Feature: Arkansas Writer Visits Santa Fe Playhouse to See A GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER

This summer Broadway World went on the road to catch some amazing entertainment, and one of the stops was at the Santa Fe Playhouse, 142 E De Vargas St, Santa Fe, New Mexico, to see A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER. If you haven’t been to this charming venue, you definitely need to check it out. The theatre, like the town, calls to your inner artist to bare your soul and contribute your talents to the pulse of the city. I instantly fell in love with this creative outlet. 

This theatre troupe far exceeded our expectations. This farcical musical follows Monty Navarro (John Alejandro Jeffords) as he is informed that he is ninth in line for the D’Ysquith fortune. Ready to claim his place in the family that shunned his mother, the members in line to control the money all seemed to die of natural and not so natural causes, and they were all played by the ultra-talented David Stallings. The characters kept coming, some male, some female, some with different accents and different mannerisms, and he owned every one of them! For a complete review of the show, read the article by Broadway World’s writer Jackie Camborde.  

Before the show, we were treated to a backstage tour and given the history of this amazing venue and area and hopes for the future by Executive Director, Colin Hovde. 

Colin Hovde: If you go to the end of the block, there's a little plaque that tells you about this neighborhood. It's supposedly one of the oldest neighborhoods in the colonized United States. The church just down the street is the first church built in the colonized United States, and we have the oldest house in America. Our theatre is on a very historic Street, Devargas St. and we as an organization have been around for 101 years. Last year was our Centennial year.  

BWW: Wow! That’s amazing! 

Hovde: Yes! We started in 1919, but then incorporated in 1922. We were very itinerant for the first 40 years or so and performed in various different places all around town. Then in 1964, a group of individuals signed the lease on this building to rent it. It was an old livery stable, then it was a bicycle repair shop, and then it was an auto repair shop, and then we signed a lease. So, it followed the trajectory of travel, until it became a theater. In the late 70s, we bought the building, and now we own the land and the building, which is pretty amazing. There's a gentleman in town, Argos, who was the Artistic Director for a while and now runs another theater company, but he actually laid these bricks that we are standing on and he made the wooden sign up front. 

BWW: The building is beautiful.  

Hovde: About two years ago, we renovated this office and one of the carpenters that works with us on a regular basis, noticed that the door was a weird size, so he said, ‘let me make one that matches these doors.’ So, he made this from scratch. This building has had very intentional, personal touches over the years making it a very quirky, but beautiful theater. There is no elevator, and because we are in such an old neighborhood and building, our internet is dismal. It's DSL dialup. So, it's really kind of crazy, but that's part of the charm of the building, the beauty of it. It has a lot of character. The actual theatre itself – I love it so much. 

As we headed into the house, I could understand why Hovde loved this theatre so much. 

Hovde: We have 75 bolted in seats, and then we can add enough to get to 99 seats. We are a 99-seat proscenium theater-nice and intimate. And as you'll see with the show tonight, we've been sold out for this show, which is really exciting. There's not a bad seat in this house, even if you're sitting in the back. Actually, most directors love those two back seats, because you don't have to sit next to anybody, and you get to watch the whole audience reacting to the show. It's a beautiful little space. We've continually added and added things like lighting instruments and lighting positions and dimmers. But it has a lot of heart. During the pandemic, I thought I might not produce theater, direct theater, or be involved in theatre again, because it was dark for so long, so when I first walked in here, I almost started crying. Theaters are really magical spaces in my opinion, because they're really built for one purpose, which is witnessing and sharing. So, seeing this theatre that has so much heart and knowing that it had been dark for so long, it was really beautiful to breathe it back to life. I loved replacing the light bulbs and cleaning off the things to get this space ready to welcome an audience back.  

BWW: How long have you been with the Santa Fe Playhouse?   

Hovde: I've been with the company about 2 1/2 years. It was around June of 2021 that I started working with the company.  

BWW: Oh, so you are still relatively new. 

Hovde: I was the Interim Managing Director for four months, helping them return the theatre to live performances after the pandemic, and then around the time my contract was ending, they offered me a position as Executive Director, and I've been on as Executive Director since then.  

BWW: And this is an Equity theatre? 

Hovde: We're technically a non-Equity Theater, but we consider ourselves a professional theater and hire Equity and non-Equity actors. We pay all of the artists involved. We definitely are a nonprofit. So, there are volunteers that definitely volunteer their time, but coming back from the pandemic, one of the priorities that we as a team and as a Board really wanted to prioritize was valuing people's time and energy that they put into it and not exploiting anyone. Theater, as a field, needs a lot of resources, and it's very easy to intentionally or unintentionally exploit people's time and energy and passion. So, we really, coming back from the pandemic, wanted to have a commitment to respecting people's time, energy and passion. We raise the amount that we pay actors and designers. We make sure that when we're building a set, we're paying carpenters to build it, instead of just hoping that people will show up with the skills necessary to build a complex set. With things like hanging lights, you need to know a certain amount about the technology, so we really upped our production values simply by prioritizing paying people for the work that they were doing. This does have ramifications in terms of how much it costs to put on a play, but I think it is really important to value people’s time and knowledge and talents.  

