Magic Moments: 'It's good theater karma'

LITTLETON – Every non-pandemic spring since 1983, Magic Moments has presented a massive … massive! … pop-music revue that gathers able-bodied and special-needs performers of all ages on the same stage to sing, dance, ham it up, laugh, cry and commune, side by side.

OK, not so massive this COVID comeback year – the cast size is a record-low of just … 106! It’ll take a few years for this all-welcoming company to build back up to past years, when the ensemble size has typically exceeded 200.

In short, Magic Moments is a magnificent spectacle of musical mayhem fostered in an environment of acceptance, growth, learning and hugs. So many hugs.

Last week, veteran special-needs actor Aaron Rendoff quietly walked into a rehearsal in progress and handed over a letter to be printed in the program. To the staff, cast and crew, he wrote: “Thanks for bringing sunshine and joy to all lives who meet you.”

Rendoff, who has spastic cerebral palsy and an autism spectrum disorder, is one of an estimated 6,500 who have appeared in this one-of-a-kind show that has been seen by 92,000 over the past 39 years. They range in age from 5 to 85, from novices to the occasional professional ringer. Many of them, like Rendoff, have come back year after year for decades. For some of the profoundly disabled, this is the only performance opportunity they will ever have, and they look forward to it all year.

Everyone who is cast is put into a minimum of four musical numbers. The 2022 show, to be presented Thursday through Sunday (March 24-27) at Littleton High School, includes 700 costumes. The organization required to pull it all together would make an air-traffic controller's knees buckle.

The head traffic cop is one of the most underappreciated men in Colorado theater. He goes by KQ (short for Ken Quintana, if you must know). He is a biochemist, underwater engineer and former novitiate who lived in a monastery for three years. And since the late 1970s, it is safe to suggest no one has directed more performers on Colorado stages outside of a school. The number is nearing five figures.

KQ takes great care to craft each year’s revue with some semblance of a plot and a few recognizable characters amid a dizzying array of showtunes, popular radio songs and rock classics – many cleverly revised to fit the story. This year, the 43-song score includes tunes from Queen, Johnny Cash, Bon Jovi, Carly Rae Jepsen, David Bowie, Jesse J, Shania Twain, Meat Loaf and Country Joe MacDonald; as well as showtunes from musicals like “The Book of Mormon,” “Aida,” “Mamma Mia,” “Newsies,” “Hair,” “The Wiz” and “tick, tick … BOOM!”

Some years, the show addresses serious issues, such as 2019’s Green Day-inspired “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” which tackled addiction and depression (in the continuing midst of an abundance of cute-kid frivolity). But don’t look for a heavy moral in this year’s show, KQ promises. The much-lighter effort, titled “Take the High Road,” is set in Nederland and pokes topical fun at small-town life, hippies, unchecked growth policies and ever-present cannabis. A quintessential Magic Moments song from the revue is “Not Dead Yet,” which has been modified from “Monty Python’s Spamalot” to wink at Nederland’s wildly odd “Frozen Dead Guy Days.”

Froth is the flavor of the day, especially after what the Magic Moments community has been through since “Take the High Road” was shut down by COVID just 10 days before its scheduled opening in March 2020.

It’s now been 36 months since the last time Magic Moments has been able to work its, well, magic, on a live audience. Sonsharae Tull, who is participating in her fifth Magic Moments show, this time as one of 12 resident choreographers, was in the audience herself when she experienced her quintessential Magic Moments … moment.

“I was sitting in the audience when a man named P.J. Bernardis, who has Down’s Syndrome, got to sing his own song with all of these dancing girls around him,” Tull said. “The crowd started hollering for him, and he just started to perform bigger and bigger. In that moment he just came alive, and before you know it, I was crying, too, because his spirit was shining so bright.

“These people are told their whole lives that they can’t  … and then they get onstage in a Magic Moments show and they realize, ‘Oh, yes, I can.’ And so does everyone watching them.”

It was demoralizing and isolating for a community that is already more isolated than most to have to sit out from performing these past two years. 

“But we hunkered down, became stronger and would not be denied,” KQ said. Added his wife, Production Manager Kamala Madden Quintana: “It was sheer determination and will that drove us to get this show on the stage.”

That’s because, after all the company had been through, and it was time to again hold Magic Moments auditions in December, Omicron was spiking and COVID positivity rates was surging beyond 30 percent. Many in this already immune-compromised performing family could not be sure they would be safe participating. Still, the leaner 2022 cast does include 32 special-needs actors, all of whom are offered a “buddy” to help them throughout the lengthy creative process.

Through the years, a number of the area’s most accomplished stage actors – some with disabilities themselves – have joined Magic Moments as featured players. They include award-winning vocalist Leonard Barrett Jr. and former Phamaly Theatre Artistic Director Regan Linton; as well as Elizabeth Welch (who has since performed in the Broadway company of “The Phantom of the Opera” for more than a decade), Traci Kern, Drew Frady, Damon Guerrasio, Suzanne Nepi and the late Daniel Langhoff.  

But the reason audiences come back year after year is to see the special needs stars shine. A longtime cast member is former University of Colorado football star Ed Reinhardt, who was the nation’s leading receiver in 1984 when an on-field collision burst a blood vessel in his brain and put him in a coma for 62 days. Reinhardt has not walked, thought or talked normally since. He was told his brain was no longer capable of even simple memorization, and that he likely would not speak again in anything more than one-word bursts.

That was before Magic Moments.

Almost every year since 1997, Reinhardt has carried a signature solo song that never fails to bring the crowd to its feet. In the early years, a partner would stand next to him and whisper the lyrics to him as he sang songs like “Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like” from “The Will Rogers Follies.” But in recent years, his brain has defied doctors’ orders, and he now happily belts out numbers on his own.

This year’s guest performers are longtime actor/choreographer Adrianne Hampton and Anna Maria High, who first appeared in a Magic Moments show when she was 13. Even then, the naturally gifted future opera singer was singled out as a featured player. Her recent stage appearances include Town Hall Arts Center’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” BDT Stage’s “White Christmas” and singing the national anthem at a Colorado Rockies game.

This year she is happily embracing her inner diva by playing a fun, Nora Desmond-type character who helps the Nederland townies fight against greedy out-of-state developers. (Guess who gets the last word, er, high note?) High performs three showcase numbers, including “It’s in His Kiss” – that’s the “Shoop, Shoop” song that Cher brought back to the top of the charts in 1990.

“Magic Moments was my first stage experience outside of grade school,” High said. “When I found Magic Moments, I found my people.” This is the first time her busy performing schedule has allowed her to participate since 2012. To High, if she’s ever available, she’s in.

“I think Magic Moments gives good theater karma,” High said. “More important – I think it raises good humans.” And by that, she means both on the stage and those watching in the audience. Seeing the show, and taking in the goodness it puts out into the world, High said, “will make you a better person.”

Both Tull and High have performed over the years alongside their mothers. Some years, there are three generations of the same family in the same cast. “My mother is not a performer,” Tull said, “but she loves Magic Moments because it lifts your whole spirit to see these people shining so bright.”

People like Rendoff, who started with Magic Moments when he was a teenager and is now 41. “The greatest compliment I ever got was when Aaron performed for the first time, and he told me, 'This is the first time anyone has ever treated me like a normal teenager,' ” said KQ.

That kind of thing is what makes Magic Moments “the best kind of community theater there is,” said Denver native John Carroll Lynch, a veteran film and TV actor (“Big Sky”) who was directed by KQ as a high-school student and returns to Denver to watch Magic Moments whenever his schedule allows. “This is theater that’s being done for all the right reasons.”