible inventiveness.

A pair of washed-up detectives slump around their dusty office. The phone never rings. No shadowed, mysterious, cigarette-holder-wielding blonde ever appears at the door. McGuinn is a onetime prizefighter who disgraced himself by throwing a match. Murry is a tough broad, given to barking out orders. To pass the time and keep their wits sharp, the two P.I.s try to stump each other with hypothetical cases. Murry sets McGuinn a puzzler that involves a letter sent to his home, but the letter gets into the wrong hands; soon McGuinn is frantically pursuing what he believes to be a real case — in which he is somehow the suspect — while Murry applauds the veracity of what she perceives as his performance.

Obviously, there’s a lot of playing with frames of reality here, and transformation rules. Brian Colonna and Erin Rollman, who play McGuinn and Murry, respectively, take on many additional personae, signaling the changes through adjustments in voice and posture, or with props that serve as a kind of shorthand. Colonna assumes a black eye patch and becomes the lover of McGuinn’s wife, Budgie. It takes only a change of footwear, a fluffing of her blouse and a shuffling off of Murry’s severe jacket for Rollman to metamorphose into the breathy adulteress. The set is transformed with the same economy and dexterity. Everything evolves from the office’s hefty desk and its two chairs. Panels slide aside; boxes are opened and props tossed in or whisked out of them. The desk becomes the kitchen of McGuinn’s home, complete with stove, cabinets and a clothesline sporting a tabbed rubber girdle. With a little more manipulation, the desk is a bar, a cityscape, a park bench, the lair of a fat, wheezing Mafia reprobate apparently based on Marlon Brando. Much of the evening’s entertainment stems from the surprising and creative shifts in character and set.

Conventions are created, then casually broken. For example, the one door on the set is raised and appears to open onto the top of the investigators’ desk or, in the household scene, the kitchen counter. I’d guess this was the only way Buntport could make the desk-becomes-everything-else concept work structurally. When the door first opens, we’re surprised momentarily, but the two actors play it straight, and we come to accept the anomaly. No sooner have we done so than Budgie snaps at her husband to stop walking on the countertop.

There’s a knowingness to all of this, a self-referential quality. At one point, parodying Lana Turner’s famous line about whistling from To Have and Have Not, Rollman explains to Colonna how to exit: “You just put your hand on the knob, and you walk out…the door.” The peculiarities of the door in question only underline the humor. If there’s a misstep, Rollman and Colonna treat it as if it were intentional, and somehow their skill and assurance, along with the mocking quality of the entire show, make the moment doubly funny.

Props take on a life of their own, and scale becomes meaningless. When all of the characters need to meet at the park, they arrive in a succession of toy cars, which are guided over the surface of a kind of relief map by the actors.

The only problem is that the set changes, while fun to watch, take too long. The dialogue is witty and bright, but it’s not so deep that we want to contemplate a scene’s final lines for several minutes. A piece like this demands speed.

Both actors are talented, but it’s really Rollman, with her elastic face and ability to morph from character to character, who carries the show. She gives life and spirit to each of her characters: mannish Murry, flirty Budgie, the creepily disembodied-seeming fat man. There’s something unformed about her stage persona, as if she were just waiting to flow into one role or another. The characters she creates can be hard-edged and defined or oddly amorphous. She can make you laugh by raising an eyebrow, and she seems to know instinctively just how long to hold the expression for maximum effect without milking it. Sometimes she appears to have the unfinished, partially defined quality of a James Thurber cartoon. Colonna, too, has wonderful moments — particularly the flashback during which he re-creates the thrown fight, striving mightily to help McGuinn’s wimpy opponent score a hit.

Like all of Buntport’s scripts, this one was created (through both writing and improvisation) by the entire group — Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman — in addition to Rollman and Colonna. And, like all their work, it has inspired moments along with a few that are less inspired.

The first time I visited the Buntport Theater, there were six people in the audience. Every time I return, I see that the numbers have grown. And this is a crowd you can’t pigeonhole: children, teenagers, young adults and their parents, entire families that have arrived together, people who look like students, businessfolk, bus drivers, intellectuals, bums or bohemians. Buntport is attracting a following not because everything they do is completely successful, but because their work is sophisticated, welcoming, unpretentious and, above all, original.

-Juliet Wittman, January 7, 2004, Westword

Close up on a dopey looking cop wearing sunglasses and holding his six shooter up to his face.

Rocky Mountain News- Brilliance plays on “Idiot Box”

In some ways, sketch comedy seems a step down for Buntport Theater, a group that has been developing original, comic, full-length works since its inception.

It’s also a skill they’ve never explored in Denver, and one which in most ways comes naturally to this group of seven inventors.

With its first sketch comedy show, Idiot Box, Buntport takes a tired premise and even a few hackneyed sketch formats and still creates something hilarious and clever, as if talent will overcome even the group’s worst impulses.

For structure, Idiot Box posits that tiny fairies inside every television are acting out the shows we choose to watch. One hour they’re in a soap opera, the next a cooking show. A channel surfer can exhaust them.

Those fairies, played by Buntport’s five actors, mostly serve for transitions. Otherwise, Buntport has borrowed the format of SCTV, creating a variety of sketches all derived from various TV shows.

And so we inherit the game show parody and the cooking show parody, frayed staples of sketch comedy. And in Buntport’s hands, even these can be amusing (well, not the cooking show, which is basically a single Stalin joke).

These creative powers instinctively know that there’s no such thing as a too-short sketch. They know that fully developed characters make every joke hit harder. And they know that delays kill comedy.


There’s also an adventure show, Tyler and Shane’s Outback Exploration, in which Edborg and Evan Weissman demonstrate that not all Aussies are brave and blustery.Among their pierced targets are the TV show 5-O and the Fuzz, in which two cops (Hannah Duggan and Erik Edborg) are shocked when suspects lie to them; their world is one bound by an honor code.

On public access, a school bully (Brian Colonna, cast against type and rising to the occasion) hosts his own talk show, falls for a victim and delivers a wallop of a surprise ending.

Erin Rollman proves once again her gift for standing on the border of creepy and taking the plunge. Her dating show contestant is a disturbingly deluded geek. But her Stacy Petrovsky, the capitalist Girl Scout, is a transcendent character given a return performance. This time, instead of selling cookies, she’s commandeering the TV news with an invented board game (Monopoly mixed with Risk: capitalism plus world domination) and tormenting her Brownie brother (Colonna).

Offstage, the performers owe all to troupe members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz, who somehow keep the manic show moving at a fluid pace. Full costume changes and proficient sound effects happen with the ease if not the budget of shows with far larger staffs.

By the time the cast resurfaces in fairy gear (technicolor Lycra bodysuits) to sing a Doris Day song, they’ve long ago won us over. And they know enough to take their bows while we’re still madly in love.

-Lisa Bornstein, December 19, 2003, Rocky Mountain News