BWW: I really love that. What is the mission of the Playhouse?  

Hovde: Right now, the mission is to connect artists and audience. There's a lot more to it, but the mission is really to connect the artist and the audience, to use theater as a medium to collectively heal and celebrate and find joy. We're just in the process of the final stages of strategic planning process, so we'll have a revised mission sometime very shortly in the future, but I really love that at the core of it, our mission is really to connect the artist in the audience. We're putting on pieces that sometimes are very unexpected for our audience. Last year we did a piece called EVERYBODY by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It's basically the play EVERY MAN but reinvented for modern times. EVERY MAN is the first play ever written in the English language. So, in EVERY MAN, God comes down and asks every man to take an accounting of his life. In this modern version, the way that Brandon wrote it, the actors get on stage and there's a lottery. In front of the audience, they're told which character they're going to play—every man, death, love, friendship, and so everybody gets their roles and then you go into the play. There's like 100 and something different variants of who could play what roles on what night. 

BWW: I like that. That sounds like fun.  

Hovde: It’s really cool, but that show was very unexpected and sort of took people off guard, but people loved it. So yeah, we do a real mix. A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER is a musical farce, Broadway style musical that swept the Tony’s a few years back, and people love that as well. So, we do a real mixture of productions. Sometimes we are pushing the envelope or have challenging pieces, and some are more accessible. We did A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD, which is a children's musical, and adults loved it just as much as the younger ones. There were adult professional actors performing, but it's really for a younger audience and people just loved it, just ate it up. It was so beautiful and fun. So, we have a real wide variety of what that means to connect the artists in the audience. Sometimes, we do post show conversations. Last year we did a piece that toured to different restaurants and bars, and the audience sat around while one person just told a story like a traveling troubadour. You know, there's different ways that we find to make that connection happen.  

BWW: Do you have an educational youth program?  

Hovde: We do. It's relatively new. I mean during the pandemic the artistic director really wanted to get an education program started, and it started out with just one class for some actors with a professional teacher. We called it the Playhouse studio. In 2022, we expanded that into six different classes about different components of acting and directing, and we added a two-week summer Shakespeare youth intensive program for ages 12 to 18. Over the course of those two weeks, they rehearsed and put up their own production of a Shakespeare play. It was pretty incredible. This year they did AS YOU LIKE IT. Last year they did A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, and it was just fantastic. It really started to build community, in fact, a number of those students that were in the summer youth intensive are volunteer ushers for this performance. You'll literally see them when you walk in the door. They're so passionate about theater. Next year, we have hopes and plans for two different programs. We want to have a two-week intensive program on Shakespeare and a two-week musical theater intensive. So, we're just growing that organically. As those programs grow, we're finding lessons about how to do student matinees, the sequence and timing, and building relationships with schools. It's nothing that can happen overnight, but it's about building relationships.  

BWW: So, what got you in the theater?  

Hovde: I started in middle school. People always told me I was a bit of a clown and said ‘you're gonna be in theatre one day and I ended up doing it. I went from Middle school to high school, and then I went off to school in North Carolina at The North Carolina School of the Arts. I studied acting and directing and followed that passion. I never really looked back, you know? I found a lot of value in the community that it builds with the other artists, and I think I was always personally impacted by seeing how theater could shift paradigms and open people's perspective up to understanding more of the world, having more compassion. I think that there are times when you put on a production, you're in a production, or you're involved in a production, and you can actually really see people's minds open. That's why I personally like post show conversations, because strangers sitting next to each other start having conversations about what they saw. After a show as people are walking down the street, they introduce themselves to somebody that they have never met and say what did you think of XYZ moment?  

BWW: I do that all the time! 

Hovde:I find it beautiful. It's like there's not many places that we can go where we really do get to meet completely new people and share unique experiences with them. I think theater and live performance are some of those places, so that's why I got involved in theater.  

BWW: What do you want for the future of the Playhouse.  

