When Bob Moore said his final goodbye to his wife of 49 years, she made him honor a simple promise: To have fun. The veteran Colorado actor followed Wendy Moore’s marching orders by marching straight into a play whose own marching orders are, yes, to have fun. 

Moore played Grandpa Vanderhof, a tax-evading eccentric whose life philosophy is simple:  “Don’t do anything that you’re not going to enjoy doing.”

Which means Bob got to deliver the famous line from “You Can’t Take it With You” that has embedded itself in audiences’ hearts around the world for 87 years. It’s a piece of advice Grandpa gives to an uptight young man desperate to make lots of money:

“You can’t take it with you, Mr. Kirby. So what good is it? As near as I can see, the only thing you can take with you is the love of your friends.”

As the actor said those words to Thunder River Theatre Company’s audiences in Carbondale, the man might as well have been saying them to all his friends and family – with Wendy whispering in his ear.   

There was no better way for Moore to honor Wendy Moore – herself a seminal director in Colorado theater history – than by starring in that very same classic American comedy for a theater company run by their daughter, Missy.

“I believe in the message of the play, and I try my best to embrace that,” Moore said. “You’ve got to make the best of every day. And if you don’t, doggone it, that’s your own fault.”

Seeing Moore deliver Grandpa’s advice was easily one of the most moving moments of the 2023 Colorado theater year. Here are seven more representative examples of actors who made singular impressions in locally staged plays this year:

Bobby Bennett

Toby Darling, “The Inheritance,” Vintage Theatre

If the Colorado theater community were a magnetic field, Bennett was its moral magnet this year, playing a succession of truth-telling characters telling it like it is in America in 2023.

Bennett was the broken but somehow still-pulsing heart of Vintage Theatre’s nearly seven-hour, two-part epic “The Inheritance,” which a critic for The Daily Telegraph calls “perhaps the most important American play of this century.”

In it, Bennett played a contemporary gay man moving through life in extremes – desperate for love while incapable of love, utterly self-sabotaging and yet maintaining a keen understanding of our world today exactly as it is, with all its privilege and hypocrisies.

And after scaling one of the most volatile and uncompromising trajectories ever traversed by a single modern American stage character – Bennett did it all again in a very similar role for Local Theatre Company’s Phish-inspired world premiere, “You Enjoy Myself.”

Of “The Inheritance,” Onstage Colorado reviewer Eric Fitzgerald said Bennett “gives an astonishing performance that has him swinging almost magically from emotion to emotion.”

Bennett has been acting since he was 7 at the Denver Metropolitan Children’s Theatre. He graduated from Metropolitan State University of Denver and made it into the top 24 on the fifth season of “American Idol.”

Diana Dresser

Ana Smith, “The Book Club Play,” Arvada Center

If “slow and steady” indeed won the race, Dresser would have slowed down years ago. Instead, she just keeps delivering one winning performance after another. Musical, play, drama, comedy –  no matter. She does it all with aplomb.

This year, Dresser played both the ever-sturdy Mrs. Webb AND the ruminative narrator in no less than “Our Town.” Then she delivered laughs like a tickling feather-duster in the Arvada Center’s delightful “The Book Club Play.” That’s Karen Zacarias’ deceptively astute little comedy about an upscale book club that has been chosen to be filmed for a documentary by some apparently famous filmmaker. 

When the camera turns on, the truth comes out – along with the laughs. The play was a comedic sandbox for Dresser playing a control freak losing all control.

Dresser spent parts of 17 seasons with the Creede Repertory Theatre as an actor, director and choreographer. She is also a longtime regular at the Denver Center and Arvada Center. 

Steve Emily

Sharky, “The Seafarer,” Springs Ensemble Theatre

Emily, one of the most admired actors in Colorado Springs over the past 20 years, moved very little physically throughout Springs Ensemble Theatre’s recent staging of Conor McPherson’s Irish booze fest “The Seafarer.” Because he didn’t need to. He did most everything the monster role of Sharky requires with his doleful, expressive eyes.

Sharky is a fighter with a short temper that’s been dulled by years of whiskey and a lifetime of sins buried deeply under a heart enlarged by barrels of poteen. Now it’s Christmas Eve in the Irish village of Baldoyle and Sharky suddenly finds himself playing cards for his life in the most Mephistophelian of ways.

“He has this dark cloud that follows him everywhere,” Emily told the Colorado Springs Gazette. “He feels like he’s never quite caught a break.”

