In theater, as in life, you are the company you keep.

Two of the biggest happenings of the 2023 Colorado theater year were centered around the concept of company. Curious Theatre Company, long-known as the local troupe with its professional pulse on the best of what is coming out of New York, entered its historically significant 26th season by emphatically underscoring its founding commitment to its core artistic company.

Curious opened the 2023-24 campaign – its first since Jada Suzanne Dixon fully took over from founding producing artistic director Chip Walton – with its largest-ever commitment to its own company members: “The Minutes,” the latest big-buzz Broadway play by Tracy Letts (“August: Osage County”). We’re talking 16 artistic Company members on and off stage, representing a cumulative 183 years of company history. This would be a significant commitment to the company’s past and its present.

And it all began with a vision that came to director Christy Montour-Larson as she finished reading the play for the first time last year. In it, she imagined seeing a curtain call where all 11 actors were Curious company members. “I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’” she said. 

This would be more than a gesture. It would be a practical gift to those artists who have stood by the company in good times, bad times and COVID times. And to the longtime subscribers who have come to know and admire their work over the years.

The names are among the biggest in the Colorado theater community: Ilasiea Gray, Kathryn Gray,  William Hahn, Jim Hunt, Brian Landis Folkins, Cajardo Lindsey, Michael McNeill, Michael Morgan, Josh Robinson,  Erik Sandvold and Karen Slack.  

“This artistic company has been a big part of the DNA of Curious since the very beginning, and these people have given their blood, sweat and tears to this church of ours at 1080 Acoma Street,” Montour-Larson said. “The actors deserved this, especially given the hit they took from COVID.”

But opening the season with a huge show and a total of 11 union contracts was also a major, expensive risk. Especially coming out of the pandemic, when companies like Curious have not and perhaps never will see pre-pandemic attendance figures ever again.

“The labor cost on this show was the largest in Curious history,” said Montour-Larson. “People were nervous.” But the gamble paid off, because “The Minutes” was one of the highest-attended shows in Curious history, too, she said.

What audiences saw was a prototypical Curious offering: Dangerous, contemporary storytelling terrain, buffered by a big-name playwright and a proven record of success in New York, including Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award nominations.

Letts’ deceptively simple story begins as a rather ordinary satire of a small-town council that is planning its Founders’ Day celebration. (The New York Times called it “the dullest possible setting for a play.”) But on a dime, the story transforms into a scathing indictment of American small towns’ distressingly common and gruesome secret histories when it comes to Indigenous peoples. In the skilled hands of the veteran Curious ensemble, these stock characters turn hysterical, shocking, hilarious, outrageous and eventually downright horrific. Audiences certainly had something to talk about on the way home.

Let’s talk trash

In Golden, the theater year was bookended by the trashy twin feel-good stories of the year: “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” and its Christmas sequel, which is currently being performed through Dec. 31 at the new Miners Alley Performing Arts Center.

“Trailer Park” is the low-brow, hometown success story of the year. David Nehls, best known as the longtime former music director at the Arvada Center for something like 50 shows, composed the original “Trailer Park” musical nearly 20 years ago along with writer Betsy Kelso. The show has been performed in 48 states and two countries, and caught lighting in a bottle all over again when Miners Alley staged it to open 2023.

This is the erudite tale of a stripper on the run who wreaks havoc at a North Florida trailer park called Armadillo Acres, a scandalous place where children disappear, markers get sniffed and guns get names like “Bertha.” The sequel offers an equally trashy tale of a trailer park Scrooge who turns temporarily nice when hit with a freak bout of electrocution-induced amnesia. If you love tinsel and “keg nog,” this is the show for you.

Audiences can’t get enough of all this “Trailer Park” trash, but this is more than a commercial success story. It’s the story of how director Piper Lindsay Arpan and her combined cast of 11 – again featuring some of the most reliable names in Colorado theater – became a family over the course of a year. That’s something that rarely happens in a quixotic creative world where shows often open and close in three weeks and the actors are off in search of their next jobs.

The combined roster includes P-Jay Adams, Abby Apple Boes, Damon Guerrasio, Jenna Moll Reyes, Norrell Moore, Rory Pierce, Leiney Rigg, Nick Rigg Johnson, Carter Edward Smith, Julia Tobey and Amy Warner Geiger.

The only actor to play different characters in both shows is Rigg Johnson, and that was intentional to pair him opposite his newlywed wife, Leiney. “Their offstage love affair was too irresistible for us not to use it onstage,” Arpan said.

But this is no Hallmark family story. “We hired some of the biggest personalities in the Denver theater community for this,” Arpan said with a laugh. But they stuck with each other through COVID, grad school and all manner of backstage drama.

“We are a dysfunctional little family, but we are stronger as a team,” she said. “We have established this connection. We have created a social group that includes everyone in both casts, we go out for drinks and we support each other – and that all certainly fits with the show.

“Trailer Park,” she says, has landed with audiences because while, yes, it’s real stupid – it’s also real.

“When I watch holiday shows, their Christmas almost never looks like my Christmas,” Arpan said. “My Christmas is always laden with chaos. But in our show, through this mess of love and life and friendship, we all have each other’s backs. Our show is proof that Christmas can be a mess and can still be beautiful.”

Audiences are loving it, she said, because people need to laugh.

“Since 2020, the world has felt significantly heavier to me, both in beautiful ways and in hard ways,” she said. “But I think there is a real joy that comes from being able to go into a theater and just belly-laugh. That is the biggest gift we can give to people, and I certainly think we are doing that with these ‘Trailer Park’ musicals.”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.