Make way for these young hell-raisers | John Moore

Ask 16-year-old Grayson Allensworth the “cute” question, and the friendly smile lingers. The pleasant demeanor, for sure. But you can’t help but notice the ever-so-slight clench of the jaw.

“You started your own theater company when you were 12. Four years later, you’re getting ready to stage the teen version of the Broadway musical ‘Hadestown.’ What do you say to those who will inevitably say, ‘Isn’t that cute?’’”

After a thoughtful pause, the contemplative high-school junior politely responds: “If they come to see the show … I don’t think they will think it’s cute.”

At which point Maya Eisbart, his 16-year-old co-founder of New Generation Productions, throws it a bit more down: “I don’t think we’re scared to prove people wrong.”

After all, the only way to upend dismissively low expectations of youth, Allensworth said, is to show them. And that’s what New Generations, its cast of 17 and its seven-piece orchestra – all high-school students – intend to do when they present the teen version of Anaïs Mitchell’s groundbreaking Broadway hit “Hadestown” to the world from Jan. 15-18 at Montview Presbyterian Church (on a rotating, turntable stage, no less).

“Hadestown” will already be the fifth fully staged production by New Generation Productions, which is why they are today joining the Denver Gazette’s 2024 True West Awards class highlighting 30 positive stories from the Colorado theater year.

The founders haven’t shied from tough, meaningful material that would challenge artists twice their age. Their catalog includes “Red” (the Tony Award-winning play about artist Mark Rothko); and the monster Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd,” with vocal demands never meant for mere mortals, much less teenagers.

Speaking of mortals, “Hadestown” is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It follows an independent young woman down into a hellish underworld and the poor, doomed serenading lover who comes to rescue her.

As longtime best friends and company partners, Eisbart and Allensworth share both a business plan and an artistic philosophy. They also tend to finish each other’s sentences. 

Eisbart: “The whole purpose of art, for us, is to make change.” Allensworth: “And as we progress in age and progress in maturity, it’s become literally about doing art that can change people, so …” Eisbart: “ … we feel like when that is coming from the young people of the world, that’s also super powerful.”

It’s certainly super powerful watching this top-notch student ensemble gather a month ahead of opening night to sing through the show with the orchestra for the first time. The actors all attend Denver School of the Arts, though the greater mission of New Generation is to build an open, statewide community of teen theater artists. The orchestra, which includes accordion, trombone, cello and even glockenspiel, has been assembled from schools all over the metro area by 16-year-old junior Sebastian Maa, a DSA piano major who already seems like he’d be right at home running a Broadway pit.

“To be completely honest with you, Sebastian is a magic man who has connections to people that I would never know,” said 14-year-old cast member Liam VanDijk, who is already being trained by the founders to succeed them in running the company once they graduate.

“I mean, you can find Sebastian on a random Tuesday night at some dive bar,” VanDijk said. Eisbart: “Or, like, the Stanley Marketplace.” Allensworth: “He’s amazing.”

‘We’ll roll up that mighty score’

Grayson Allensworth, as his mother lovingly puts it, “is a freak.”

His parents, Erin Webber and Brian Allensworth, are big-time University of Colorado sports fans. “I’ll never forget this,” Webber said. “We’re at the airport. Grayson is 2 or 3. He jumps up on this elevated platform and starts randomly belting the CU fight song out of nowhere.

“So he’s just always performed. Growing up, we put him in all the sports, and he’s good at them. But you could tell he wasn’t passionate about it.”

He was passionate about storytelling. Last summer, it earned him a Henry Award nomination for his performance as a kid whose dad strips to pay the alimony in Miners Alley Playhouse’s “The Full Monty.”

“When Grayson was, like, 8, I’d have girlfriends over, and he would say, ‘Can I put on a show for you guys?’ And I’d kind of roll my eyes and apologize to my friends. But they were like, ‘No, no, this is fun!’ Now I wish I could see more shows.”

