Buntport Theater

Season 9

Light shines through a wall made of many glass jars. A man wearing a half mask sits in the foreground.

dscriber.com- Forget New York and LA – Colorado theater kicks serious ass

Nobody gives a damn about the arts.

Too bad.

Likewise, unless it involves killings, multiple births, rich people, cults, meth labs or big boobs, nothing that happens between New York and L.A. matters.

Wrong.

Denver’s Buntport Theater opened its ninth season two weekends ago with their version of a novel, “Indiana, Indiana,” by Boulder writer Laird Hunt. What happens onstage is miraculous. I’ll tell you why.

First, a disclaimer. Usually, a reviewer is like a food taster. He or she checks out the product, chews it over, masticates it into a 500-words-or-less paste, regurgitates it. Signals whether it’s safe to consume or not.

This isn’t that. I’m a fan, a partisan, a booster. I’ve watched them for nine years, seen nearly all of their two-dozen-plus productions, and I’ve never had a negative experience. I’ve always been glad I attended.

Why is that important? It’s the definition of good art – something that not only entertains you, but sticks with you and expands your sensibilities. This is what Buntport does. As I’ve written many times before, for many different publications and websites, they are a group of six who work together as performers, designers, writers, technicians, ticket-takers, whatever needs to get done to make it happen. They are Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman.

To this point, they’ve been focused primarily on comic extrapolations of classic texts, leading to hilarious results in works such as “Titus Andronicus! The Musical,” “Moby Dick Unread” and “Kafka on Ice.” (I mention the catchiest titles, to whet your appetite.)

This time, they’ve taken the work of a living writer and translated it onto the stage. It’s serious, but not somber. It provokes feeling, but it doesn’t make a play for your emotions. It is what it is, and it’s fascinating and delicious.

A blank white rectangle on the floor is the playing space, often overlaid with transparencies that move us through fields, onto roads, into the rain. This barren space is backed with a wall of glass jars, containing objects, memories, properties. The wall’s panels unhinge to make doorways, windows, hatches. A few pieces of furniture fly down, across or roll onto and off the set.

The story’s told without a break. It’s Noah’s story. He’s the only constant, played by Weissman, half-masked as an old man tumbling through his fragmented memories. He’s slow, or gifted, or both; a farm boy in the Midwest dominated by his brief experience of marriage to the similarly minded Opal, who’s taken from him.

The other players (Colonna, Duggan, Edborg) drift in and out around him, playing wife, mother, father, preacher, sheriff, townsfolk. Flashes from Noah’s mind, projections, fall onto blank surfaces periodically and play themselves out cryptically (Rollman and Schmitz work off stage this time).

So what is so miraculous about this? For all its fragmentation, “Indiana, Indiana” coheres. It’s fluid and eloquent, there’s no wasted movement to it, no moments of awkwardness. The years of work this group has done together gives them an unmatched ability to communicate clearly and deeply.

It’s not an adaptation into play form. No other group will ever be able to pick up and recreate what they do. That’s what makes “Indiana, Indiana” worth getting up and going to. When its run is done, you’ll never see it again. It will never move to Broadway. It will never be on TV.

Here’s a statement that can be found in every Buntport program: “At Buntport, we strongly believe that Denver is NOT a staging area on the way to ‘bigger’ and ‘better’ things. Wonderful, vibrant Art is happening right here and now! . . . We strive to provide a wide variety of high quality programming that cannot be found anywhere else.”

I don’t really know how they do it. I don’t think I want to penetrate that mystery. I’m happy they’re here. I will hijack their achievement to help make my own assertion that there are no more excuses for overlooking what good art can do for us, for ignoring anything of value that sprouts up outside the spotlight’s scope. Which is why I will keep on about them until they selling out every show.

When the lights came up and the bows were taken, the person next to me was too moved to get up. For a minute, too changed. That’s what good art does. That’s why you should see it.

-Brad Weismann, September 15, 2009, www.dscriber.com

A man with glasses examines a letter. Behind him an image is projected on a white door.

Denver Post- Buntport arrives at a state of grace in ‘Indiana’

Buntport Theater is always up for a new challenge. With “Indiana, Indiana,” the endlessly witty collective takes on acting. Real, character-driven acting – while telling an uncharacteristically melancholy family tragedy.

