The Festival Playhouse has been entertaining Arvada audiences for the past 20 years, but not many know how far back its history goes.
Charley Ault and his wife Donna currently own the 137-year-old building at 5665 Old Wadsworth Blvd. in Olde Town Arvada that houses the Festival Playhouse, but for the company, this is their fourth location, dating back to the founding of the group by Charley’s father in 1936.
It seems, however, that the Arvada residents have found a cozy home in the 100-seat theater and the Festival Playhouse’s 75th season will open Friday, Feb. 11, with an old favorite, “Let Me Hear You Smile.”
This will be the seventh performance of this play for Charley and the fifth for Donna. Rounding out the cast is Jim Hoover, who makes his third appearance in the play, which opened on Broadway for one performance in 1973. Charley first performed it with the Festival Playhouse in 1976.
“This play’s talking about life and perseverance and the curve balls that life throws us. It really is just a super, super good show,” Charley said.
The play begins set in the 1970s with Neil (Charley) retiring in his old age and wanting to leave and travel the world. The second act is set in the 1940s and sees Neil’s wife Hannah (Donna) earlier in life also wanting to leave because she is getting gray and transforming into an old woman. And the third and final act is set in the characters’ youth and is about the pair’s young friend Willie (Hoover) at the age of 5 wanting to dig a hole to China to escape. The three actors play all three characters in the three acts,
“Everybody in the audience can relate to it,” Donna said. “The men can relate to the first act of him retiring and wanting to leave. The second act, women can relate to her going through the change and the third act, the young people can relate to the kid wanting to run away so I think everyone can relate to it.”
Charley said they’ve run the play on an average of once every five years and had been getting requests to do it again.
“We’re re-doing it because the audience tends to change over time, and we’ve received so many requests to re-do the show that we figured it was time to re-do it,” he said.
Charley added that the play works so much better today than it did in the 1970s, which may be why it failed on Broadway at the time, and he has seen it mirror life in many different ways.
“We carry on conversations like this on a daily basis. It’s so real,” he said. “I think it was before it’s time. Today they make movies about it all the time, but I don’t think people were talking about this kind of stuff in the ’70s.”
And Charley and Donna hope that every member of the audience will see its relavance during the six performances, which will be 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11, and Saturday, Feb. 12, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 13. The play resumes the following weekend at the same times on Feb. 18, 19 and 20.
“I want people to come and have a good time and go home and love themselves and love the person their with and just be happy. I think that’s the ultimate goal, to have people leave happy and hopefully we do that,” Charley said.