When the family made a mountain getaway that same year, 8-year-old Grayson and his 9-year-old buddy Logan Ambroggio – who is now playing Hades in “Hadestown” – turned the cabin’s garage into a theater, using its motorized door as the curtain. “Grayson would make us sit outside and pull out lawn chairs,” Webber said.

The show today would be a retelling of the ribald Broadway musical “Something Rotten!” which imagines how a pair of Shakespeare competitors invented the first musical. (They didn’t.)

Just imagine, if you can, an 8-year-old belting out lyrics to a song about V.D. (and we don’t mean Valentine’s Day!):

“What’s that creeping ’round your peepee and your vagina? It’s the Black Death, Black Death, woo!”

“Brian and I were looking at each other like, ‘What the hell have we done?” Webber said with a laugh. But the dye was clearly cast.

Allensworth was doubly bummed in 2020 when the global shutdown began on the very night he was to perform as Tobias, the endangered meat-pie kid in “Sweeney Todd” for the Rocky Mountain Theatre for Kids in Englewood.

“I was sitting in my basement, and I was really bored, and there were no opportunities to do anything,” he said. So he called Eisbart, his friend since they met at theater camp when they were 8. Even now at 12, and already theater majors at DSA, these two were used to being involved in multiple shows at the same time. They pondered what to do with their time.

They took inspiration from their DSA middle-school teacher, Andre Rodriguez, who told them: “If you don’t see the opportunity, become the opportunity.”

“That definitely sparked a lightbulb in both our heads,” Allensworth said. And that’s how he, Eisbart and pal Ian Johnson started putting together a musical called “The Trail to Oregon.” They told their parents they would do everything themselves. (Except maybe for rides. And pizza.)

That was music to their parents’ ears.

“Brian and I thought that it would last two weeks,” Webber said. “Kids were coming over and they were rehearsing two days a week for four hours. We thought the other parents were never going to go for this. But instead, they were like, ‘Thank you for giving my kid a reason to live.’ And they were serious about that, because so many kids were so depressed at that time.”

They staged “The Trail to Oregon” in May 2021, just as it was becoming safer for audiences to gather again. And when they did, Allensworth said, “I think Maya and I both realized this could be a much bigger thing, and this could be something we continue doing.”

Soon they formed New Generations Productions LLC. Its founding mantra: No adults allowed. That meant the kids would be responsible not only for all creative tasks but the business responsibilities as well, including marketing and fundraising.  

“We just decided that if we did it all ourselves, it would probably actually be much easier,” Allensworth said. “We were so young, we knew that if we asked the adults to get involved, they would probably try to take over. But we wanted this to be our thing and our vision.”

Part of great leadership is learning strategic delegation, and Allensworth and Eisbart slowly built a team of reliable, accomplished collaborators like Oliver Goertzel as Music Director with Maa, who learned how to run an orchestra pit from a YouTube video.

It can’t be overstated how much time and commitment it takes to pull off any quality theater production, but this would involve asking already stressed-out and overburdened high-schoolers to take on one more major commitment at the busiest times of their lives.

It also takes money. For rights. For a venue, For programs. For security. For starters.

Staging a show like “Hadestown: Teen Edition” will run about $10,000, Allensworth figures. “That means finding sponsors,” he said. “That means selling program ads. That means going out into your community, to your doctor’s office, to your dentist, and saying, ‘Hey, would you be willing to support our theater?’”

And then, sometimes all your hard work goes straight to Hadestown.

The rug gets pulled out

Whether at age 16 or 60, one big part of being a grown-up theater producer is learning how to pivot when things fall apart. The co-directors had cast “Hadestown,” rehearsed it and booked the Bug Theatre with announced performance dates of Nov. 7-9, 2024, when its licensing rights were suddenly pulled because a touring production of “Hadestown” would be coming to Fort Collins in October.

What one had to do with the other is ponderable, but the bottom line was clear, and devastating: Allensworth and Eisbart would have to cancel the announced run, find new dates and a new venue – and hope that it could keep its cast, crew and orchestra intact.

“I always find that whenever I do a show, logistics are the death of art, and that’s just how it goes,” said Allensworth. “Honestly, spaces to perform are not affordable, and there are very few of them in Denver.”