It’s a departure for this proven team known more for awing audiences and its unique brand of smart, irreverent humor.

“Indiana, Indiana” is something else indeed. Something dark and lovely. Sad and wonderful.

At the same time, “Indiana” marks a welcome return to Buntport’s presentational roots, every few moments conjuring another bit of its simple, signature stage magic.

Based on Laird Hunt’s elegiac, nonlinear novel, “Indiana” is about a simple old man named Noah who spends his late years drifting through his memories. There are those before Opal, and those after Opal. The sad circumstances of his detachment from a wife with an affinity for flames are worthy of John Irving.

What makes “Indiana” so intriguing is its approach to the chaos of memory, and Buntport’s approach to staging it.

The set is initially draped in a white sheet. Grainy, mood-establishing home movies play not on the wall but more askew: on the floor. The sheet is pulled to reveal an entire wall of stacked Mason jars, as if lining a Midwestern general store. Each jar is randomly filled – with straw, buttons, love letters and even bones. Each represents a memory from Noah’s life. Accessing a needed one here after so many decades looks akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

We see Noah’s story in bits, just as this old-man mind remembers them – hazy, incomplete, fragmented and unreliable. We’re in the land of “50-percent clarity,” we’re told – Noah remembers half the story, and we get only half its meaning.

He’s played with sad sobriety by Evan Weissman. Coaxed into talking by caring neighbor Max (Brian Colonna), we go back and forth in time to meet his teacher father (Erik Edborg) and devout mother (Hannah Duggan). With Noah’s eyesight failing, Max also reads aloud old letters from his beloved, Opal. These letters come with corresponding home movies, cleverly projected on everything from a woman’s apron to the back of an umbrella to the side of a washing machine.

In these murky journeys into the past, we discover Noah is a seer, a gift he’s reluctantly used to help cops solve crimes but has never been of any use to himself. His flashes come with crackling sounds and bursts of light, like a synapse not so much firing but short-circuiting.

The unfolding mystery of Noah’s current solitude culminates with a visit to his wedding, during which two glowing Mason jars, one blue and one red, swing from attached cables.

It’s an ambiguous but strangely moving effect.

“Indiana, Indiana” is in league with the Denver Center’s “Plainsong” and its coming sequel, “Eventide” – both based on novels that are as much read to an audience as performed. But Buntport’s creation shows just how beautifully real theatricality can be intermingled into such storytelling.

This brief journey is much to process at once, but it’s all captivatingly staged, and the story arcs satisfyingly.

While it might help to have read the novel, “Indiana” succeeds on it its own theatrical terms. Yes, it’s strange. Some might think there’s not much sense to it.

But, as we’re told along the way, “There might be!”

-John Moore, September 12, 2009, Denver Post

A minister kneels, reaching skyward, and places his hand on the chest of a man laying on the floor. Behind the two men is a giant wall made of jars filled with sundry objects.

Indiana, Indiana

A NOVEL ADAPTATION

An adaptation of the novel by Laird Hunt.

Nestled on a farm in the heartland, Noah Summers spends his time drifting through memories. (more…)

A man dressed in black sits on a stool holding a jar. Behind him light shines through a wall made of jars filled with sundry objects. In the foreground a window with curtains, bathed in green light, hangs in the air.

ARTICLE Denver Post- With “Indiana,” inventive Buntport troupe evolves its approach

There’s a word for the adroit, unpredictable symbiosis that turns a Ukrainian short story into a theatrical mud bath, adapts a confusing Shakespeare tragedy into a musical comedy or propels an episodic Colorado novel into the Twilight Zone.

“Many times, the act of ‘Buntporting’ the show happens after we’ve made the choice to deal with certain material,” says Buntport Theater actor Brian Colonna, reflecting on “Indiana, Indiana,” the singular novel that inspired the latest Buntport collaboration. It opens on Friday.

“We’ll say, ‘You gotta put some Buntport in.’ This novel is so beautiful and strange already. The nonlinear story line begs for some Buntporting, as well.”

Buntport: It’s a verb and a noun. In the Buntport Theater’s eccentric stagings, the actors have slogged sloppily through a mud pit, offered a goldfish playing Ophelia in “Hamlet” and staged an Ice Capades-inspired interpretation of some particularly bleak Franz Kafka material.

