2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 9

Prolific costume designer had a hand in the making of 60 theatrical endeavors in 2025, surely the most of anyone in Colorado

I’m pretty sure I first met Nikki Harrison in 1995 while mutually fanboy/girling a popular Denver funk ‘n punk band called the Psychodelic Zombiez. Tom Murphy, Westword’s definitive music chronicler, once said it was “their rowdy Danny Elfman-esque strangeness” that set them apart from many other bands of the day.”

Totally tracks that, 30 years later, Harrison was in her full element designing costumes for Parker Arts and Veritas Productions’ “Rock of Ages,” a big and big-hair, tongue-in-cheek musical that challenged Harrison to capture the over-the-top, iconic 1980s glam-rock aesthetic of the day – the leather, the spandex, the fur – all within a budget.

“Nikki is totally a rocker girl at heart,” said her prolific director, Kelly Van Oosbree.

Stands to reason, then, that Harrison also designed costumes this year for the Town Hall Arts Center’s contemporary Irish/Czech folk musical “Once” (for director Carrie Colton) and its 1950s Texas jukebox tuner “The Buddy Holly Story” (for Shannan Steele).

But the thing is, Steele and Harrison also teamed up on “Mary Poppins,” which is set in Edwardian London, for Parker Arts and Give 5 Productions at the PACE Center in Parker.

Then there are Harrison’s other collaborations with Van Oosbree, whose 2025 slate included “Fiddler on the Roof,” (set in 1903 in what is now Ukraine), “The Bridges of Madison County” (Iowa 1965), and “Frankenstein” (19th-century Europe). The required range in costuming style and requisite research was astonishing. 

Wait, how many shows DID Harrison design this year, anyway?

Sixteen? Are you kidding me? You’d have to have a warehouse the size of a Costco to handle all of that.

She does, actually. Well, maybe not that big. She is the proprietor of Nikki’s Costume Closet, which is a 9,000-square-foot storage warehouse at 5800 Franklin St. just north of downtown. Because, in addition to designing those 16 shows for 12 directors and 10 different theater companies from Creede to Brighton, Harrison runs her own personal costume-rental business that serves not only the local Colorado theater community but many schools and youth groups throughout the Front Range. Many of which have little funding available to pay for her services. Doesn’t stop her from helping.

On top of that, she is an adjunct professor in costume design at Metropolitan State University of Denver and manages the busy costume shop at Denver School of the Arts.

It takes a spreadsheet to map this all out, but, in the end, Harrison has had a hand in the making of at least 60 theatrical productions, school projects, community events and special events in 2025. For the past two years, her total is 129.

In short: No one has had a hand in more theatrical endeavors in Colorado than Harrison this year. It’s not even close. How does she do it?

“She works tirelessly,” Steele said. “She is the kind of person who says yes first and figures out how later. She will sacrifice her sleep and her time and her energy. And it’s not just in service to her own creative effort – she truly wants to realize a director’s vision.”

Ask Steele the one thing we need to know about Harrison, and she will say: “She will go above and beyond.” Separately ask Van Oosbree the same question, and she will say: “She always goes above and beyond.”

And she does it the way she’s done it for 25 years: As a single mom, raising a boy who is now a man of 24. That would be Niko Poli, who says his mom “is the hardest-working and most generous person I know. She’s always willing to help people out, even if it doesn’t always help her to do so.”

He said that last year, when Harrison was selected among 22 members of the local theater community to be showcased in a portrait series of unsung heroes. It was conceived by local artist and actor Rick Long and for a time hung on the lobby walls of the Vintage Theatre in Aurora.

There are a lot of good actors in this town, Long said, “but Nikki Harrison is a star.”

Harrison herself calls the scope of her Nikki’s Costume Closet warehouse “both awesome and terrifying at once – and maybe more of the latter at this time,” she said. She purchased BDT Stage’s entire costume vault when that 45-year institution shuttered in January. She is also now storing costumes for Performance Now, CenterStage and the Community College of Aurora.

While costume design cannot exactly be called one of the many invisible arts that go into the making of live theater, it is often taken for granted and underappreciated, in part because it can be difficult for an unknowing audience to know if what they are seeing has come from authentic original thinking, or has been either borrowed or pulled out of storage. Van Oosbree and Steele are both quick to point out that Harrison is first and foremost a designer, not a mere collector of clothes.

