Best Relative Newcomer on the Denver Center Stage 2003 | John SloanLove's Labor's Lost | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Relative Newcomer on the Denver Center Stage

John Sloan
Love's Labor's Lost

John Sloan played the romantic, caustic, moody Berowne in Love's Labor's Lost with energy, wit, youthful exuberance and a genuine understanding of the language. His performance confirmed the expectation raised last year by his irrepressible Mairtin in A Skull in Connemara that this was an actor to watch.

Best On-Stage Coming of Age

Heather Nicolson
Collected Stories

As Collected Stories begins, a worshipful young writer comes to a famed and brilliant older author for advice. As the play progresses, the novice matures into a poised young comer, a surrogate daughter to and ultimate betrayer of her mentor. Heather Nicolson brought charm, vitality and intelligence to the role, along with an increasingly evident steely backbone.

Best Raunchy On-Stage Orgasm

Margot Kidder
The Vagina Monologues

Many a bold-faced name have given performances in Eve Ensler's original Off-Broadway hit, but it was Margot Kidder who brought it to life in Denver. She gave one of the wildest, most raucous and also most generous-spirited performances ever to grace an area stage, giving new meaning to the phrase "pulling out all the stops."

Best Professor You Wish You'd Had

Susan D'Autremont
Wit

In her first appearance as Professor E.M. Ashford, Susan D'Autremont was appropriately chilly and forbidding. But she brought an almost radiant kindness to her second appearance, at the bedside of her protegé Vivian Bearing, finally calling on Shakespeare's "flights of angels" to see the dying woman to her rest.

Best Interpretation of a Difficult Play

Terry Dodd
Wit

For Wit, Terry Dodd coaxed nuance and passion from a play that -- though it reliably reduces audiences to tears -- has always struck us as thin and smug. Her production created a connection to a deep and ancient sea of inner sadness that even Emma Thompson and HBO couldn't accomplish. We found a grace and truth here that we hadn't previously sensed, and the result was genuinely moving.

Best Reinterpretation of Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus: The Musical

I'd venture to guess that no one, but no one, would attend a production of Titus Andronicus except under duress, but this version is inviting and howlingly funny. Five actors played all of the roles, the set was a cunningly fitted-out van in the middle of an empty space, the death score was kept on a chalkboard, and songs and dances punctuated the murderous action. This was a clever, inventive and definitive production.

Best Director

Israel Hicks
King Hedley II

Hicks has been working with August Wilson's work for so long now that he almost seems to breathe these plays' silences, words and rhythms. For King Hedley II, he brought together a fine group of local and out-of-town actors, elicited generous, full-hearted performances from them and balanced the performances one against the other to create a layered, textured and absorbing world on stage.

Best Choreography

Crazy for You

The dancing in this show provided all the customary joys of synchronized kicking and tapping, along with loads of wittily unexpected moves. In "I've Got Rhythm," which served as the first-act finale, everything and anything became a musical instrument -- miners' helmets, pizza pans, a plunger and the dancers' bodies. The number built and built and built, and still you wanted it never to end. The original choreography is by the multi-award-winning Susan Stroman; local choreographer Tony Rintala re-created it with a group of talented dancers.

Best Set -- Big Budget

Michael Brown
Love's Labor's Lost

Michael Brown's set for Love's Labor's Lost provided all kinds of sweeps and nooks for playing areas, as well as embracing both the romantic and the rational. The outdoor scenes were all dappled, gray-green shadow, framed by beautifully twisting trees; inside, there were shelves of books and scientific instruments. And the lily pond added depth -- in every sense -- to the action.

Best Set -- Small Budget

Kenn Penn
Alchemy of Desire/ Dead Man's Blues

Kenn Penn created a gutsy, complex setting for Alchemy of Desire -- one of those archetypal, steamy, swampy bayous, with vines reaching everywhere. Even the weathered wooden steps and platforms reached out into and divided the audience.

Best Of Denver®

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