2022 was the Year of Neyla Pekarek before the first week of February was even over.

By then, the Colorado native had fulfilled a dream 14 years in the making. A 2008 visit to the Greeley Museum introducing her to the legend of Colorado’s Kate Slaughterback — which lit a creative spark that rattled into the deep recesses of her brain stem, which gave her the confidence to leave a Grammy Award-winning band to be true to her own creative vision — had come to fully fleshed life on the Denver Center’s Wolf Theatre stage.

The cellist, singer and actor had done the unthinkable: She turned her tantalizing concept album into an instantly acclaimed new stage musical that serves both as a surprising history lesson and a rallying cry for women across a century. “Rattlesnake Kate” opened to rapturous reviews (and won about 347 local theater awards).

She had plenty of help along the way. Director Chris Coleman. Playwright Karen Hartman. Dozens of artisans from the Denver Center and around the country. And, particularly, a fellow musical bad*ss and fellow University of Northern Colorado alumna named Angela Steiner, who served as the production’s music director, arranger, vocal coach and all-aboard train-whistle conductor.

It’s hard to overstate the chemistry that must spark and flow between the music director of a developing new musical and its first-time composer. As the writer, you can’t be precious or proprietary. You have to be willing to toss material years in the making, rewrite on the spot and sublimate your original vision for the greater good of this embryonic thing that an army of creative people have a hand in birthing. Through sheer luck, humility and good parenting, Pekarek happens to have the temperament of a basketful of kittens sitting atop a cloud.

She not only rocked, rolled and ran with the changes, she played cello in the orchestra while also portraying one of the central figures in the story: Slaughterback’s trusty pony, Brownie, who was carrying Kate’s 3-year-old adopted son in 1925 when they wandered into a potentially lethal snake migration. Naturally, Slaughterback proceeded to wipe out all 140 rattlers. It was the birth of a legend.

Steiner and Pekarek made for a perfect musical match. Which became all the more evident later in the year when Steiner signed on as music director and sculptor of another risky new project: The regional premiere of an odd little science-fiction, steampunk folk-rock musical called “Futurity” at the Aurora Fox. The music was written by a New York-based indie rock band called The Lisps. The radically idealistic premise imagines a world where a soldier joins forces with an inventor at the height of the Civil War to devise a machine that creates peace. Imagine if man were advanced enough to invent a machine that could stop violence. “Futurity” does.

And Steiner needed a cellist. Pekarek, who opened for U2 as a member of The Lumineers, a band whose first record went triple-platinum, was all in to play cello. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen. But there was Pekarek on stage at the Fox, furthering an underappreciated skill she mastered during “Rattlesnake Kate”: She could play the cello while moving around the stage at the same time.

Steiner and Pekarek have several traits in common that make them a perfect pair, said “Futurity” director Helen R. Murray, starting with a mutually collaborative spirit.

“They both really do care about the idea of ensemble and embracing what is going to work best for the show,” she said. “When you are working on new scripts, you need makers — people who are adept at both seeing need and answering need. Angela and Neyla are both makers.”

One’s yin to the other’s yang.

Steiner, now the Music Director for the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Fla., also helped craft a new “Theater for Young Audiences” musical called “Amelia’s Big Idea” for the Butterfly Effect Theatre Company, which bowed in April.

“Angela really loves the challenge of a new piece, which is uncommon,” Murray said. “She attacks arrangements with ingenuity.”

Pekarek is long past living off the laurels of her former band. Still, it can be jarring for some young artists to wrap their heads around performing arm-in-arm with someone of Pekarek’s pedigree. That is, until they discover she’s a total theater geek, just like them. One who belted out Liza Minnelli showtunes in her Aurora bedroom when she was 12. Who was typecast into playing the Tomato Plant Girl in a children’s theater production because, yes, she’s just that sweet. Who sings competitive barbershop music, for crying out loud.

But they learned soon enough.

“She was beloved by everybody,” Murray said.

And yes, Murray confirmed – Pekarek and Steiner do have one other thing in common: “They are, in fact, both total bad*sses,” she said.

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 22nd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 of the best stories from the past year without categories or nominations.