Buntport Theater

Season 13

A large rabbit wearing a ratty robe and bunny slippers squats on a floor covered with newspapers. The rabbit holds a microphone and sings.

North Denver Tribune- Buntport’s second musical dark, hilarious, and brilliant

It almost seems unfair – each time I go to Buntport Theater, I expect something unique, unexpected, clever, hilarious, thoughtful, challenging – in short, I expect brilliance. This would be unfair, except that I have yet to be disappointed. Somehow, the six Buntporters are constantly able to expand what they do – they rarely go in the same direction twice. And their works are not just thrown together – they are complete, well-developed and structured stories that are engaging and insightful. Their latest creation, a musical called Jugged Rabbit Stew, is dark, funny, bizarre, thought-provoking, and edgy.

Jugged Rabbit Stew is about Snowball, a rabbit that is pulled out of a magician’s hat. The twist is that snowball has real magical powers. This makes the shows he does with Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful magician popular and successful – until something goes very wrong. Snowball is not a happy, cute bunny – he is angry, cynical, and mean. He has a bizarre collection of things, which exists as a result of his efforts to make others unhappy. He randomly rearranges body parts on several other characters for the same reason. But when he “collects” a fan of the magic show, he is frustrated that she refuses to be unhappy.

This is a musical, and composer, lyricist, and music director Adam Stone has written a nice variety of songs that fit into the story well. The music is prerecorded, and the quality of the singing is somewhat variable, but certainly good enough for the intent of the show. It also allowed for some very creative and funny ways of using microphones. And as with any good musical, the songs add another layer of emotion and context to the story. Buntport’s collaborative directing is excellent. The formal layout of the action on stage reinforces the interplay between the characters and provides an interesting and constantly changing visual image. The six members of the company are all involved throughout the development, so they understand the story perfectly and can integrate all aspects of the show completely. The pacing is spot-on, the musical numbers are integrated seamlessly and cleverly, and everything operates as a cohesive whole.

The acting is strong, with the story adding challenges that the company rises to. Eric Edborg is Snowball, and performs with a rabbit mask that covers part of his face. He more than makes up for this by using his voice and the rest of his body to communicate. He is angry and bitter, but also captures just enough of the essence of being a rabbit to make the character work without overdoing it. Hannah Duggan is Mystical Marla, the beautiful assistant with misplaced body part problems. Duggan’s movement convinces us that her body is not all her own – resulting in great physical comedy. Evan Weissman is the magician Alec – less his right arm. Weissman is the consummate showman, falling naturally into a presentational announcer’s voice frequently. Brian Colonna is Alec’s Right Arm (don’t try and figure it out – just know that it works). The two work together well, and get into some very funny arguments. Both also handle the restrictions on their movement and expressiveness very well. As the Woman, Erin Rollman is bubbly, enthusiastic, happy, and romantic, but also has more. She adeptly becomes serious as things progress.

As with all aspects of their shows, the six (the five actors listed above and SamAnTha Schmitz “off stage”) design the set, lighting, and costumes. The set, nicely framed by a proscenium of drapes, includes all sorts of things hanging suspended from above, and a floor covered in newspapers. The lighting provides good illumination, and includes some nice effects for some of the songs. The costumes are notable as well; especially Snowball’s mask, and the integrated costumes of Alec and his Arm. In Jugged Rabbit Stew, Buntport creates a sort of alternative universe, which is a lot like our own, but with a few important differences. But while the story exists in a different world, it is true to that world – and the feelings, relationships, and situations are authentic and relate to our world. While this may sound impossible (if you have never been to Buntport), it works flawlessly. The show is about fate and how we deal with what life gives us, and asks the question of whether we can control our destiny – or maybe suggests we can only control it by fulfilling it. It is funny, edgy, deep, unpredictable, and in the end, meaningful – and certainly worth seeing.

-Craig Williamson, June 3, 2010, North Denver Tribune

A large rabbit wearing a ratty robe and bunny slippers squats on a floor covered with newspapers. The rabbit holds a microphone and sings.

Denver Post- Waiter! There’s a Grinch in my “Jugged Rabbit Stew”

The Buntport Theater ensemble has taken audiences down the rabbit hole before, but never to the nether regions of “Jugged Rabbit Stew,” its wonderfully weird if ideologically troubling new musical, written in collaboration with impressive young pop songwriter Adam Stone.

The premise is precocious: A magician’s rabbit has quit the act because he’s depressed. He’s a guy dressed in a bunny suit, down to his cute little floppy-eared slippers. And he’s named Snowball. Cute, right? But in many ways, this ambitious piece culminating Buntport’s ninth season of all-original works is its most disturbing to date.

Imagine, if you will, a man who’s grown so fatalistic that the only joy he gets in life comes from stealing and hoarding items precious to others. Only he’s a bunny. And not some pwetty widdle wabbit, either; he’s the most surly, hateful hare since “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Think the Grinch meets Harvey. If Pee-wee had a big adventure in a Kafka nightmare, it would be “Jugged Rabbit Stew.”

