Regardless of whether times are flush or being flushed down the you-know-where, the big dog Denver Center Theatre Company has always been unenviably tasked with having to be somehow all things to all people.

Times are tough right now, both locally and nationally, with some studies putting post-pandemic theater attendance down anywhere from 15 to 59 percent. That has made a whole lot of companies understandably risk-averse in announcing their 2024-25 seasons. But “risk-averse” is not an option for the Denver Center, which has positioned its entire identity around being a leader in bringing new stories to the American stage.

Which helps explain why the leading nonprofit theater company in the region has just announced a season that will run a head-spinning gamut from the very old to very new.

It doesn’t get any safer than “Hamlet,” an incumbent 30th anniversary staging of “A Christmas Carol” and “Little Shop of Horrors,” a ubiquitous Broadway musical that’s harder to kill off than the strange and unusual plant that conquers the world. Each crowd-pleasers sure to bolster the bottom line for what otherwise promises to be a walk into the wild.

A homegrown staging of “Little Shop” will continue to blur the line between the DCTC and its revived interest in staging musicals and the Denver Center’s larger Broadway musical touring division. But while “Little Shop” is easily one of the locally most produced musicals of the past two decades, and has been running off-Broadway since 2019 (give or take a pandemic), it hasn’t had a Broadway run since 2004 or its own touring production since 2006 – which means it will somehow be a relatively new experience for the large segment of local theatergoers who pretty much only patronize the Denver Center.

The eight-show season opens Sept. 13 with “Hamlet” and includes Katori Hall’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama, “The Hot Wing King,” which the DCTC describes as “a boisterous, in-your-face dramedy.” In a story framed around a contest to land the coveted title of “Hot Wang King,” two men are forced to reckon with what it means to be a Black man and a father figure.

“I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter,” based on the best-selling novel by Erika L. Sánchez, follows a Chicago high schooler who unravels a secret truth after her imperfect sister’s death. Artistic Director Chris Coleman calls the play “a love story to young Chicanas who, in trying to find the truth about the people and the world around them, end up finding themselves.”

The season includes one essentially imported show, “Avaaz,” written and performed by Michael Shayan. In it, an Iranian named Roya shares her journey from Tehran to “Tehran-geles, California.”

Coleman will helm both “Hamlet,” arguably the greatest play of all time (and last undertaken by the company in 2014), and “Little Shop.”

The company had previously announced that its two world premieres will be Denver-born playwright Jake Brasch’s “The Reservoir,” a semi-autobiographical dramedy about the year Brasch moved home to Colorado to get sober; and Sandy Rustin’s “The Suffragette’s Murder,” a highly unusual comic murder mystery set in 1850s New York.

“The Reservoir” is part of an historic partnership with L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, which will also present the play next season in what is called in the biz “a rolling world premiere.”

New and renewing subscriptions are on sale at denvercenter.org. Single tickets go on sale at a later date.