The 2025 summer rep season has roared to life in Pagosa Springs, delivering an audacious mix of laughter, debauchery and, yes, Elizabethan-era musical theater satire.
Audiences have already been treated to “Something Rotten!,” the sly, riotously irreverent Broadway hit, and, just this past weekend, they braved the thrilling descent into jazz-age excess with the opening of Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.”
This weekend, the temperature rises again as both productions return in full production. “The Wild Party” will play Friday, June 20, at 7 p.m., followed by “Something Rotten!” on Saturday, June 21, at 7 p.m. If you’re the kind of theatergoer who likes your musicals shaken, not stirred, this pairing hits the sweet spot between biting parody and feral sensuality.
“Something Rotten!” is the kind of show that practically smirks at its own cleverness, and rightly so. Conceived by Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick with John O’Farrell, the show tosses Renaissance England into a Monty Python blender, producing a farcical feast of scrambled Shakespeare, meta-musical references and chorus lines that won’t quit. It’s the kind of crowd-pleaser that Broadway critics pretended to sniff at but secretly watched twice. It earned 10 Tony nominations in 2015, winning one for Christian Borle’s outrageously self-delighted Shakespeare.
“The Wild Party,” by contrast, is a velvet-gloved gut punch. Lippa’s adaptation of Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 narrative poem isn’t so much a musical as it is a psychological masquerade ball with jazz hands.
Lippa’s score lurches between torch-song confessions and percussive mania, giving the ensemble plenty of chances to bare their souls and, occasionally, their teeth.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the next chapter of the season is already in motion. Rehearsals are underway for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” a pitch-black Edwardian comedy that skewers class, greed and serial homicide with astonishing grace.
Winner of four Tony Awards in 2014, including Best Musical, this clever show follows the hapless Monty Navarro as he discovers he’s ninth in line to inherit a family fortune and decides to eliminate the competition. One by one. With songs.
The score, by Steven Lutvak and Robert L. Freedman, is all champagne bubbles and arsenic, light, effervescent and laced with poison. Think “Downton Abbey” meets “Sweeney Todd,” only with a higher body count and better hats.
“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” will open June 27 at 7 p.m., and if the first two productions are any indication, this rep season is shaping up to be less a curated festival than a theatrical roller coaster engineered by a cabal of mad geniuses.
All shows are playing at Pagosa Springs Center for the Arts, 2313 Eagle Drive, through August. For tickets and show information please visit pagosacenter.org or call (970) 731-SHOW (7469).