The setting, based on the newspapers lining the floor, must be Snowball’s cage. The drunken and cantankerous master of this house, free-range yet clearly trapped, wiles away his days watching home movies of his dead rabbit parents. It’s Erik Edborg in a masterful performance that unnervingly parallels his most recent role as a sotted Eugene O’Neill – only here, he occasionally breaks into song.

Suspended in midair are seemingly random objects covered in sheets – a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a bike … and a woman, sitting patiently in a hanging rocking chair (Erin Rollman). Her unveiling is the first of many signature examples of Buntport’s uncanny presentational creativity. She’s straight out of a Tennessee Williams play – a fangirl who’s deliriously pleased to be held here in ongoing captivity.

A few parameters: Snowball is the actual magician here. His doting human assistants are Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful, and Mystical Marla. And because of Snowball, neither is whole. Snowball failed to make Alec (Evan Weissman) completely disappear, leaving him with a disembodied arm that now has a mind of its own (played by Brian Colonna). Marla (Hannah Duggan) is saddled with “nasty man legs” because, in a fit of spite, Snowball sawed hers off, and replaced them with a mechanic’s.

He’s cruel and dismissive to them, and yet both have a pathological need to be loved by him. But the ones we love are not always kind to us, Alec aptly says. And when these two sing out of their willingness to change themselves, to disappear into a top hat and emerge as something else in order to be loved by Snowball in return, well, this musical transforms from a charmingly elusive menagerie into one that is painfully, identifiably human. We all, after all, want to be wantable. In the the brilliantly titled song, “Take Me, Break Me, Make Me Something More,” Marla sings of needing to be nicer. Alec sings of needing to be meaner. To win the same man’s affection. Who can’t relate?

But Snowball, as the doted-upon often are, is otherwise consumed. He’s convinced himself that his fate is to twirl on a roasting spit, as did his parents before him, a mere ingredient in someone else’s stew.

This heady talk of fate versus self-determination takes us out of the land of Lewis Carroll and into that most classic and human of storytelling genres: We’re in the land of the Greeks. Of Shakespeare. And you know what happens to the tragic hero there. Only in Snowball, we have a tragic hero who isn’t at all heroic.

How this musical handles Snowball’s epiphany will have audiences asking: Is the finale inevitable … or irresponsible? Those paying the most attention might be left shaken, even indignant, by what it seems to be advocating.

It’s certainly impressively staged, if bloated at more than 2 ½ hours. It’s unnervingly well performed – and yes, that takes into account that none of these actors are trained singers. That’s part of their charm.

Stone’s considerable 17-song score (performed to his taped synthesizer accompaniment) is laden with meaningful, soul-searching lyrics that evoke everything from “Sweeney Todd” to “Les Miserables.” They are often performed in the rapid-fire (and sometimes indecipherable) tempo of, say, REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Fine for a rock concert, but not ideal for a musical where we’re hanging on every word.

This is a stew, all right – ideologically, philosophically and musically. And it’s just like Buntport to leave audiences both dazed and amazed.

-John Moore, May 28, 2010, Denver Post

A magician and his disembodied arm strike a pose. A woman dressed as the magician’s assistant but wearing mechanic’s pants sits on a television looking angry. A red bicycle and two televisions hover above her.

Westword- Buntport Theater creates a hare-raising musical with Jugged Rabbit Stew

You have to wonder at the sheer gutsiness of the Buntport Theater Company, whose members took an absurd idea and then – instead of playing around a bit, giggling and letting it go – decided to carry the concept forward, step by step, moment by moment, to its logical and intensely illogical ending, trusting that others would willingly give themselves up to this phantasmagorical universe. Jugged Rabbit Stew is an original musical whose sunnily innocent surface carries a darker underlay, an underlay involving blood, dismemberment, the way humanity destroys its gods, predation and carnivorousness – which takes on a whole new dimension when the meat in question not only walks and talks like a man, but can perform astounding feats of magic. All of this is pounded home by Adam Stone’s inspired rock songs, some hilarious, some carrying a thumping portentousness reminiscent of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The plot concerns Snowball (Erik Edborg), a giant rabbit who works with a magician called Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful (Evan Weissman). At his best, Alec can pull off only the simplest and most obvious sleights of hand; Snowball is the genuine magical power behind the act. This bunny is anything but sweet and fluffy, however. He’s a miserable, scruffy creature who looks a little like the ugly, ragged-toothed White Rabbit in Jan Svankmajer’s film Alice and who likes stealing things that others value and are useless to him, simply to make as many people as possible miserable: the VHS tape of a graduation ceremony, a gravy boat, an old-fashioned gramophone. All of these objects hover below the ceiling throughout the action. Snowball has confiscated the legs of magician’s assistant Mystical Marla (Hannah Duggan), replacing them with those of a middle-aged workman so that she can no longer dance; he took away Alec’s right arm. Despite the depredations he’s wrought on their bodies, both Marla and Alec are in love with him. Also dangling from the ceiling, seated, is Woman (Erin Rollman), a regular audience member whom Snowball loved until he spotted her one evening in the company of another rabbit. A chatty, cheerful person in pink ruffled shoes, remarkably unfazed by her predicament, Woman eventually falls in love with Alec’s disembodied arm, played by Brian Colonna, and the two enact a Hollywood fantasy in which she is the gutsy ranch owner and he the traveling farm hand (pun most definitely intended) who’ll save her land.