Hovde: Like I said, we've been going through the strategic planning process. Last year was our Centennial year and in the last year and a half to two years, we have more than doubled our annual operating budget. So, speaking for the Playhouse team and board members, I'd say we really want to serve our community more fully. We want to be around for another 100 years. I think there’s a beauty that we’ve been around for 100 years, but I don’t think we can coast on that. I think we need to, show after show, continue to bring really powerful productions as a gift for the audience. So, to me, it’s about sustainability. It’s about consistently bringing high class theater work to Santa Fe. We have The Opera, amazing dance, great food, and one of the largest art markets in the country. Theater here in Santa Fe has never really blossomed in the way that opera or visual art really has, so I think that our hope is that the Playhouse really continues to grow and continues to be a source of great experiences and memories for the Santa Fe people and visitors.  

BWW: Is there anybody you want to thank?  

Hovde: That's a great question. Recently our Artistic Director Robyn Rikoon submitted her resignation. She's stepping down, and I'm going to be Interim Artistic Director for a while as we do a search. I’d like to thank her for the work that she's done. She really helped move the theatre forward. I’d also like to thank the Santa Fe Playhouse Board of Directors. I don't know how well you know boards of directors, but nonprofits really are buoyed and supported by these volunteer boards. They give their time, treasures, talent, and tie ins. That’s the way we call it-the 4 T’s and share their financial resources and their connections. Sometimes they volunteer their time, introduce their friends, and sometimes they write checks. Also, I want to thank our staff. I don't think we can thank them enough. The team that coalesced here are just incredible and really, really working very hard to bring this theater to where it is and continue moving it forward. 

BWW: What events are coming up for the Santa Fe Playhouse? 

Hovde: You should come back in about a month or so for our Fiesta melodrama. It's a really fascinating piece that is originally written by anonymous Santa fe-ans every year. It captures what happened over the course of the last year and sort of critiques the community of Santa Fe. It's a traditional melodrama, so there is booing and hissing and cheering, and there's lots of songs and parody songs. It's really adorable and beautiful and pretty special to our community. It usually happens, historically, around the Burning of Zozobra. Are you familiar with the Burning of Zozobra? 

BWW: No. 

 Hovde: So, around the time that Mary Austin created the Playhouse with a group of individuals, there was this whole influx of artists moving to Santa Fe. One of the other artists, William Howard “Will” Shuster, Jr., started this thing called Burning of Zozobra in 1924 in his backyard, and now it happens at Fort Marcy Park, which is just a few blocks away. The idea is that throughout the year, Zozobra sends his Gloomies around to bring everybody down. So, once a year, the people of Santa Fe gather together in the effigy of Zozobra and burns this giant statue to get rid of the Gloomies. There's rave music, and it's just so much fun. The festival is turning 100 next year, so the melodrama that we do happens at the same time as The Burning of Zozobra, and they're kind of linked in ways, because The Burning is Zozobra is about burning the Gloomies and getting rid of your negative energy from the year, and the melodramas are about reflecting on the last year and what happened and making fun of it, laughing at it, you know. So, these are fun traditions, and if I understand the melodrama correctly, when it was originally written, it was making fun of what's happened in the last year and placing the melodrama 100 years in the past. It's always been a kind of historical piece, even though it's written about the last year. The reason why the writers are anonymous is because some years they say some pretty offensive things to the politicians or to this person or that person. So, at some point they were like, no, no, it's anonymous. No one knows who wrote it. We're just putting on what they wrote, so there's a plausible deniability and we can say whatever we want in the melodrama and really roast the town in a way. It’s a fun, quirky little thing. 

BWW: Thank you so much for showing us your wonderful theatre. I had a great time getting to know Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Playhouse! 

If you are in the area, BEAR GREASE LIVE is currently on stage through Sunday, Aug. 20. BEAR GREASE LIVE is A Treaty 6 Indigenous twist on the classic musical Grease by hip-hop duo LightningCloud. 

Featuring an all-Indigenous cast, this hilarious twist on the 1978 classic, Grease reimagines the beloved musical as culturally relevant with Indigenous humor and pride. BEAR GREASE is the brainchild of Crystle Lightning (Cree) and MC RedCloud (Huichol), a husband-and-wife hip-hop duo who go by the name LightningCloud.

With Crystle Lightning as Sandy, Henry Andrade as Danny, Teneil Whiskeyjack as Marty, Tammy Rae as Rezzo, Rodney McLeod as Canuckie, Nipíy Iskwew as Jan, Bryce Morin as Roger, Melody McArthur as Frenchie, Artson as Arty McFly, and Robert Mesa as Sonny Boy. The showrunner is Omar “Panda” Ornelas. Understudying the role of Frenchie is Ayla Coltman, and the role of Sonny Boy is Joel Oulette.

Tickets range from $30 - $75 and can be purchased by calling 505-988-4262, visiting santafeplayhouse.org/events/bear-grease/, or in person one hour before showtime.

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