When you are 21 and lying on an operating table with your heart turned off for five hours, the 7-inch incision down your chest might well be considered a dividing line for your life. Everything up to now: Ordinary. Everything to come: Extraordinary.

The problem with the analogy is that very little in young Kaden Hinkle’s life so far has been ordinary. And all roads on his remarkable journey collided on Saturday night with the opening of the disability-affirmative Phamaly Theatre Company’s staging of the splashy Broadway musical “Pippin” in partnership with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

In Hinkle, director Robert Michael Sanders didn’t find just the right young actor to play the prince on an existential quest for meaning and purpose. He found … Pippin.

“Kaden really kind of is Pippin,” said Sanders. “He just really embodies what his story is all about. He’s a special kid.”

Hinkle has wanted to play this role since he was 11, when the first national tour of the Broadway revival launched at the Buell Theatre back in 2014. Well, at the time, he wanted to play Theo, the boy who becomes Pippin’s stepson. He auditioned to play the role at the time, and even made it to the final cut. His random consolation prize was sitting directly behind legendary composer Stephen Schwartz on opening night.

“I still have the signed Playbill from that experience,” said Hinkle. “I was just like, ‘Holy crap, this show is magical. … The ending is weird, but this show is magical!’”

As Hinkle grew over the next 11 years from 55 pounds to – well, let’s say at least twice that much today – his dream role has morphed from playing the boy Theo to the man Pippin. In fact, Pippin sits at the tippy-top of his list of dream roles like a one-toed tightrope walker.

This is how bad he wanted it: When Hinkle found out that Phamaly would be staging “Pippin” as its annual summer musical extravaganza, he was attending PACE University in New York City, where he studies musical theater. He auditioned by videotape, “and he really sang the (bleep) out of it,” said Sanders, so he was invited to participate remotely in the second round of tryouts.

Instead, Hinkle came home to Denver to do the callback in person. “He flew in for one day, did the audition, then flew out that same night so that he could take his finals the very next day,” Sanders said. “That is an interesting level of commitment.”

So, I asked Hinkle: Why would you risk that? And he said, “Because this is a dream role with a dream team for a dream company.”

Like Pippin, he had magic to do.

A boy’s ‘Bloody’ beginnings

Hinkle’s professional theater path began at age 9 when he was cast in Ben Dicke’s self-produced regional premiere of the rebel-rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.”  This was an insane theatrical introduction, starting with Dicke running for 24 hours on a treadmill on the 16th Street Mall to raise money to pay for it all. Just two hours before the opening performance at the Aurora Fox, Dicke fell about 8 feet down an open trap door. He broke four ribs, punctured a lung and required three staples to close the cut on the back of his head. Performances were delayed for three months.

Casting the role of Jackson’s orphaned, adopted Indigenous son, Dicke said, had been a challenge. “Piper Arpan, who was choreographing, said, ‘Well, we just had this 9-year old, skinny-jean-wearing, emo child audition at the Arvada Center. I think he might be perfect.’ Dicke talked to Kaden and his mom, Shannon Gaydos-Hinkle. They were undaunted by the show’s controversial political themes. All in.

“All through rehearsals, Kaden was ready for anything and everything,” Dicke said. “He was as emo, pop punk as anyone in the group. He was playing Jackson’s adopted son, but he was the adopted little brother of everyone in the cast.”

Video: Watch the making of ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson’

What he took from that experience, Hinkle said: “My initial love for musical theater obviously came from ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” And what he learned watching and working with Dicke, he added, “was the power of persistence – and the power of community at the core of making theater.”

The next few years of Hinkle’s life were the theatrical equivalent of a growth chart:

• 2013: Hinkle was cast as a Munchkin in Boulder’s Dinner Theatre staging of “The Wizard of Oz,” alongside a tyke who would soon occupy a place in his heart as big as Oz: Darrow Klein.

• 2015: Hinkle was one of two actors chosen from a huge local auditioning pool to perform as part of the ensemble while the national touring production of “A Christmas Story, The Musical” was in Denver, putting him on the very same stage where “Pippin” changed his life the year before.

Video: Watch Kaden Hinkle in ‘A Christmas Story’

• 2016: Sanders put together a group of six young actors to completely steal a fundraising event for the Denver Actors Fund by having them sing a cheeky variation on the racy “Chicago” anthem “Cell Block Sirens.” Each kid adopted iconically and ironically wholesome characters turned bad, like Peter Pan and Little Orphan Annie. Hinkle played the anachronistically appropriate Javert from “Les Misérables.” Klein played Matilda. A video of the song went viral, with 2 million plays and counting to date. Sanders dubbed his collected ensemble “The Killer Kids of Miscast.”

Video: Watch the Killer Kids of ‘Miscast’

• 2017: Hinkle, at just 13, played his first leading role, as Billy Elliot at the Vintage Theatre in Aurora. 

Also in 2017, Sanders was approached by the parents of the Killer Kids and others to direct an entirely self-produced staging of Jason Robert Brown’s “13, the Musical” as a fundraiser that ultimately generated, yes, $13,000 for the Denver Actors Fund.

 “What do most kids do when they want to raise money for charity? Set up a lemonade stand or organize a car wash,” Sanders said. “What do theater kids do when they want to support their favorite charity? They put on a show.”