Their latest challenge is translating University of Denver professor Laird Hunt’s dark, poetic novel “Indiana, Indiana” into a theatrical drama.

The novel maps the fitful interior and exterior landscapes of protagonist Noah. Its deliberately cryptic content – Noah’s memories focus heavily on what his father calls “fifty percent stories” that omit half of the tale – and nonlinear structure could have been written specifically to be Buntported.

“When you’re reading, you can sit on it for a second while you put the puzzle pieces together, so the challenge was how to put it on stage without making it too artsy,” said ensemble member Hannah Duggan.

“We don’t want people going ‘Wha . . . what?’ We’ve tried to stay true to the book.”

“Plus we thought it would be nice to actually meet a living author,” said actor Evan Weissman.

“People like to hear songs they know, set to different words. That’s a given,” said Duggan. “And when it comes with really bad dancing and colorful costumes, you just can’t beat it.”

That’s a wry reference to Buntport’s longtime reliance on public-domain works, a dictate of the company’s lean budget. (It also avoids possible rows with authors surprised by particularly elastic translations of their work.)
The innovative, collaborative Buntport Theater company dates back to 1998. Then, seven Colorado College alums – Colonna, Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Duggan, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Weissman – began creating what Denver theater critic John Moore once called “the most quirky, creative and thought-provoking new material in Denver.”

Thanks largely to the runaway success of “Titus Andronicus! The Musical!” – which was staged four times with long and often sold-out performances before the company retired the hit in 2007 – Buntport earned a reputation for edgy comedy. That’s a mixed blessing because its productions aren’t always cheeky and blithe.

The company’s adaptation of “Indiana, Indiana” steps outside Buntport’s unique mixture of intelligence and silliness and incorporates multimedia elements.

“There may be a moment or two of levity, but it’s generally a dramatic show,” Weissman said.

“I don’t think it’s the type that will have people laughing out loud,” Rollman said.

“Indiana, Indiana” maintains Buntport’s tradition of collaborative theater. Although most members of the company have met Hunt, the novelist wasn’t involved in translating his novel from paper to proscenium. Opening night will be as surprising to Hunt as it will be to people who never heard of his book.

“The adaptation takes on a life of its own, and we have to respect that, while always making sure that we’ve maintained the feeling of the original,” Rollman said.

“Anything can be Buntported. You just have to figure out how.”

August 30, 2009, Claire Martin

Shoulders down image of a man in a brown suit, he has one sock on his foot and one sock on his hand. He is resting on a leather suitcase.

Rocky Mountain News- ‘Rotten’ socks it to audience Puppets pile on plenty of parody in Buntport’s ‘Hamlet’

It all began with a lost sock at a laundromat in Texas. Eventually, the sock returned, ghostlike, pale and floating.

“Looks it not like my sock? Mark it, Harold. Speak to it,” said the sock’s owner, Julius.

So begins Something Is Rotten, a rendition of Hamlet that is ludicrous even by Buntport Theater standards. And while the company’s creative standards have prevailed in recent serious fare, it’s a joy to see this group of seven return to high comic form.

Julius (Evan Weissman) and Harold (Erik Edborg) have teamed up with a narcoleptic thespian, George (Brian Colonna) after that sock convinces them to stage a production of Hamlet. The problem: Harold and Julius aren’t actors, and George can’t stay awake long enough to make it through his own soliloquies.

The result may be the best bad theater you ever see.

What makes this more than just a parody of bad theater are the carefully drawn characterizations. Some of the funniest moments come in the first 10 minutes, as Julius and Harold awkwardly try to set up their performance. In black pants and a turtleneck, Harold tries – and fails – to be commanding and professional. Both are tense, trying to forge ahead while George lies unconscious on the floor.

In his tassel loafers, tennis socks, fanny pack and shorts, Weissman makes a visual punch line, increased as his character preens in the light of newfound fame.

They forge ahead, trying to present the show while George naps, a show that would be much better, Harold says, “under normal circumstances, which are rare.”

Buntport’s normal ingenuity – supplemented offstage by Samantha Schmitz, Matt Petraglia and Erin Rollman – makes itself evident in this production, where puppetry is extended beyond just a sock puppet as Hamlet’s father. A Teddy Ruxpin doll with pre-recorded tapes plays Polonius; Laertes is a toy truck; Ophelia is a live goldfish. For the two-faced Gertrude and Claudius, Edborg dons a double-sided costume, one half a giant mask of the king that flips over to become Gertrude’s flowing locks while her body spills out of a tiny suitcase.