This is not the only place where the production underlines its own artificiality, satirizing magic shows and theatrical conventions in general (a character standing in the distinct spotlight that universally signifies a soliloquy overhears another in a similar spotlight, to the latter’s great irritation), and looking at the ways we use language to create story and propel action. They niggle over usage: the fact that a rabbit is not a hare (unfortunately, “hare” works much better for song lyrics) and whether the potatoes in TV dinners are whipped or mashed. Woman is a chattering ninny most of the time, but Snowball had originally imagined her as an intellectual and, toward the play’s end, she becomes the figure he’d imagined, lapsing into erudition and discussing his role as tragic hero: Is he the classical noble-but-with-a-fatal-flaw model, the romantic Byronic type in rebellion against convention, or a twentieth-century anti-hero?

Edborg’s crazed energy somehow shines through the face-obscuring bunny mask, and Colonna also manages to surmount a smothering black costume that covers everything but his right arm and delivers a sizzling performance. Duggan is by turns cynical, angry and pathetic as lovelorn Marla; Rollman makes Woman as appealing as she is fluff-headed. Weissman has tended to play the quieter and more sensitive Buntport roles in the past, but here he lets loose with a brilliant cascade of tics and tricks, and a balls-out singing style that parodies every dopey, mannered vocalist you could ever imagine.

With its truly startling originality, Jugged Rabbit Stew is one of the deepest, weirdest, funniest and most assured things Buntport has done in its decade of amazing theater. It also testifies to the fruitfulness of the collaboration with Stone, as the Buntporters take on the musical form, bow to its conventions, then twist it every which way and back until it becomes their own. Don’t miss this production.

-Juliet Wittman, May 27, 2010, Westword

A wooden ladder is set up in the middle of an empty stage covered with newspaper. Suspended from the ceiling are various objects including a woman in a rocking chair.

Littleton Independent- ‘Stew’ introduces magical characters

Once upon a time there was a magician named Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful. And, he had an assistant called Mystical Marla. As magicians are inclined to do, Alec had a white rabbit he pulled from a hat in each show.

Until one day the rabbit, smitten by a sweet lady in the audience, became surly and took over, decreeing “no more magic shows!”

Soon, a pair of accidental characters became part of the action. Readers probably need to see this production to comprehend it, but we’ll try.

“Jugged Rabbit Stew” is a new musical written by the always-inventive crew at Buntport Theater with music and lyrics by Adam Stone, who was also composer for last season’s “Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang.”

Lights go up on a living room of sorts, with newspapers covering the floor and draped objects hanging from the ceiling. On one side is an overstuffed chair and several TV sets. A tall creature with rabbit ears and mask and white furry paws, wearing rumpled pajamas and robe staggers in and plops down in the chair, turning on a show about wild rabbits (home movies).

It’s Snowball (Erik Edborg), the magician’s rabbit with a fondness for the bottle, who, we learn, has stolen all the objects hanging from the ceiling and has a reason to justify each one. “I collect, not steal” he explains to Mystical Marla (the comical Hannah Duggan), who walks with a peculiar gait because Snowball once sawed her in half and gave her the “hairy man-legs” of a local mechanic instead, complete with smelly feet.

Enter next the red-clad magician (Evan Weissman) looking for his coin he uses for a sleight of hand trick. His right arm is missing, we learn, because the rabbit made him disappear and sent the right arm out to get Ding Dongs, while he made the rest of Alec return to the scene. That would, logically of course, lead to a mysterious black figure with one red arm and a western drawl entering the room – Arm (Brian Colonna).

Among the objects hanging from the ceiling is a rocking chair, which turns out to hold a sweet Woman (Erin Rollman) whom Snowball stole after making eye contact with her during a show – it was at this point that Snowball refused to perform any more.

Woman and Arm make a connection.

Throughout, songs burst forth, telling more stories.

Snowball maintains he’s a tragic hero and hoped to have intellectual conversations about Kepler and Galileo with the Woman, although she was at the show with another rabbit. Hanging over it all is Snowball’s fear that people will want to eat him – in jugged rabbit stew, a fate that befell his parents… Assorted story lines unroll as things get sorted out.

Buntport’s ingenious staging has microphones appearing from on high and a suspended Victrola that functions. Delightful, clever – what more can you ask? Perhaps a bit more polish on the musical delivery.

-Sonya Ellingboe, May 27, 2010, Littleton Independent