Colorado BackStage with Holly Bartges

Welcome to Colorado BackStage. Welcome to the awe, wonder, and perplexities of live Colorado theatre stretching from the highly polished professionals, to the struggling artists with a dream, and everyone in between.

Having written theatre critiques for several Colorado newspapers, it seemed high time for a Web Site without space restrictions.

Here you will find reviews, interviews with the known and unknown, audition notices, up and coming schedules, previews, dialogue with other theatre critics as well as their reviews.

While studying at San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California I became enchanted with the Festival Theatre on the campus. As a child, Festival Theatre was known as The Strawhatters, which toured Northern California, producing original musical reviews written by Executive Producer, Elizabeth Berryhill. When the Strawhatters came to Sacramento my Father saw to it we went. He knew two of the actors through architectural connections. As Festival Theatre, Berryhill took on more serious minded plays. During summer months she revived the original Strawhat reviews. How astonishing to play sketches as an adult I saw as a child.

Early in the game it struck me that theatre in the church could be one of the most effective tools ever. Not the bathrobe type dramas that many churches sported, but the hard core real life honest to God statements made by the top playwrights of the time: Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller. On the campus, known as the hill, we academically studied the theological basis of Love, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation. Under the demands and pressure of Festival Theatre productions we lived it. While some in the church looked askance at what I was talking about, I did produce, direct, and act in some 150 productions in the United Presbyterian Church as a minister over a period of 15 years until a dream outgrew the reality.

The Theatre Muse smiles brightly on Colorado with brilliant, talented, astonishing actors, directors, producers, set, sound, and costume designers.

Just about everyone knows of the highly successful Temple Buell Theatre in the Denver Center for Performing Arts Complex, and the Tony Award winning Denver Center Theatre Company, but there are some amazing high quality small theatres very few pay attention to, much less know about. My dream: I want everyone to know about them. I want the artists to become household names. I want the artists to know their dreams speak volumes to this upside down crazy world we call home. I want the small struggling theatre companies working on a prayer and a shoestring to have the same kind of play the Buell gets. Unrealistic maybe, but it’s a dream, and a valid one.

Theatre can do what nothing else in our culture can do: inspire, launch dreams, provide an honest silly moment of carefree laughter, challenge dyed in the wool thought processes and wobbly convictions that become hard core because they are wobbly.

The playwright frequently accomplishes what the priest only dreams about. To think without fearing the unknown, create community instantly, look truth in the eye with freedom to embrace it or walk away from it, laugh, sneer, cry, smile, agree, disagree, hopefully to understand the disagreement more than before. To honor humanity, invite the spirit to grow, to celebrate, investigate and explore not what should be but what is, and consequently, what can be.

Colorado BackStage exists to celebrate theatre in its glory, trials, and tribulations, bowing to the artists, recognizing the artist in all of us. It can. It will. It does.

Live theatre has and does turned lives upside down and inside out, validating a history gone a wry, celebrating creativity, thought, and the magical essence of being alive. Which is what it is all about anyway, and why I’m here.

You may not agree with the premises, and that is more than OK. Disagreement leads to clarification on a variety of levels. Disagreement teases the imagination to wider perceptions and understanding of our world and the world that encompasses us. It can lead to boring a hole through diversity with its high separating, menacing walls.

Colorado BackStage speaks to the magic of the theatre community, to our humanity, which binds us together, whether we want it to or not, and to the spirit always hungering for truth.