'Animal Farm,' 'Hair' left biggest impression in 2022 | John Moore

It’s telling that the most impactful play and musical of the 2022 Colorado theater year have been freaking people out, in very different ways, for more than 130 years.

The Arvada Center’s “Animal Farm” and Miners Alley Playhouse’s “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” both turned out to be surprisingly urgent commentaries on who we are as a fractured and fractious nation – and world – in 2022.

“Animal Farm,” newly adapted by director Jessica Robblee, came out of nowhere as one of three repertory plays competing for Arvada Center audiences’ attention early in the year. Until it opened one day after Russia invaded Ukraine. The same Russia whose aggressions, invasions and exploitations inspired George Orwell to write “Animal Farm” back in 1943. There was fleeting optimism that ordinary Russians would not support a specious war against a neighboring country but, because Vladimir Putin’s Ministry of Misinformation controls all messaging, polls have put Russian support for the invasion at as high as 90 percent.

Poor dumb animals. 

For Orwell, the “Animal Farm” lightbulb went off when he saw an image of a small boy whipping a huge cart-horse to make it turn. It struck Orwell that if the horse only became aware of its own strength, “it could buck up and throw that kid 20 feet in the air,” Robblee said. But, chances are, that horse never realized its power.

In the story, a group of exploited barnyard animals overthrow their human masters and set up a new system based on fairness and equality. But soon classes and divisions form among the animals, some of whom begin to take on human-like proclivities like ambition, greed and cruelty. Before long the animals find themselves the subjects of a dictatorship far more oppressive and heartless than the one before. That’s a story we have seen play out countless times across the world, but what made the Arvada Center’s past-is-present staging of this play so particularly chilling is how closely it mirrored new threats to our own democracy since the rise of Donald Trump, and the endless propaganda, insurrection and electoral subversion he has wrought. Orwell’s 79-year-old story played out like a direct commentary on a man whose ability to manipulate and incite the ignorant, sheep-like masses with fake news and gobbledy-speak poses the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.

“I think in a lot of ways, we are the horse now,” Robblee said.

Poor dumb animals.

“This play is so relevant to what we have been through as a country for the past five years,” said actor Sean Scrutchins. “This happened then, this is happening now, and this will happen again.”

What made Robblee’s adaptation and staging so fresh and accessible despite its dire overtones were its playfulness and the utter joy her cast took in staging a story that had the energy of a children’s theater show – but it was anything but.

Alex Miller, editor of OnStage Colorado, said Robblee pulled it all off “with a singular vision that really sings.”

It was important to her, Robblee said. “that the animals found as much celebration as possible in what they discovered before they found themselves within the thing they hated. That way, in the end, they really understood what they had lost.”

Meanwhile, in Golden, director Len Matheo breathed new life into a presumably dated Broadway warhorse by populating it with a more authentic and inclusive cast than even the barrier-busting Broadway original produced.

Matheo’s 12-person, multi-racial and multi-gender ensemble looked like a true cross-section of America in 1968 – and 2022. It included at least two nonbinary actors and another whose name and fluid identity actually changed during the course of the summer run. Matheo dared to cast a trans woman as anthropologist Margaret Mead, a role that for 54 years has been played mostly by a performer in drag. He also cast a Puerto Rican actor in the all-important role of Claude – written for the stage as a white kid from Flushing (and in the film as an Oklahoma redneck) who is killed in Vietnam. Matheo says he did not do that to make a statement, “but when you see a young Puerto Rican man who everybody loves lying on the ground dead at the end, yeah, it means something,” he said.

The oldest person in the cast was 32, but most were under 25 – and that, he said, was intentional. His actors were largely of the same age as the young men who were being drafted into the war.

“But the biggest difference we added to the show was the nonbinary aspect,” Matheo said. “Elderly and teens are the most vulnerable populations in our country right now, and I wanted a representative version of what a teen looks like today. That’s a nonbinary kid, a Black kid, a white kid with money, a trans kid – and in some ways it’s more dangerous out there for a kid today than it was in the 1960s. As the parent of a nonbinary, trans teen myself, that was meaningful to me. Even though this story is set in the 1960s, I wanted other parents to walk into our theater and say, ‘Those look like the kids of today.'”

There were many other reasons “Hair” fully landed its message of love and acceptance while reveling fully in its once-taboo themes like race, nudity, draft dodging, drugs and sexuality.

Matheo’s company infused visceral new power into its “Hair” by cramming it like gunpowder into the explosively intimate confines of the 130-seat Miners Alley Playhouse. There was nowhere to hide. And why would you want to?

“This company has created a little corner of the Summer of Love in downtown Golden,” Miller wrote. 

Credit is due Music Director David Nehls for thoughtful re-arrangements that forced audiences to listen to these familiar old songs anew. Like, for example, opening the show with P-Jay Adams, as Hud, singing “Aquarius” lightly, almost as a prayer.

At the end of the show, nearly the entire audience was up on the stage letting the sun shine in, both on a dusty old musical, and on what an American theater stage can and should look like at this time of awakening in the national performing-arts community.  

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 22nd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 of the best stories from the past year without categories or nominations.