“To the world, you may be one person. But to one person, you may be the world.” – Snoopy. 

To the thousands of both ordinary and extraordinary Coloradans who have been directed on a stage by a man known only as KQ – and there have been an estimated 10,000 of them – he’s something of an enigma. Always has been.

Some who have known him for 40 years don’t even know his surname. (It’s Quintana). His hard, defined facial features even as a young man have always made guessing his age something of a party game. (He’s now 76. Which is kind of how he looked in 1981.)

He’s been a biochemist, an underwater demolition engineer in the Caribbean and a novitiate who lived in a monastery for three years. He’s worked on the back of a trash truck. He’s done small-engine repair. He was a roofer and a lawnmower repairman. Somehow he has been both a burger-flipper for Jack in the Box and the No. 2 salesman on the East Coast for Radio Shack. And while he’s never been paid for it, he’s probably put in 10,000 hours as a D&D Dungeon Master.

For 20 years, KQ would go straight from late-night rehearsals directing plays and musicals for a legendary young-adult Denver theater company called the Original Scene to working overnight shifts as a machinist for the Santa Fe Railway. Sleep was rarely an option. 

But who is KQ, really? That’s actually a pretty easy question, said esteemed stage and screen actor John Carroll Lynch.

“He’s Snoopy,” said Lynch, who has appeared in 135 TV shows and films, but says he only made it out of Regis Jesuit High School alive because of KQ.

“When I came into the Original Scene, I was a seriously angry kid, and I left high school as a seriously angry teenager who had done 16 plays that gave me the opportunity to pretend to be someone else,” Lynch said. “And that helped to alleviate the pain I felt being me for the remainder of my day.”

Lynch, whose films include “Fargo” and “Zodiac” and is currently featured in the TV series  “Ballard” and the movie “Sorry, Baby,” was the kind of teenager who was ferocious with both his mind and his fist, which he was known to put through walls. “It wasn’t so much, ‘What was I  angry about? as, ‘What wasn’t I angry about?’” he said. “I was just angry.

“And beyond fulfilling a desire for me to follow a vocation that I felt strongly about, the Original Scene created a community of people that gave me some stability and saw me through that period of time. I don’t know what would’ve happened without it so, yes, the Original Scene, without a doubt, absolutely saved my life.

“But the thing that KQ specifically did was: He took me as seriously as I took the work.”

So what makes him Snoopy?

“Because, if you think about it, Snoopy is a change agent,” Lynch said. “He’s absolutely a free spirit, so he’s not tied down by ego. He’s always quintessentially himself. There are other children in the ‘Peanuts’ story – but there is no other dog.

“There are many people you will meet. You will never meet another KQ.”

Lynch recalls the time KQ and his wife came to visit him in New York City. Well, that’s not exactly true. “The reason KQ came to New York was not to see friends,” Lynch said. “It was to hold one of the ropes that holds down the Snoopy balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

His childlike mentor was giddy for the opportunity.

“I think he could die a happy man right now if all he ever did was hold the rope for Snoopy one time In the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade,” said Lynch.

That’s not all that he has ever done. Not by a long shot.

Over the past 50 years in the local theater community, he’s been a director. A writer. A producer. A scenic designer. A properties desi – oh, let’s cut to the chase. “KQ has done every single job in theater – except for costumes,” said his wife, Kamala Quintana. Maybe it’s his proclivity for wearing cargo shorts, Converse High Tops and T-Shirts with witty slogans. Or his, ahem, “color vision deficiency.” But there is a line: No costumes.

“A couple of years ago, during what we call the ‘costume parade,’ there was just a sea of girls in blue dresses, and when KQ saw them, he said to me, ‘But I wanted them in blue!”’ said Kamala. “I just looked at him and gently said, ‘OK, sweetheart … we’ll get that fixed.”

KQ would not have made it 50 years without being able to take a joke. For 40 of those years, he has created and staged an original annual musical for a one-of-a-kind theater company called Magic Moments, which gives as many as 270 all-comers of all ages, some with disabilities, some without, the opportunity to perform and commune on stage together, side by side.

