By Charlie Miller, Resident Multimedia Specialist

If you haven’t seen our Online Fortune Teller yet, you MUST go check it out!

Here’s the deal: I wanted to create something entertaining and interactive online that

Kathleen Brady as our Fortune Teller

would allow audiences to browse through the season’s plays and learn about the different aspects of the productions. We came up with different categories and realized it would be fun for people to choose a category and find their play from there. There are some fun interactive card tricks on YouTube and from that we decided to turn the categories into tarot-like cards, inspired by the awesome season artwork. But then who would read the cards?

Growing up in Denver, I saw a lot of productions at the Denver Center Theatre Company. One of my favorites was Thorton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, which was produced when I was in high school in 2002. I’ll never forget Kathleen Brady (a favorite resident actor) as the Fortune Teller in that show. When I found out the costume was still in storage and Katheen was willing to do it, all of the pieces fell into place and the online Fortune Teller was born!

Well, first it took many hours of planning, filming, editing, and programming. Using 181 cards in her deck, the Fortune Teller invites viewers to choose categories of plays that pique their interest. Each category leads to another set of options, and eventually the Fortune Teller predicts which of the Denver Center’s ten productions the viewer will attend. The Online Fortune Teller is comprised of 62 final videos, averaging 55 seconds each, that are linked together using 188 YouTube buttons. With dozens of categories from which to choose, there are 124 possible outcomes.

I am really excited about the Online Fortune Teller because it is a fun and interactive new way for audiences to explore the plays in our season. We are always trying to find new methods of engaging people, and these interactive videos are really unique. Plus, Kathleen Brady is hilarious!

Click here to try it out:

Popularity: 9% [?]

Starting Monday, the WICKED trucks – 14 in all – rolled into Denver to begin loading in for the six-week run that begins tonight.  We caught a few photos of the proscenium being hung in The Buell Theatre today and the trucks unloading out front.

Popularity: 14% [?]

By Daniel L. Ritchie, Chairman and CEO, The Denver Center for the Performing Arts

Welcome to The Denver Center’s BLOG! We are really exited to launch this new part of our website where you can hear from many of the different voices at The Denver Center. This is a new way for you to connect with the Center, so read posts, look at behind-the-scenes pictures and videos, and don’t forget to interact, too. We’d love to hear from you, so please leave comments and ask questions.

I was so excited about the launch of our blog that I had to make a video to celebrate. Make sure you watch this—it’s a side of me you’ve never seen and are not likely to see ever again!

Popularity: 28% [?]

Bryce Baldwin with Kathleen McCall in Richard III. Photo by Terry Shapiro.

Colorado’s own Bryce Baldwin, who appeared in Denver Center Theatre Company productions of A Christmas Carol and Richard III, is out on the road as “Michael Banks” in Disney’s MARY POPPINS.  The show, which is headed for Denver next March, recently played an engagement in Minneapolis.  We’ll be getting updates from Bryce about life and performing on the road over the next few months.  And check out his interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune theatre critic Rohan Preston:  THE CHILDREN OF MARY POPPINS

Popularity: 17% [?]

Russell Hornsby as Walter Lee. Photo by Terry Shapiro.

But as we all know, the production was a triumph both as a human drama and a political statement. The issues the play raises about the hurdles African-Americans face trying to advance in a segregated society were new to mainstream theatre audiences. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson was struck by the play’s social resonance:  “A RAISIN IN THE SUN has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of anyone who sees it….It is a play about human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be their fate.”

The play stirred up considerable critical controversy at that time, in the days before the advances of the Civil Rights movement: Was the play intended for black or white audiences? Was this a specific story of a black family facing segregation on the South Side of Chicago, or a universal story about the power of the human spirit? Was Hansberry, who grew up in a middle class family, able to truthfully speak for members of the lower middle class?

To that last question, here’s what Hansberry had to say:  “I come from an extremely comfortable background, materially speaking. And yet we live in a ghetto, …which automatically means intimacy with all classes and all kinds of experiences. It’s not any more difficult for me to know the people I wrote about than it is for me to know members of my family. This is one of the things that the American experience has meant to Negroes. We are one people.”

To the second question, Hansberry responded:  “From the moment the first curtain goes up until the Youngers make their

Dawn Scott as Beneatha and Tyee Tilghmann as George Murchison. Photo by Terry Shapiro.

decision at the end, the fact of racial oppression, unspoken and unalluded to, other than the fact of how they live, is through the play. It’s inescapable. …It is always distinctly there but overtly it isn’t introduced until they are asked by the author to act on the problem which is the decision to move or not move out of this area.”

I believe this point, the fact that racism is inescapable, is one of the strongest reasons her play has become an American classic. Classics speak to us through time because something about them is still relevant to our lives, and even though we have an African-American President, racism is still inescapable in this country. And we still need plays like A RAISIN IN THE SUN to remind us of that.

One final note: I think it’s an incredible stroke of fate that RAISIN’s original director Lloyd Richards would go on to mentor playwright August Wilson whose work might never have been so readily accepted without Hansberry having prepared the ground.

Popularity: 20% [?]