Colonna fades in and out of narcoleptic attacks to take on the role of Hamlet (it seems this was supposed to be a one-man show), pouring himself into the role until the actor and the character are equally unstrung.

Two-thirds through, the jest loses some momentum, but it’s a brief fade until the show comes bounding back to a bloody finish.

The evening’s frivolity is introduced by Hannah Duggan as Janice Haversham, “local” performer here to prepare us for the tale of Hamlet. With appalling folk songs and the quality of a local public radio personality, she moves from a desperation to be liked to just plain desperation in a well written and performed curtain opener.

-Lisa Bornstein, September 22, 2006, Rocky Mountain News

Three awkward men sit in front of a chainlink fence. On the left is a smiling man with a space t-shirt on he is holding a fish bowl with a goldfish. In the center, a man in a suit and large glasses purses his lips. On the right is an intense man with a buzz cut and black turtleneck.

Denver Post- A “Rotten” good time

Imagine a kid, 16, sitting in a theater – a live theater – guffawing, thoroughly engaged, leaping up at curtain call. And it’s Shakespeare, even. Kind of.

That Laertes is played by a remote-controlled toy bulldozer may have had something to do with it. Or Ophelia as a live goldfish (wait, can a goldfish drown?). Or Polonius as a Teddy Ruxpin doll, his “to thine own self be true” speech recorded on the cassette in his back. Or the gravedigger sampling Justin Timberlake’s “I’m Bringing Sexy Back.” Or Horatio as a marionette with Irish actor Geoffrey Toone’s face taped over his.

OK, maybe the 16-year-old missed that one. I know I did.

That doesn’t begin to explain the appeal of Buntport’s 16th original creation, “Something is Rotten,” featuring “Hamlet” – as a sock puppet.

There have been plenty of stabs at dumbing down the Bard (“The Complete Shakespeare Abridged”). “Rotten” is silly, but hardly dumb. Just the opposite.

“Rotten” is a ripe introduction to Shakespeare. But what that kid won’t even realize is that “Rotten” is a pretty accessible introduction to Samuel Beckett as well.

Three inexplicably, inextricably tied pals, only one an actor, have been compelled to perform “Hamlet.” By whom? The ghost of one’s long-lost sock, of course. No other context or explanation, no sense of time, place or greater purpose. Buntport doesn’t play by those rules. It’s absurdly Beckett.

Julius (Evan Weissman) enters preening and shy, a hint of an actor begging to break out from within him. Harold (Erik Edborg) is dressed in black, stern but trepidatious. He’s a ’50s-looking combination of Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” and Dieter (“Vould you like to touch my monkey?”). Sprawled between them is George (Brian Colonna) an intense “thee-a-tah” actor and narcoleptic.

With a trunk, a few cases and a coat rack, they embark on a fearful demonstration of the power and humor in transformative theater.

Harold, for example, portrays Claudius and Gertrude at once. As the foul king, he has an oversized mask over his head. To become Gertrude, he flings the mask back to reveal his wigged face. Simultaneously he unclasps a bowling bag, unfurling the queen’s dress before him. Brilliant.

The three oddballs bicker and banter as they go about their existential task, never questioning the necessity of its completion. But only George takes the actual art of the presentation all that seriously. His sleepy bouts allow his pals to skip ahead.

Julius is insistent on just two things: the safety of his beloved fish, and that the famous “play within the play” be a cutting from “Death of a Salesman.” As you can imagine, that slightly mucks up eliciting a guilty reaction from the king.

Does “Rotten” mean anything intellectuallly? Who knows. But the writing is absurdly clever, the performances sublime.

The pre-show amusement is an enormous treat; Hannah Duggan performs an endearing new-age folkster’s intro to Shakespeare. Duggan is funny from her first word to her final eyebrow twitch – better than anything “SNL” has done in a decade.

It was obvious the grandparents nearby loved “Rotten” as much as that 16 year old.

Imagine again: Buntport fans new and old walking out buzzing. Just another night at Buntport, where the only comfort zone here is entering a creative danger zone.