Last March, dozens of Magic Moments cast members showed up for a Saturday rehearsal wearing KQ-inspired attire. Like CJ Kinney’s T-Shirt that proclaimed: “I may be color blind, but I know I look good in green!” (His T-Shirt was red.)

By itself, Magic Moments has given more than 7,500 experienced actors and everyday folks a chance to perform. From writing an original script each year to auditions to closing day, pulling it all off requires the logistical proficiency of an air-traffic controller. Lynch calls it “community theater in its purest form.” Theater, he said, “that’s being done for all the right reasons.”

But what is it, exactly?

“Magic Moments is a jukebox musical, like, say, ‘Mamma Mia,’ but if you come, you’re going to get something different every year,” KQ said. There is a story with a throughline and recognizable characters. Sometimes it’s sad; more often silly. The songs, often altered, span showtunes to classic rock to whatever pop tunes have TikTok abuzz in any given year.

His wife says: “It’s a lot of people of varying degrees of abilities, all doing the best that they can, pulling off things they didn’t even know they could do.”

Cast members have included Broadway veterans like Elizabeth Welch (“Phantom of the Opera”) and Mara Davi (“Dames at Sea”), local all-stars like Anna Maria High, Traci Kern and Megan Van De Hey alongside members of the disabled community who come back year after year, infused anew with fresh purpose. This past March, former University of Colorado football star Ed Reinhardt, who incurred a severe brain trauma in a 1984 game, finished up a run of 27 consecutive Magic Moments shows. His final song: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

KQ has a unique ability to take a performer’s individual situation – and write it into a show. When he learned that Amy Rusak – who is completely nonverbal and confined to a wheelchair – was dabbling with new technology that might allow people to hear her voice for the first time, KQ had her use that technology to deliver the opening and closing lines of that year’s show.

Talk about a magic moment.

No one who watches leaves unchanged. Certainly not Dana Hart Wright, who changed careers and became a special-needs teacher after seeing her first Magic Moments show.

She was performing in another KQ play in 2010 when she heard that KQ also puts on these annual jukebox musicals involving hundreds of people of differing abilities.

“I thought to myself, ‘Hey, I’d like to try that,’” she said. “And it changed my life.”

Hart Wright auditioned, was cast, and was partnered with two performers with disabilities.  

“Because of that experience, and specifically because of KQ’s unwavering support of my work during the process, I went into special education as a teacher, and I haven’t looked back since,” Hart Wright said. “I am forever indebted to KQ for this life-changing experience and for simply being a wonderful friend and cheerleader.”

Another person who considers herself forever changed by KQ is Cole Schneider Huling, now artistic director of a performing collective known as the Handsome Little Devils.

“KQ taught me how to be a whole human, how to look people straight in the eye, how to shake a hand properly, how to stand with confidence, how to speak loudly when needed, how to own my identity, how to be compassionate, dedicated, honest and respectful,” Schneider Huling said.

(She also met her husband through Magic Moments. So there’s also that.)

The conversation shifts to Magic Moments 2026, which won’t happen for another eight months. KQ’s face doesn’t just light up as he talks about it – it can’t contain the rapid-fire enthusiasm of a man seemingly decades younger than 76. KQ gleefully recounts an epiphany he recently had while brushing his teeth at home that, oddly enough, solved a scheduling problem that solved a casting problem. He burst out of the bathroom, toothpaste running down his chin, to tell his wife all about it.

“I’m sorry, I am going to have to interrupt you,” I interjected, then turned to address Kamala. “Can you put into words what we’re watching right now?” I asked, gesturing toward KQ’s animated face. She just smiled.

“First of all, the man cannot talk unless his hands are moving,” she said. “He’s obsessed with what he does. He lives, eats and breathes creativity. And when he gets an idea like that, his creative juices just go crazy. His passion flows through every ounce of his body.”

Magic Moments is the primary reason it is believed that KQ has directed more human beings on Colorado stages than anyone else. But that’s just one reason the Colorado Theatre Guild will present him with its Lifetime Achievement Award at its annual Henry Awards ceremony on July 28 at the Lone Tree Arts Center.