“Nikki absolutely designs,” Steele said. But then again, the purpose of her business is for people who don’t have a Harrison on their design teams can come to her and get ready-made costumes. That’s not how she designs her own shows, but you can see how an audience might be unsure of just how impressed they should be by any given costume design.

“Yes, Nikki has a massive warehouse, but when she is designing a show herself, she’s not just pulling out a chunk of stock things from storage,” Steele said. “She’s constantly being creative for that specific show, and in accordance with the director’s vision. She will put a lot of different pieces together to create a completely unique look.”

A perfect example, Steele said, comes from “Mary Poppins.” During the iconic “Jolly Holiday” musical number, “we had the idea of there being strolling flowers and foliage, because, in the original movie, that song is beautifully animated – and we wanted it to be more impactful than just a costume change,” she said. “And so, Nikki put the adult actors who are strolling in these long gowns with huge petals on their heads. And she put the kid actors in these little bushes that then unfolded.

“And it was done with all these fabrics that were London period-appropriate, and yet they also seemed like 1964 fabrics, which is the year ‘Mary Poppins,’ the movie, came out. It was just so unique, and so beautiful.

“What she did with that show was otherworldly, in my opinion, in terms of thinking outside the box. I just love her.”

Harrison is very likely the first theatrical costume designer to hail from Eaton, a plains town of about 5,800 situated about an hour north of Denver in Weld County and running about 3 miles wide from end to end. She studied ceramics, fashion design and art history at three colleges, lastly at the nearby University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

Having a hand in 60 shows is enough to put anyone into hibernation by the end of the year. But for her self-starting success not only as a freelance designer but also as a benevolent business owner, Harrison is today’s representative honoree of the 2025 True West Awards, which endeavor to tell 30 positive stories from the theater year.

She has previously won a 2006 Denver Post Ovation Award for designing the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s “As You Like It”; a 2008 Colorado Theatre Guild Henry Award for the Arvada Center’s “La Cage aux Folles”; and in January she won an “OSCA” from Onstage Colorado for Platte Valley Theatre Arts’ “Cabaret.” But that’s not what it’s about for her.

“I never knew how satisfying it would feel to help others create and tell their amazing stories,” said Harrison, whose son pointed out another of her essential qualities.

“She is also one of the funniest people alive,” Niko said. “She always has me and others around her laughing and having a good time.”

A rock … of ages.  

Note: The Denver Gazette True West Awards, now in their 25th and final year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community throughout December by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.

NICOLE HARRISON/2025 Costume Designs

1. ‘Mary Poppins,’ Give 5 Productions and Parker Arts, at PACE Center
2. ‘A Brother’s Grimm Spectaculation,’ Community College of Aurora
3. ‘Fiddler on the Roof, Performance Now at Lakewood Cultural Center
4. ‘Once,’ Littleton Town Hall Arts Center
5. ‘Grumpiest Boy in the World,’ Theatre SilCo (Silverthorne)
6. ‘Xanadu!’ Creede Repertory Theatre
7. ‘The 39 Steps,’ Creede Repertory Theatre
8. ‘42nd Street’ Performance Now at Lakewood Cultural Center (with Susan Rahmsdorff-Terry)
9. ‘Rock of Ages,’ Veritas Productions and Parker Arts, at PACE Center (Parker)
10. ‘Bridges of Madison County,’ Platte Valley Theater Arts (Brighton)
11. ‘Escape To Margaritaville,’ Theatre SilCo (Silverthorne)
12. ‘Join, Or Die!’ Dairy Center for the Arts (Boulder)
13. ‘The Buddy Holly Story,’ Littleton Town Hall Arts Center
14. ‘Frankenstein,’ Platte Valley Theater Arts (Brighton)
15. ‘The Museum,’ Denver School of the Arts
16. ‘Cinderella Jr.’ CenterStage, Louisville

More True West Awards coverage:

• 2025 True West Awards, Day 1: Matt Zambrano

• Day 2: Rattlebrain is tying up ‘Santa’s Big Red Sack’

• Day 3: Mission Possible: Phamaly alumni make national impact

• Day 4: Jeff Campbell invites you to join him on the dark side

• Day 5: Cleo Parker Robinson is flying high at 77

• Day 6: Mirror images: Leslie O’Carroll and Olivia Wilson

• Day 7: Philip Sneed will exit Arvada Center on a high

• Day 8: Ed Reinhardt’s magic stage run ends after 27 years