2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 13

Marine Sergeant Michele Crowe was more than a leading lady – she was a leader when her cast needed her most

It was an irresistible story that in an instant became unimaginable.

Marine Sergeant and local actor Michele Crowe had won the role of the famed Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley in the Irving Berlin musical “Annie Get Your Gun” for a community theater in Evergreen called Ovation West Performing Arts.

I mean, come on!

Crowe had begun performing on her hometown theater stages in Oklahoma at just 5 years old. “So I was in it from the get-go,” she said. Fast forward past the two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the life fits and starts, the delayed dream of returning to the stage, and here she was, at age 37, “finally being cast in my first lead role in many, many years,” she said.

After having engaged in multiple combat firefights, performing again was helping Crowe to process the totality of her full military experience. Being back on the stage, she said, had made her feel whole again.

Like I said: An irresistible, feel-good story.

Until the musical, after just three performances, got shut down, like much of Evergreen, by the Sept. 10 shooting of two students just 2 miles south of the theater at Evergreen High School. That the 47th U.S. school shooting of 2025 played out in this most unlikely mountain town nestled next to a majestic lake 30 miles west of Denver caught everyone off guard. According to the Gun Violence Archive, that number of shootings is now up to 70.

Ovation West Executive Director Graham Anduri and “Annie Get Your Gun” director Tim Kennedy brought the show to a full stop for a period of urgent communion and reflection.

The decision whether to resume performances could come only after consultation with community members, students, parents, therapists, trauma experts, theater industry professionals, crew, staff and the cast of 30.

“The most common response we heard is that we can’t let evil win in this situation,” Anduri said.

But the opinions that mattered most were those of the three cast members who are also Evergreen High School students and were in the building when the shooting began on Sept. 10. All three were strongly in favor of going on with the show.

“And so, we are going to let art be our source of healing, our source of goodness, our source of light,” Anduri told his community.

The shooting gave Crowe, who already bore the most responsibility in the rehearsal room as the actor playing the title character, a calling to step into an even greater leadership position within the cast.

Sept. 14 should have been a Sunday matinee performance day. Instead, the cast gathered at the theater for a somber potluck and emotional check-in after not seeing each other for a week. After a mental-health professional led them all in a group conversation, Crowe led all of the youngsters in the show outside, where she said to them:

“Listen, I know a lot of adults are talking at you right now, kind of telling you how you might feel, or how you’re going to feel. Well, you might not feel any of those things – and that’s OK. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that those people have honestly never experienced what you’ve experienced. And I kind of have.

“I know what it feels like to have bullets fly by my head or to watch my friends get hurt and trying to find out what’s going on. I’m not going to pry and ask what you’re feeling. But if you want to talk to me, just know that I have been there.”

One of the boys responded: “I just want to get back out there on that stage.”

“I think they all know now that this show was helping them,” Crowe said, “and they know it was helping other people.”

Anduri said it was “really amazing” to watch Crowe come into her own first-hand during that awful time.

“I would say she really stepped into her power both on stage and off,” Anduri said. “I think she inspired a lot of the other cast members to really step into their own potential in a big way. “

And Crowe, who next appears in “South Pacific” for the Performance Now Theatre Company from Jan. 9-25 in Lakewood? “I don’t think I realized how much of an impact what I was saying was having at the time until the aftermath of it.”

The power of the bell

Enormous care was taken to modify the staging to ensure that no one in the returning audience who was affected by the shooting – which in a town of 8,600 was essentially all of them – might be retraumatized by the story. “Annie Get Your Gun” was written as lighthearted fare in 1946 but is inescapably the tale of a woman and, yes, her gun.

Every (fake) stage rifle was replaced by a round mop stick. Every gunshot was replaced by the sound of a soothing bell from the orchestra pit “out of an abundance of caution for people’s sensitivities,” said Anduri, who actually tried to get the name of the musical changed to “Annie Get Your MAN” (which is actually a far more accurate summary of the story. But the Berlin estate was not having that.)

Local mental-health professionals were in the lobby for all resumed performances to listen to anyone who needed to talk. Pinwheels were distributed that found their way to every corner of the town,

In the opinion of Heather Aberg, co-founder of the Evergreen-based mental-health nonprofit Resilience 1220, it was vitally important that the show resume because canceling might have been received by the younger cast members as a kind of punishment. As another thing that was being taken from them. 

“Everyone processes trauma differently,” Aberg said. “What we say in trauma therapy is that our body keeps score. Our trauma is trapped in our bodies. So, for these kids to be able to come out on stage and be fully present in their characters, doing what they love, along with their castmates – that is super-healing. It’s very grounding. It gives them back both purpose and connection, and that’s what they need right now.”

Most people “were really grateful that we made the choice to keep the show going,” Anduri said. A few audience members who had seen the musical before the shooting came back to see it again as a proactive show of support.

“Some of them told us that the show was noticeably improved,” Anduri said. They talked about the renewed energy, focus and vigor.

“I think there was a greater purpose in their performance,” he said. “It was no longer just about putting on entertainment. This was now something deeper than that. It was about bringing the community together to collectively heal from this shared trauma that everybody had just experienced. And using theater as a means of facilitating that healing, I think, was palpable for everybody.”

Before each resumed performance, Anduri and Kennedy addressed the audience to explain their modifications to the show. Not everyone took kindly to them, as one man interpreted the changes as an infringement on his gun rights.

“One guy got up and stormed out of the theater before the show even started complaining about how were weren’t taking away his guns,” Anduri said. This man was interpreting the changes in how the show was being staged as a symbolic attack on his personal right to bear arms.

“That is the only way to interpret that incident,” Anduri said. “That is pretty explicitly what he was ranting about as he walked out. It was pretty astonishing.”

But that was a lone incident, he emphasized – one more than countered by “a very large check” that Anduri received from an anonymous donor with a message dedicating the gift to all the performers and staff of Ovation West, as well as “everyone at  Evergreen High School.”

“It was just completely out of the blue of the Western sky,” Anduri said, “but it was clearly from somebody who appreciated how we handled the whole situation.”

That was reinforced on Tuesday, when Colorado Gives Day supporters pledged $50,000 to Ovation West. That beats the company’s previous record by $15K.

Ovation West, said choreographer Rachael Lessard, came out better in the end because of all of it.

“I think the company did come out stronger and with more of a desire to be present for the community than ever before,” she said.

The final takeaway, Anduri said: Art is the best antidote to violence.

“It’s better than any kind of legislation that we can pass,” he said. “The goal is not to just react to something that already has happened, but to act to hopefully prevent those kinds of events from continuing to happen in the future.”

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. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com.

Next at Ovation West:

• What: ‘Songs for a New World’
• When: Feb. 20-March 8
• Times: 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 4:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays
• Where: Center Stage, 27608 Fireweed Drive, Evergreen
• Tickets: $24-$36 ($20 on Fridays)
• Info: 303-674-4002 or ovationwest.org

More True West Awards coverage:

• Evergreen’s Annie Oakley is a real-life Marine Sergeant

• ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ returns – without the guns

• 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

• Day 9: Costume Designer Nikki Harrison

• Day 10: DU’s tech interns getting the job done

• Day 11: Husbands, wives keep home fire burning

• Day 12: Denver School of the Arts’ Drama Dash