Roots in the church

KQ was born at a Denver hospital that has since burned down. His theater career began designing props for the fifth-grade school play at Presentation Catholic grade school, after which his family moved him to Louisiana for six years. It was, in his words, a difficult childhood that led to a stay in a monastery, where he was asked to ponder a life of poverty, chastity and obedience.

“I was fine with poverty and chastity, it turns out – but not so much with obedience,” he said. “if you know me, you know I don’t follow orders very well.”

But KQ’s pursuit of knowledge, which he approached more as a lifelong educational odyssey than a finite course of action, took him to Tulane, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Utah and Emerson College in Boston, earning five degrees along the way in biochemistry, pre-med, philosophy, theology, theater and more.

His time in the grown-up Colorado theater community began in 1976 by setting lights and designing sound for a company called Theatre Under Glass. He was then approached by a priest named Rev. Dennis Dwyer about joining him at the Original Scene, a citywide, year-round theater company run by Catholic Youth Services from 1972-93.

The O.S. attracted top talent from across the metro area, including the Broadway-bound Rebecca Eichenberger, Martin Moran, Mary Bacon and John Paul Almon, as well as Lynch, future radio personalities Steve Cassidy and John Gleason, TV writer Bryan Holdman and local theater faves Jada Suzanne Dixon, Nick Sugar, and siblings Paul and Annie Dwyer. Several kids who learned technical skills at the O.S. are now veterans of Broadway and national touring productions. 

KQ is proud of all their professional successes, but none more so than the O.S. alum who was a homeless 16-year-old drug addict when KQ met him in the 1980s, and has now been a stable, sober, gainfully employed lighting technician at a major metro arts center for two decades.

“The goal of the Original Scene was not to produce professional actors,” KQ said. “It was to give these kids a family, and a place to go.”

But the shows were pretty great. Like Lynch starring as Jonathan Brewster in “Arsenic and Old Lace” and Pilate in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Dixon, now artistic director of Curious Theatre Company, as Rosie in “Bye Bye Birdie.” But the zenith was probably a groundbreaking 1981 production of “Godspell” that was so stacked with talent, KQ created simultaneous shows for two completely different ensembles. One included Michelle Anderson, who would later be crowned Miss Colorado. The show routinely packed the 300-seat Oscar Malo Hall and was extended several times. 

(KQ even typecast me as “Evil, the World Hater” in an original musical called “A Question of Balance,” inspired by the Moody Blues song. It covered pretty much the history of the world from the Big Bang through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, all set to songs like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”)

KQ was actively involved with grassroots efforts to start Denver School of the Arts, and he was among its first guest artists. He has since worked across the state in a variety of capacities for past and present companies including the Bonfils, Aurora Fox, Performance Now and Vintage. He has helped out on shows at Littleton and many other high schools.

KQ helped legendary producer Henry Lowenstein to open the New Denver Civic Theatre (now the Su Teatro Performing Arts Center) in 1986. KQ’s “Story Theatre” christened the smaller Dorrie Theatre. In 2014, KQ directed a production of “Spamalot” for StageDoor Theatre in Conifer that set a record for tickets sold, producer Jill Manser said.

People don’t think of him as much of an actor, but he’s played a Toy Soldier in the Arvada Center’s “Babes in Toyland” and the Innkeeper in “The Man of La Mancha” (twice).

But to KQ, a man of deep and abiding faith, the honor of his life was being asked to direct “Our God’s Brother,” a play written by Pope John Paul II himself, as part of World Youth Day activities held in Denver in August 1993. Lynch came home to play the Devil in a story about the struggles of a Nazi-era Polish artist.

It should be noted that KQ’s larger job for World Youth Day (which was more like a week), was production manager, including managing the sound systems at every festival venue. Which brings him back to what he considers to be his true identity in the Denver theater community.

Sure, he’s a director. A playwright. A traffic cop. A teacher. But more than anything else, he says, he’s a techie. And so, when he got the word that he’s joining 20 or so actors, directors, producers (and one props designer) as lifetime achievement honorees, he was thrilled for who that invites to the podium for the first time.

“My first reaction was, ‘Man, a techie is getting this thing,’” KQ said. “Isn’t that just great? It’s such a humbling thing.”