-John Moore, September 15, 2006, Denver Post

Three awkward men in front of a window grate. On the left is an intense man with a buzz cut and black turtleneck, holding a fish bowl with a goldfish in it. In the center, a man in a suit and large glasses purses his lips. On the right is a smiling man with a space t-shirt on

Westword- That’s Entertainment • Buntport makes magic with something is rotten

The action of Hamlet all hinges on an injunction by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who appears on a bitter cold night to tell the prince he must kill his murderous and usurping uncle. Everything that happens in Something Is Rotten is also set in motion by a ghost — in this case, the ghost of a pink striped sock that insists the three performers mount a production of the Shakespeare play.

Julius, the weirdly smiling, dim-witted but steel-willed owner of the sock, who’s played by Evan Weissman, bullies two friends, Harold and George, into fulfilling the command. But Harold is doubtful. Erik Edborg gives Harold the stern expression and deep, haunted eyes of Samuel Beckett, though not the intellect. He’s basically puzzled and resentful through the entire evening. The cast is rounded out by the star of the play, Brian Colonna’s George, a temperamental, hypermanic Hamlet whose approach offers a telling contrast to the subdued — though very different — performances of the other two. That is, when he’s not dropping into sudden narcoleptic trances.

We never really know exactly who these men are or why they’re on stage. George is clearly an actor – or at least someone who wants to act — but Julius and Harold are stumbling amateurs. They discuss their roles and argue about how to act them, bicker, shush each other and improvise when panicked.

Since this is a Buntport Theater production, the show is as ingenious as it is low-tech, and a lot of intensely clever and hilarious things happen. Edborg plays both King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, often at the same time. For the king, he wears a huge mask, the mouth of which he’s forced to manipulate with his hands. This means that Weissman has to provide his gestures, pulling on a pair of elbow-length gloves to do it. For the queen, Edborg undergoes a costume change that you simply have to see for yourself.

Ophelia is played by a goldfish — a real goldfish in a bowl — which makes the queen’s line “Your sister’s drowned, Laertes” particularly poignant. Ophelia’s father, Polonius, is a Teddy Ruxpin bear with a tape of the lines in his furry back. The family scenes can get tricky. “Sometimes the fish doesn’t look at the bear,” one of the actors complains, and for the next several minutes, we in the audience twist our necks to see which way Ophelia is facing. This is hard to do, since she’s quite a small fish and does a lot of aimless circling.

Laertes is a Tonka truck. A bright-yellow Tonka truck. There’s a forklift in the front that comes in handy when Laertes is forced into a duel with Hamlet.

Though only three Buntporters appear on stage, Something Is Rotten was written by all seven company members — Matt Petraglia, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan and SamAnTha Schmitz, as well as Edborg, Weissman and Colonna — and they are as agile with words as with their visual jokes. There’s also a pre-play warmup by Janice Haversham, who looks and sounds exactly like Hannah Duggan but cannot, in fact, be Duggan, because we all know she left for New York some months ago. Haversham shows off her musical instruments, which include a tambourine and a triangle, and provides smooth, folksy singing and an introduction to Shakespeare for those of us who have trouble understanding his work — an introduction that includes the information that ants are known to count their steps and it’s hard to make a pie crust.

You’ll be reassured to know that the requisite catharsis-providing pity and terror aren’t absent from this interpretation. The shrieks of grief and rage that rend the final scene would move a statue to tears — albeit tears of laughter.

Thaddeus Phillips of Lucidity Suitcase, who trained at Colorado College with the Buntporters and shares their anarchic humor and innovative relationship with objects, has also tackled Shakespeare, but took a different approach. Phillips used his versions of King Lear, The Tempest and Henry V to illuminate cultural or political issues or to tell us something we might not have thought of about the play itself (although in a strange, eccentric and sideways manner). In earlier seasons, Buntport staged Titus Andronicus and Macbeth with the primary goal of provoking laughter, and they do it again here, sending waves of giggles and belly laughs rippling through the house, punctuated by the occasional surprised snort.

But Something Is Rotten isn’t just great entertainment. It also tells us something about the process of making theater. The Buntporters go about their work in the same way that a four-year-old creates a game — focused, intense, playful, pursuing an idea until it dead-ends, then making a swift turn and dashing off down another pathway. Or just hanging on and babbling until something new springs to mind. Except that these players are highly sophisticated, and the apparent artlessness of the production masks the meticulous work that shaped the final version.

