Arts news: BETC has its ‘Liberation’; Murray leaves Florida post; Sandoes keep Shakespeare tradition going in Boulder; People’s Building adds second space

The Tony Awards crowned Bess Wohl’s Pulitzer-winning “Liberation” as best new play of the year on Sunday – and Denver audiences will get to see it sooner than they have perhaps ever seen a homegrown staging of any Tony-winning best play before.

Wohl’s play follows a grieving adult daughter in the 2020s who travels back in time to revisit her mother’s youth as a radical feminist in 1970s Ohio. The New York Times called it “a heartbreaking exploration of how the gains and losses of second-wave feminism resonate today.”

For decades, here’s how it’s gone down: We’d wait here in Denver a year or two for the Tony Award-winning best play to finish its run on Broadway – then maybe go out on a national tour – before the rights would be made available to companies around the country to mount their own homegrown stagings. And, also for decades, the local company landing those rights has almost always been the Denver Center Theatre Company or the Curious Theatre Company.

“Liberation,” however, is coming to Denver – and Boulder – courtesy of the ever-rising Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company. And fast.

BETC will open its production, directed by Denver’s Kate Gleason, at the Savoy Denver from Feb. 25 through March 14, 2027, then move it to the Nomad Playhouse in Boulder for a second run from March 17-April 4.

The creators of the Broadway show are currently developing a touring version that will open next Jan. 27 (one week ahead of BETC) at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. That then moves to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (also in California), then the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., then London.

That means, as of this very moment, the only two theater companies in the world that have secured the rights to stage their own native productions of “Liberation” are the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company and Philadelphia Theatre Company.

For BETC, landing those rights is surely the greatest coup in the company’s 20-year history. “It’s an extraordinary accomplishment,” said Managing Director Mark Ragan, and one almost entirely attributable to Ragan’s own dogged determination.

Ragan saw the play on Broadway last year and “instantly knew” it was a BETC kind of show, he said.

“It’s filled with empathy,” said Ragan. “It tugs at the heartstrings. It’s intelligent. It’s everything we do at BETC, all in one play.”

“Liberation” closed on Broadway on Feb. 2, “and I started stalking people from the show the very next day,” Ragan said. “I wrote to Bess Wohl over Facebook Messenger. I contacted the licensing company before they had even landed the rights to the play themselves. This was before it won the Pulitzer or Tony awards.“

It worked. The buzz was so big that more than 300 local actors signed up for BETC’s auditions. The resulting powerhouse cast will be announced this week.

So how unusual is all of this? Well, Curious Theatre recently announced it will stage the 2025 Tony Award-winning best play, “Purpose,” as part of its next season. So, about two years removed from its New York coronation.

The Denver Center Theatre Company has staged the 2022 winner (“The Lehman Trilogy”), Vintage took a big step up when it premiered the two-part 2021 winner (“The Inheritance”) and Curious debuted the 2016 winner (“The Humans”). That means the 2017, ‘18, ‘19, ‘23 and ’24 winners all remain unproduced by anyone locally. Granted, no one’s going to get the rights to stage “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two” anytime soon. The other neglected winners are “Stereophonic, “Leopoldstadt,” “The Ferryman” and “Oslo.”

This all reminds me of when the Denver Center landed the right to launch the national touring production of “The Book of Mormon.” Hesitant producers inked us in for three weeks. That was before the underdog won nine Tony Awards and suddenly became one of the hottest properties in touring history. That Denver run could have sold out for months.

A Tony Award can make all the difference.

(Wohl, importantly, also just became the first woman to win the best-play Tony since Wendy Wasserstein in 1989 (“The Heidi Chronicles”).

Turnover in Florida

Helen R. Murray, who ran the Aurora Fox Arts Center through the globally tumultuous period of July 2018 through October 2022, has abruptly left her position as Producing Artistic Director of the prestigious American Stage in St. Petersburg, Fla. No reason has been publicly disclosed.

The exit comes just days after she opened the company’s Colorado-connected 2026-27 season lineup, which started June 3 with the comedy “The Hot Wing King,” directed by Arvada Center Associate Artistic Director Kenny Moten and featuring Denver actors Randy Chalmers, Don Randle and Broadway’s Mathenee Treco, a graduate of Eaglecrest High in Aurora. That runs through June 28.   

Before her departure, Murray slated the electrifying one-man memoir “Unhinged,” written by and starring Denver’s Steven J. Burge, to open in its world-premiere staging on Nov. 4. The play, which has been developed over several years by both American Stage and Boulder’s Local Theater Company, still lists Murray as its director. Burge starred in the Denver Center’s one-man comedy “An Act of God” in 2017 and now works full-time at the Town Hall Arts Center in Littleton.

Family affair in Boulder

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s bloodlines back to Shakespearean scholar James Sandoe run deeper every year. James Sandoe is not technically the founder of the nation’s second-oldest Shakespeare Festival. (That was University of Colorado Professor Jack Crouch.) But it was Sandoe who laid the groundwork all the way back to 1944, when he started directing Shakespeare plays at the university’s Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre.

Season 69 began Sunday with a company that would seem to get younger and younger every year were it not for the continuing presence of Sandoe’s children, Sam and Anne.

Sam Sandoe extends his own historic record with each new season – 2026 is his 39th. At age 72, he’s paying the Sea Captain in “Twelfth Night” and Tilney in “Shakespeare in Love.” Anne, 75, opens her 20th season this weekend as Caius Ligarius in “Julie Caesar.”

Sam has Anne beat in volume, but his sister goes back the furthest. She was only 4 when she appeared in a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on the Rippon Stage. That was before the CSF was even a thing.

Info at cupresents.org/shakespeare-festival

New studio space in Aurora

The Denver Fringe Festival marked a “soft opening” for a small, second performing space in the lower level of The People’s Building in Aurora. It’s a flexible, 65-seat studio space made possible by about $340,000 in grant support from the Aurora Cultural Arts District, the Gates Family Foundation, Bonfils-Santon Foundation and Boettcher Foundation. The studio will accommodate theater productions, classes, events and more. 

The main performing area in the People’s Building has been a godsend for local performing-arts groups but, at a capacity of 225, it’s almost too much of a good thing for most. The new studio will serve as a smaller and more affordable option for many of those groups, said Aaron Vega. He’s the curator of the People’s Building but has been recently promoted to the official title of Project Manager for Northwest Aurora. 

“This allows us to truly incubate new voices an take some of the pressure of selling hundreds of seats a night – which is impossible for many small theater companies,” said Vega. 

The People’s Building has helped Aurora and surrounding cities to meet the the growing need for performance space in the area. It is typically booked out 16 months in advance, but uncertainty in the present economy has wreaked havoc on many event spaces’ long-range scheduling plans, said Vega, who now has some unexpected openings for the space in July.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at [email protected].