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Best Supporting Actor in a Musical

Tyrell Rae in Shrek

Playing Donkey, who insists on befriending a reluctant Shrek, Tyrell Rae was a hoot. He posed and preened, whined and threatened, cajoled and charmed, sang his lungs out and, with his cute little hooves, almost trotted away with the entire show. No matter how silly his antics, Donkey always had our sympathy in Shrek, and also somehow maintained a weird off-kilter dignity.

Best Theater Season

Curious Theatre Company

A literary S&M fest involving whips and leather; a one-man piece about sexual predation, rage, forgiveness and understanding; an examination of the very personal way a Boston woman experiences class, power and powerlessness; a wry comedy about two weary fortyish losers falling in love; and a brilliant play about a dead composer (Venus in Fur, All the Rage, Good People, Lucky Me and Charles Ives Take Me Home, respectively) — these were the offerings from Curious Theatre Company in the past year, as the company reaffirmed its primacy in producing fascinating new works, well-acted and mounted with care, passion and integrity.

Readers' choice: Curious Theatre Company

Best Theater Production

Charles Ives Take Me Home

One of those evenings of theater you felt blessed for having experienced, Charles Ives Take Me Home evoked thoughts and emotions you couldn't put into words. A beautiful script, beautifully brought to life by the director and her actors, transcendent and filled with music, the play tells the story of a violinist profoundly influenced by the work of composer Charles Ives and the daughter who, to the violinist's distress, is a dedicated jock. Ives himself makes a ghostly appearance. The play left the audience so entranced that a few members actually resented the applause that broke the silence of that crystalline final moment.

Readers' choice: The Book of Mormon

Best Original Script

Beets, Aurora Fox

Rick Padden's Beets isn't a perfect play, but it's an intelligent one that deals with an important and generally forgotten historical topic. During WWII, German prisoners were held in rural Colorado, and many worked on local farms. Set in Berthoud, Beets explores the tense relationships between the locals and the prisoners — in particular, between farmer Fred Hunt, whose son is fighting overseas, and a polite young German who's beginning to take an interest in Hunt's daughter, Anna. Padden has many quietly wise things to say here about rural life, war and forgiveness.

Best Costumes

Clare Henkel, The Great Gatsby, Arvada Center

A white suit, worn with a pale lavender shirt and a yellow bow tie. A patterned, slightly darker lavender dress that gently skims slim hips and beautifully complements the shirt. Long strings of beads, men in braces, a woman's cloche hat and a man's boater. Clare Henkel's costumes for The Great Gatsby were so elegantly form-flattering, and moved so beautifully with the actors wearing them, that you half wished for a return to the 1920s.

Best Museum Exhibit

Modern Masters

Courtesy Denver Art Museum

Exhibition-goers in Denver have gotten used to seeing the work of internationally famous artists, from van Gogh to Warhol. Rarely are the examples that wind up here the best efforts of those artists, however. Instead, we often get the middling if still noteworthy exemplars. Such was not the case with Modern Masters: 20th Century Icons From the Albright-Knox Gallery. Not only did the show include some of the biggest names in art show business — Gorky, Pollock, Motherwell and Rothko — but they were each represented by one of their most important works.

Readers' choice: Whales: Giants of the Deep, Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Best One-Person Play

Grounded

A pilot who's been carrying out air strikes in Iraq and loving the solitary blue of the sky she inhabits is grounded when she becomes pregnant, then tasked with launching drone attacks from the safety of an air-conditioned trailer in the Nevada desert. Between the hours of excruciating boredom she endures and the vivid images of the dead and dying recorded by the drone camera, she begins to break down. Grounded, a brilliantly written, tough-minded exploration of the effect of war on a particular woman, couldn't be more timely, as the issue of PTSD becomes more and more pressing and veterans' organizations discover that the illness is affecting drone operators as well as soldiers in the field. Laura Norman turned in a brilliant, nerve-shattering performance as the Pilot.

Best Actor in a Shakespeare Play

Geoffrey Kent in Henry IV, Part 1

Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 is filled with complex and fascinating characters, and one of the most fascinating, at least as played by Geoffrey Kent, is Hotspur. Though tough as nails, this hothead was as much joker as warrior. He was both tender and rough with the wife he loved, he punned relentlessly and fully appreciated his own wit, and he was willing to attack any male he encountered for any slight — big or small, real or imagined.

Best Actress in a Shakespeare Play

Jamie Ann Romero in Henry IV, Part 1

Hotspur's wife, Lady Kate, is usually played in Henry IV, Part 1 as a gentle charmer, and Jamie Ann Romero was indeed charming and gentle in the role. But underneath the charm, this was a strong-minded woman, more than capable of keeping the bull-headed husband she loved in check.

Best Actor in a Comedy

Erik Sandvold in Lucky Me

In the ironically named Lucky Me, Tom, played by Erik Sandvold, comes to the aid of Sara, a woman who claims to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, after she's fallen from a roof. He soon discovers that lightbulbs pop and fizzle in Sara's vicinity and that she hasn't had a hot meal for over twenty years because she can't handle a stove, knife or microwave. Tom, who works for the TSA at the airport, is determined to rescue Sara, even as her ailments threaten his own health and sanity. Sandvold was wonderfully strong and sympathetic — and also appealingly goofy — in this story of two fortyish people who've been beaten down by life but still entertain a flicker of hope that love is possible.

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