Perhaps not. But then again, this is the season of miracles.

Josh Levy

Ian, “Blasted,” Benchmark Theatre

Who should have wanted to see a play about a misogynist, racist, homophobic, drunken (sorry, let me just take a quick breath here), narcissistic, cruel and abusive journalist in a dystopian war story that mingled bombs, male rape, oral sex and a dead baby into one in-your-face fun-house thrill ride?

The answer is anyone who should have wanted to see one of the most fierce, fearless, audacious, disturbing (sorry, let me just take a quick breath here), horrifying, ghastly, committed, masterful performances of this or any other theater year.

The play was Sarah Kane’s unapologetically confrontational “Blasted” at the Benchmark Theatre in Lakewood. The story, inspired by the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars, offers a brutal vision of a war-torn society viewed through a heightened series of violent acts. But it plays out entirely, oddly enough, in a posh hotel room.

This play certainly requires a kind of courage rarely asked of any stage actors. The Denver Post’s Lisa Kennedy called Levy’s performance a revelation. OnStage Colorado’s Alex Miller called it harrowing.

Whatever it was, it catapulted Levy straight into the top tier of the area actor pool.

Cajardo Lindsey and Emily Paton Davies

Jim and Josie, “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” Cherry Creek Theatre

It is meant to be the greatest compliment to say these two fine actors go well together – in roles that, until recently, they would not have been cast to play together anywhere at any time over the past century. 

Lindsey, both a Black man AND a Colorado District Court judge, was cast to play the spectacularly damaged Jim Tyrone, a character based on the irreducibly White brother of masterful Irish playwright Eugene O’Neill in the autobiographical sequel to his monumental “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

In this world set exactly 100 years ago, our Black Jim is a slumlord to hardened Josie and her hardscrabble father. The crux of the tale is Josie’s heartbreakingly desperate attempt to seduce a man who is wracked with fresh guilt for having been too drunk to attend his mother’s funeral. He has come to Josie this night seeking comfort from a kindred broken, misbegotten spirit.

That these two can’t get past seemingly surmountable obstacles that in this iteration includes the insurmountable issue of race – just makes the whole thing all the more immeasurably sad. But in the hands of these two incredible actors, it was downright thrilling. 

Davies is a powerhouse actor who has performed with companies throughout Colorado for nearly 20 years, frequently praised for her naturalness and authenticity. But she has been choosing her roles more selectively of late, which made “Misbegotten” a particular treat.

Lindsey said yes to one of the greatest acting challenges of his life for one simple reason: “Because I have never been asked to play a role like that before,” he said. “What resonated strongly with me was the theme of forgiveness. I wanted to be a part of telling the story that you can, in some situations, tell someone your innermost, dirtiest dirt that you’ve ever done – and there’s forgiveness available for you.”

But love? That’s another story.

Sean Scrutchins

Edgar, “King Lear,” Colorado Shakespeare Festival

It’s impossible to fully convey the greatness of Scrutchins’ feral performance as the seemingly mad Edgar outside the context of all else he accomplished in 2023. His lisping, Python-esque Dogberry brought such needed laughs to a contemporarily problematic “Much Ado About Nothing” that he almost single-handedly poked all the hot air out of the vile treatment innocent young Hero takes from her father and suitor. (Side note: What is it with Shakespeare and all these wrongfully accused women?)

And Scrutchins ended the year by thoroughly charming delighted young tots in the Denver Center’s “Little Red,” a joyful musical retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood.” As one of the story’s three little piggies, let’s just say Scrutchins was a lot more adorable here than he was last year as Squealer in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” at the Arvada Center.

But Shakespeare is Scrutchins’ forever home, and after nine winning seasons with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, said Managing Director Wendy Franz, “Sean is someone all the directors fight over when we are casting each summer.”

In “King Lear,” Edgar runs for his life when his dumb dad Gloucester believes a lie that his favorite son was plotting to kill him. So he adopts a crazy beggar identity and takes pity on the old man after he’s blinded. But only after having a little sadomasochistic fun at his dad’s expense. But in the murky end, Edgar never reveals his true identity to his blind dad, and Scrutchins never fully reveals his final hand to us – leaving audiences to wonder if not giving his dad the comfort of knowing his son is in fact alive is perhaps meant to be a final act of cruel revenge.

If you saw Scrutchins’ performance, you’d know exactly why all those directors are fighting over him.

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd 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 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.