Best Supporting Actor in a Drama 2013 | Ben BonenfantRed | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Supporting Actor in a Drama

Ben Bonenfant
Red

In Curious Theatre's Red, Ken was the kid who apprenticed with the overbearing, narcissistic artist Mark Rothko, making coffee, cleaning up, fetching Chinese food and enduring huge, pointless and unexpected rages. Ben Bonenfant's portrayal of Ken was vulnerable and self-effacing. But even as Ken soaked up the things the master had to teach, he also began to understand the weakness and self-contradiction at the heart of Rothko's posturing. You could see all this, as well as Ken's growing strength as a man and an artist, in Bonenfant's finely drawn performance.

Best Supporting Actor in a Musical

Nate Kissingford
Miracle on 34th Street

Nate Kissingford is only six years old. Still, we can't remember seeing an actor stop the action quite the way he did when little Tommy took the courtroom stand in the Arvada Center's Miracle on 34th Street and, with devastating innocence, utterly destroyed his prosecutor father's case against Kris Kringle. Cute kids often bring down the house, as Kissingford did. But it's a rare child who can perform with this much poise, timing, concentration and sweet lack of self-consciousness.

Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy

Deborah Persoff
The Play About the Baby

Magnificently stagey and at the same time deeply sincere, Deborah Persoff is a mainstay of the local theater scene and always a pleasure to watch, whether she's being wryly sophisticated, dead serious or What-Ever-Happened-to-Baby-Jane crazy. She got to strut all her comic stuff as Woman, half of an older couple determined to disabuse a younger couple of their illusions in Edward Albee's The Play About the Baby at Germinal Stage Denver this season. At one point she delivered a fabulous monologue about living the artist's life in Europe that described the painter who hanged himself for love of her and used every cliché author that Albee could get his hands on. Like almost everything Persoff does, it was pitch-perfect.

Best Supporting Actress in a Drama

Aimee Janelle Nelson
In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play

It requires a lot of daring to take on the role of Mrs. Daldry in In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, about a Victorian doctor who, in accordance with the practices of the day, cures hysteria by providing orgasms. As Mrs. Daldry in Equinox Theatre's production, Aimee Janelle Nelson had to portray complete sexual innocence and also deliver periodic on-stage orgasms — the kind of orgasms a woman might have if she'd never known such things were possible or been exposed to the sexual imagery we see everywhere today. Nelson has the kind of little-girl sweetness and vulnerability we associate with Marilyn Monroe. Her laughter is silvery and infectious; her hesitations speak volumes. To top it off, she plays the violin. Beautifully.

Best Supporting Actress in a Musical

Joannie Brosseau
42nd Street

Joannie Brosseau can sing. She can dance. She can play a wide range of roles, most of them with an irrepressible comic edge. Most of all, she has an indefinable quality that makes audiences snap into high alert whenever she steps on a stage. You could call her perky, but perky sounds mindless. Can you be smartly perky? That's certainly what Brosseau was in Boulder's Dinner Theatre's 42nd Street, bringing all her shine and energy to the part of Maggie Jones, kicking the action into high gear and encouraging her chorines to "Go Into Your Dance."

Best Theater Production

The Book of Mormon

A couple of hometown boys — Trey Parker and Matt Stone — made good, very good, with The Book of Mormon, which debuted on Broadway two years ago and started its tour in Denver last summer, with tickets selling out within hours of going on sale. The story of a couple of Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda, the show was just as mocking and funny as you'd expect from the creators of South Park, and also just as clever. It took on Mormonism and the horrors of poverty and violence, and somehow — without racism or callousness — made it all hysterically funny. The songs were tuneful, and the big, show-stopping numbers did indeed stop the show. Everything from the acting to the costumes to the tech was bright and tight, and it all worked together to create a blast of music, dirty jokes, color and hilarity. Miss it the first time around? The Book of Mormon is coming back this fall.

Best Theater Supporter

Gloria Shanstrom

As general manager of the Colorado Theatre Guild, Gloria Shanstrom maintains the group's website, stays in touch with companies around the state and administers the annual Henry Awards, among many other tasks. Wearing a second hat, she does publicity for several Colorado companies, providing perhaps the most competent and reliable service around. But her work is about much more than paperwork and administration. Shanstrom networks tirelessly; gives smart, disinterested advice; reaches out to new companies and if necessary helps them polish their image; attends dozens of shows; celebrates happy events with theater people, and grieves with those who've sustained losses. She soothes myriad frayed nerves and calms inflamed egos. Theater in this town would be far poorer without her.

Best Theatrical Date Night

Off-Center@The Jones

What goes on in the shadows of the Jones Theatre, hidden away on the back side of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, shouldn't be kept a secret: The Jones is home to the ongoing theatrical/performance/improv/crazy madness series Off-Center@The Jones, which produces about four shows each season, some of them ongoing and others a one-shot deal or with a limited run. Yet attending a show here is still a little like being part of a big, wonderful, funny secret, and part of the fun is that Off-Center shows sometimes start or end with a party, with beer and dance music included. Curated by Emily Tarquin and Charlie Miller, the current season of Off-Center has already broken our hearts with Drag Machine and inspired us with the interdisciplinary dance work Audio Kicks; throughout, the returning Cult Following, a live improv show that plays off memorable scenes from the film world, has kept us laughing, with the action continuing on second Thursdays every month through May. Still to come? Sweat: Improv on Bikes, for two days in May. Good thing you still have time to get in shape.

Best Transgender Comedian

Jordan Wieleba

Despite the fact that Joe Biden called transgender rights "the civil-rights issue of our time," standup comedy is still a world crawling with pre-Stonewall bigotry — which makes for some great tension when Jordan Wieleba lays her autobiographical transitioning stories on a mainstream comedy audience. Formerly of locally celebrated punk band Forth Yeer Freshman, Wieleba spent the first five years of her comedy career as a man, publicly becoming a woman both on the stage and in an in-the-works documentary, set for a 2014 release, that will conclude with her reassignment surgery this fall. While Wieleba is frequently seen in Denver's gay-friendly comedy scene, she can also be found in traditional comedy venues, where beer-pong bros may drop a heckle or two at her feet. Yet she has a brilliant resilience, with a graceful routine that somehow makes a polarizing issue universally funny.

Best Tribute Band

The Dirty Femmes

Jen Korte has been on the radar of the Denver music scene for some time now, but it was only last year that she introduced us to the Dirty Femmes, her Violent Femmes tribute band. Korte embodies the Femmes' gender-bending songs with a passion and accuracy that could only spring from a devoted fan. The pleasure she gleans from performing each memorable tune is only surpassed by the strident roars delivered by the fanboys and fangirls in the audience, clearly buzzing with delight at hearing their favorite album tracks live. And in a pleasantly bizarre act of postmodern transcendence, last November the band was joined by original Violent Femmes singer Gordon Gano for a pair of shows in Denver, backing up the Dirty Femmes on fiddle and approaching the mic for a song or two.

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