CU students get to crack open ‘Book of Mormon’

They go behind the scenes with actors, creators of hit Broadway show

DENVER—The team of Matt Stone and Trey Parker is somewhat of a legend, especially in Colorado.

The pair of University of Colorado Boulder alumni has been bringing its brand of humor to the small screen with “South Park,” and now it’s landed in Denver to open the Broadway mega-hit “The Book of Mormon.”

Stone and Parker's Tony Award-winning adventure “The Book of Mormon”—2011 Tony for Best Musical—opened this week at Denver's Ellie Caulkins Opera House.

University of Colorado Denver and CU-Boulder students got a behind-the-scenes look at the technical side of what goes into a Broadway show. The crew arrived in Denver last week for the first stop of the road-show tour.

Stone himself greeted students in the lobby of the Caulkins Opera House. The lucky students then watched cast and crew as they worked to clean up the opening number of the musical, in preparation for its opening, reports Bud Coleman, professor and chair of CU-Boulder’s Department of Theatre and Dance.

“It was really interesting to see all the small details that go into one scene,” said CU Denver student Ryan Flint. More than 25 students were on hand to watch a technical run through of the first scenes of the show.

What the students got to witness was “the incredible specificity that is expected of everyone involved with creating and maintaining this high-quality production: the actors, musicians, crew, assistants etc.,” Coleman observed.

The company had already done a full run-through earlier that afternoon, but during the clean-up rehearsal, Coleman added, “we witnessed they were still operating at full concentration and power—no one was ‘marking’ their job.”

After the rehearsal, students were invited to sit down with three of the show's actors, Gavin Creel, Jared Gertner and Grey Henson, as well as the executive producer for “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon,” Anne Garefino.

Creel, Gertner, Hanson and Garefino generously gave up part of their dinner break to do the Q&A with students, Coleman noted.

The actors had several words of wisdom for the aspiring theater students, “Be honest to yourself and things will always work out,” said Creel. Gertner added, “Everyone has their own path; you just need to stay on your own.”

“This show came together in a unique way; we kind of just held our breath and did it,” said Garefino. “The process was different from any other show you will see.”

Garefino shared her “mantra” for what it means to be a professional: work hard; be nice to people; when you leave a job, make sure people are sad to see you leave; make it so that your current personal assistant hires you for a job in the future.

“It was very clear from the 100-plus people in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House that the company of ‘The Book of Mormon’ is living out this work ethic,” Coleman said. “These were not just words to embroider on a pillow!”

All of the students were invited to watch the final dress rehearsal on Monday night. “It is so much better than anything else on Broadway right now,” said Flint.

Noting that the national tour of “Book of Mormon begins in Denver, Coleman observed: “Sitting in the same row with director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw, the CU students were part of the first audience to witness the insane brilliance of what the South Park creators (along with Robert Lopez, of Avenue Q) have realized with this new, stunning group of actors.”

“The Book of Mormon” is running from Aug. 14 to Sept. 2, at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. But getting tickets for the show might be difficult as more than 50,000 tickets sold out in less than five hours.

While there are very few seats left for the three-week Denver run, there is a lottery for $25 seats, which are only available 3 hours before each performance.

The The Book of Mormon tour will be back in Denver in October 2013.

The CU-Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance has had a particularly good summer. Last month, CU alumna Roe Green committed $2 million to establish an endowed chair in theater at the Department of Theatre and Dance—the first endowed chair in an arts discipline in CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences.

It will be the department’s first fully endowed faculty position and the largest gift ever given to CU-Boulder theatre by a large margin.

“This is a real game-changer for us,” said Coleman, who will hold the Roe Green Chair in Theatre when funding begins in 2015. “It’s a sign from the donor, from the outside world, that says, ‘What you do counts.’ It really validates theater training at a liberal arts university.”

This article includes reporting by Amanda Heersink at UC-Denver’s Office of Media Relations and CU-Boulder’s Office of News Services.

August 2012