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Best National Appearance by a Colorado Treasure

Navajo Weaving Stamp

Last August, a selection from the Denver Art Museum was reduced to a tiny canvas, but it reached a global audience. An intricate 1940s Navajo weaving by master artisan Daisy Taugelchee was one of ten artifacts depicted in "The Art of the American Indian" stamp, a series of 37-cent stamps released by the United States Postal Service. The inclusion of Taugelchee's piece, which has a permanent home in the DAM's Native American Arts collection, lent a bit of Colorado cachet to letters sent around the world.

Best Development for Western Playwrights

Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region

Organized by Pamela Jamruszka of the Red Rocks Community College theater faculty, and with the support of the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the first Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region featured three intense days of panels, workshops, discussions and play readings. The series was designed to inform and inspire, and to begin the process of putting Western playwrights on the map.

Best Theater Production

The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?

Edward Albee's play about a man in love with a goat makes you question every assumption about sexual mores you've ever made. Just where are the boundaries between the permissible and the impermissible, and what do they mean in the lives of actual people? The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? is skillfully written, funny, silly, profound and disquieting all at once; the script includes one of the most extraordinary scenes in modern dramaturgy, as the wife who's discovered her husband's animal obsession careens from rage to helpless laughter, laughter to anguish and anguish to bitterness, breaking vases and furniture as she goes. Director Nagle Jackson gave this strange, daring piece a top-notch production at Curious, with an expressive cast, intelligent direction and an elegant set.

Best Dramatic Script

Inventing Van Gogh
Steven Dietz

Inventing Van Gogh unleashes a torrent of ideas about art -- possibly enough for a dozen plays. But its primary achievement is illuminating the artist's struggle to wrench meaning from a recalcitrant world, and to ransom his own soul. Steven Dietz's script incorporates historical fact without lecturing; bits of Vincent van Gogh's letters erupt into the text like cries from the grave. We're told that by the time van Gogh created his later works, he was squeezing paint directly onto the canvas rather than using a brush, and shaping it with such force that it retained fragments of his fingernails. There's something of this intensity in the form and content of the play itself, with its swirling structure, density of allusion and furious commitment to discovery.

Best Actor in a Drama

Brett Aune
Inventing Van Gogh

In a luminous portrayal, Brett Aune made Vincent van Gogh an essentially gentle and guileless man, a little uncomfortable in his own body. Aune possessed an arrogance that stemmed from the artist's bone-deep understanding of the rightness of his work, coupled with the insecurity of someone who has laid bare his heart and received only contempt and indifference in return. The image of Aune's van Gogh wandering into the night with four flickering candles on his hat remains indelible.

Best Actress in a Drama

Laura Norman
Angels in America

Angels in America's Harper is a pill-popping young Mormon wife who spends half her time yearning for her faithless husband and the other half in a fantasy. She could easily seem fey or just plain irritating. But Laura Norman moderated Harper's dopey ethereality with a wry humor and a sense of groundedness. Her interpretation was potent, but also wonderfully unassuming.

Best Supporting Actor in a Drama

Christopher Leo
Inventing Van Gogh

Christopher Leo gave two confident star turns in Inventing van Gogh -- as an unscrupulous art authenticator named Bouchard, and as the painter Paul Gauguin. Bouchard was self-mockingly mannered, effete in the most amusing way, while Gauguin was arrogant and thick-skinned. Both characters possessed a juicy vitality that served as a perfect foil for the other actors' lower-key interpretations. Leo was obviously having a lot of fun on stage, and his enjoyment was infectious.

Best Supporting Actress in a Drama

Denise Perry-Olson
Old Times

Harold Pinter's Old Times is a bleak, enigmatic play, but Denise Perry-Olson's sensual energy and radiant smile animated it. Her Kate -- sophisticated, sexy and well-traveled -- flirted equally with onetime best friend Anna, and with Anna's husband, Deeley. It sometimes seemed she was about to stride off with Bas Blue's entire production.

Best Musical

Cabaret

Many regular customers of Boulder's Dinner Theatre stayed away from Cabaret. The show's seedy settings, writhing dance numbers and uncomfortable focus on fascism clearly set it apart from most BDT fare. But in a just world, it would have attracted dozens of people who normally never set foot in a conventional dinner theater. Director Michael J. Duran's production was a visceral treat, with fantastic music, deft staging and vivid, all-stops-out performances. Brian Mallgrave, with a fresh take on the familiar Emcee character, and Alicia Dunfee as Sally Bowles were especially good.

Best Actor in a Musical

Nicholas Sugar
Bat Boy: The Musical

Bat Boy: The Musical is based on a character in the Weekly World News, a bat-human creature found in a cave. In this musical, he's discovered by some teenagers, one of whom he bites. Nicholas Sugar -- an actor we should be seeing a lot more of -- plays the role full-tilt. He's weird, comic, scary, athletic and pathetic. He squeaks and gibbers, scuttles about the stage and hangs upside down from furniture. Sugar is particularly funny in the show's My Fair Lady takeoff, as he's taught to speak with a BBC accent and to drink his tea with his pinky primly raised.

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