That show is additionally significant for our story because Sanders paired Hinkle opposite his best friend. In that show, they would share their first kiss – on-stage or off. Soon they found themselves falling asleep in each other’s laps on carpool rides home to Boulder.

Magic to do? Magic done.

“That show was foundational to the most important relationship in my life, which is the one I have with my partner, Darrow Klein,” Hinkle said.

It’s true: Two young people, in 2025, having attended different colleges, are still going strong eight years later. And that’s not even the half of what they have been through together.

During their senior year at Fairview High School, Klein came out to Hinkle as nonbinary. More specifically, as “masc,” which is when someone identifies more on the masculine side of the gender spectrum – even if they don’t necessarily identify as a man.

When this sort of thing happens between high-school sweethearts, it tends to go one of two ways: With the couple irrevocably broken; or as lifelong, platonic best friends and allies.

But a funny thing happened when Hinkle processed the news.

“I was like, ‘Huh. I’m suddenly more attracted to you than I was before. This is definitely awakening some things in me, too.’ I realized I still love the person that I loved before – and if anything, even more.”

Hinkle struggled with his own conflicting ideas of masculinity and femininity, until he had a kind of epiphany, he said, “about how performative gender is. After a while, I just said, ‘(Bleep) it. I’m going to be who I want to be.”

I told Kaden that reading those words is surely going to break some people’s brains. What, I asked him, would he want those who do not understand the nonbinary narrative, or approve of individual trans rights, to know? He put it this way:

“We all grew up in school saying the Pledge of Allegiance. ‘With liberty and justice for all.’ What I would want people to know is that the freedom part of that – the freedom to be and express yourself – we are all promised that. We are all promised the pursuit of happiness, and it doesn’t hurt other people. But I think the other side’s perception is a bit twisted because they have been constantly told that trans people are dangerous. When, in reality, they are simply a grand representation of all the things that we are all promised in this country. And they’re unknowingly stripping those rights away from others – and from themselves.”

Welcome to the Phamaly

For more than 35 years, Phamaly Theatre Company has existed to create opportunities for those with disabilities to perform in a safe, people-first environment. It has transformed hundreds of lives on stage and tens of thousands in its audiences.

Phamaly shows just land differently. But it can be tricky, because “disability” is a legal term, not a medical one. ​​Phamaly takes what it calls “a non-hierarchical view of disability,” meaning that it embraces the full spectrum of disabilities – both the visible and invisible kinds; both the physical and mental kinds. Being a safe and welcoming space for all is what allows for laughter, vulnerability and fearlessness in the creative process.

What makes Hinkle, specifically, a member of the Phamaly family is not that huge scar running down his chest. “The biggest thing I have been limited by for my whole life is ADHD,” he said. “And when I was 17, my eyes started to go. The muscles in my eyes started to get imbalanced, and I started to have a semi-permanent cross-eye.”

And then there was that no small matter of his heart. Before Hinkle was even born, doctors discovered a faulty tricuspid valve that he has always known was going to require surgery someday. That day came last Aug. 12, when the blood flow between his heart and lung was so compromised, surgery was ordered. The open-heart, cracked-rib kind.

Hinkle was placed on a heart bypass machine for the five-hour procedure, which turned out to be much more complex than doctors had originally anticipated. No big thing for Hinkle. “I just went to sleep and woke up,” he said. But for everyone else? “It was a lot more scary,” he said.

Until doctors turned his heart back on and gave the all-clear.

Three weeks later, he was back at college. Four days after “Pippin” closes on Aug. 24, he’ll be back in New York for his senior year.

But first … he’s off to find his corner of the sky. Walking in footsteps that could be his own.

“Pippin” is the musical that dares to ask: Did princes really have identity crises in A.D. 780? The son of Charlemagne finds no fulfillment in his dalliances with orgies, war, religion, domesticity or even absolute power. So what’s a fellow to do? The story’s ultimate answer – settling down – is, to many, itself unsettling. Even the authors – Schwartz and book writer Roger O. Hirson – fought bitterly over it, as have audiences for 53 years.

But Hinkle, for one, is a big believer in happily ever after.

Here is a young man of 22 – practically still a boy, who has been through his own wars. He’s faced ignorance and stared (groggily) at death. But he knows where he wants his story to go: With Klein. Not as an ending. But as a beginning.

To illustrate the point, he says, already armed with Klein’s full support, consent and participation, plans are in the works.

“Rings have been bought and paid for,” he said. 

For someone who longs for an extraordinary life filled with excitement and fulfillment, that’s not a bad way to go about it.

“I think at the heart of it, ‘Pippin’ is the story of second chances,” he said. “He doesn’t really physically change by the end of it, but he does get to see everything in a new light and with a new appreciation. I think one of the things that I’ve noticed myself doing a lot more is expressing gratitude for everything that I’ve gotten to experience. Because I’ve had an incredibly privileged and lucky time on this Earth.

“I mean, I got to spend eight years with the person that I fell in love with as a kid and have been lucky enough to not fall out of love with since. And both of us have evolved past anything we could have imagined each other being.”

And as for the show? For those who might be attending a Phamaly production for the first time, he makes this promise:

“This is a spectacular take on ‘Pippin,’” he said. “This is a show that promises the audience magic from the very beginning of the show, and this one is magical from start to finish.”