There’s not a boring moment in Something Is Rotten, even though the company is unconcerned with narrative and forward momentum, at least in a conventional sense. The play mocks these elements. An actor stands on the stage and stares at us as he tries to figure out what to do next. Two of the performers rush off stage to buy ice cream. It’s clear from the pace of the show the relaxed tension of the actors that Buntport has mastered its medium. These guys don’t have to hit you over the head with what they’re doing, get loud and jittery, try to underline the cleverness of their inventions. They’re not worried about losing the audience. They take their time, and they know exactly what they’re doing. On an almost empty stage, using nothing but their minds, voices, bodies and a few props, they’re making theater magic right in front of your eyes.

-Juliet Wittman, September 14th, 2006, Westword

North Denver Tribune- Brilliant creativity abounds in Buntport’s new “Something is Rotten”

The 2006 Boulder International Fringe Festival, which ran August 17-28 in (not surprisingly) Boulder, featured a diverse collection of performing, visual, and cinematic art from Colorado and around the world. It also provided an opportunity to see local grous in an alternate venue, including Denver favorites Buntport Theatre and A.C.E. Comedy. I was able to attend Buntport’s new spoof of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entitled Something is Rotten, which will have a full run at Buntport in September.

The Boulder International Fringe Festival is a phenomenon unlike any other in the Colorado performing arts world, a “12-day un-juried arts event packed with live theatre, dance, circus art, media art, cinema, visual art, spoken word, puppetry, workshops, and storytelling.” The result is an eclectic mix of the bizarre and the conventional, comedy and drama, plays, dance, and film.

Something is Rotten is the latest original cration by the comic guniuses at Buntport. While many in theatre create spoofs and send-ups of classics, Buntport adds another dimension by building a story with idiosyncratic characters around Shakespeare’s play. It is not so much a spoof as it is a comedy built upon another play. And the Buntport gang (Evan Weissman, SamAnTha Schmitz, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, and Brian Colonna) have outdone themselves, giving their three main characters the most bizarre, unpredictable, and brilliantly creative set of devices to present the cast of Hamlet that have ever been conceived.

The basic “story” of Something is Rotten is that three contemporary men are about to perform a somewhat unorthodox Hamlet, having been charged to do so by an unusual apparition (and “we take our apparitions very seriously”). But unfortunately, one of the three (George) is sound asleep as they arrive about to perform. This is apparently not uncommon, and gives Julius and Harold a chance to give some context and background. Since George continues to snooze, his compatriots decide to start the show without him. Of course, while George is an experienced actor, Julius and Harold (the characters, no the real actors) are not actually actors, so it is with great relief that George eventually wakes up, and immediately joins the others in the performance of Hamlet (as Hamlet). The rest of the characters are performed by an indescribably eclectic, creative, and hilarious mixture of puppets, mechanical devices, costume/mask combinations, and a pet fish, just to name a few. To mention more of the devices they’ve come up with would be to spoil the delightful surprise you’ll experience when you see the show.

The three actors (the real actors, not the characters that are also actors) are superb. Evan Weissman as Julius delivers his patented endearing awkwardness seen in other Buntport shows, but adds multiple levels including a steadfast determination and fierce affection for his pet fish. Erik Edborg is charming as Harold, and switches adeptyl between characters throughout. Brian Colonna has the most difficult task as George, for in addition to having to spend a good part of the show asleep, he bounces back and forth between funny bits and delivering many of Hamlet’s meaty lines seriously, creating another level of complexity and making the comedy even funnier. One of the biggest strengths of all three actors is their ability to turn on a dime, going from character to character and from slapstick to intellectual comedy to mock seriousness in the wink of an eye.

If you like Shakespeare and know and love Hamlet (as I do), you’ll love this show. If you don’t understand what the big deal is about Shakespeare and you hate Hamlet, you’ll erally love this show. Audience members that saw it at the Fringe rated it very highly and chose it as one of the “Picks of the Fringe.” If you want to see an amazing display of creativity and fall-off-your-chair-laughing comedy, head down to Buntport to see Something is Rotten as quickly as you can.

-Craig Williamson, September 7, 2006, North Denver Tribune