But as the universe takes, it also gives back. Enter Montview Presbyterian Church, which is not only donating its space to New Generation Productions, it’s got that cool rotating stage, which gives the co-directors exponentially more creative room to play.

“In retrospect, I am very thankful for the rights problem, because now we have a better space, and the cast has had more time to work on their stuff,” Allensworth said. “I think the show will be better than it ever could have been.”

And all but one of the 24 actors and musicians have found a way to stay with the show and its new January dates.

It’s on.

Good peer pressure

All that is good about New Generation Productions is evident in the face and words of 14-year-old Liam VanDijk, who describes himself as the mascot of the company. He met the co-founders when he was in sixth grade (and they were only in eighth). He joined for the company’s second show, “Be More Chill.”

“I just showed up at one of the rehearsals, and they kind of took me in a little bit,” he says softly. They asked him to play Tobias in “Sweeney Todd,” “which changed my life in a lot of ways,” he said.

“Grayson and Maya both inspire me in different ways,” he said. “I credit them for a lot of the way that I see theater as an art – and for the way I see theater as a business as well.”

Eisbart: “And you work really hard.”

Allensworth: “And, if I may add: We see ourselves in him. He’s about to make his directorial debut with ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’ for 5280 Theater Company. And then he is directing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the fall. So he’s following a pretty similar track that we did.”

They plan to spend the next 18 months apprenticing Van Dijk to become the new head of the company and ensure its future life. (Keep in mind: He’s 14.)

“To have a boss you feel like you can trust and is someone who shares your creative ideas and your creative vision is very special,” he said. “But I also am lucky because I feel like I could call Grayson or Maya and they would pick up and I could talk to them about whatever was going on in my life.

“For them to be this talented and this smart and this intuitive and this creative at 16 years old and to not be mean or terrible to someone like me, who is two years younger than them … I don’t know. Not only are they incredible and amazing artists who are putting on ‘Hadestown’ at age 16, they’re also just really good people.  And you like to work with good people.”

That age dynamic also works on the flip side as well. Now that Allensworth’s garage-playing storyteller pal Ambroggio is 18 and a senior, the age difference between the two looms much larger. Only, Ambroggio said, it doesn’t.

“Honestly, when you’re being directed by Grayson, you don’t even think about the fact that he’s 16,” he said. “I think that really speaks to his drivenness and his vision and the way he’s able to execute it. This is his story he’s trying to tell. The cast respects him because he respects us.” And if the time does come for some skull-cracking, he added, it will only if and when some skull-cracking is needed.

Where does all of this – the drive and, more important, the follow-through – come from in people so young?

“Maya and I were just talking about this,” Allensworth said. “We were like, ‘What would we do if we woke up tomorrow and we just lost all of our passion? What would our lives be like?’ Which is me saying: I don’t know where the passion comes from, but it is just there. It comes from the groups that we surround ourselves with, and from the friends that we make, and from the school that we go to, and from the training that we get, and from the resources we are privileged to have.”

Eisbart: I also think it’s because we are always pushing each other to be better.”

Allensworth sees this time of his life as a gift. “And the thing about being given a gift is that you have to use it. You can’t just throw it in the trash,” he said. “You have to keep building it up.

“And yeah, maybe this thing started in seventh grade as kind of a joke. But now, even with all of the schoolwork, which has been so incredibly difficult this year, we’re still finding time to balance everything and make all of this work because, at the end of the day, this is just what we do.”

And when people come to see “Hadestown?”

“Yeah, maybe it will be cute,” Allensworth said.

“But … no.”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 24th 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.

Unsung hero of the day

Linda Morken might be the most accomplished, least celebrated costume designer in Colorado theater history.

This past year, her titles included “Gem of the Ocean,” “Art,” “The Lightning Thief” and “Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big Aurora Fox Christmas Show,” at, yes, the Aurora Fox. She was also the longtime resident costume designer for BDT Stage and has also worked at Town Hall Arts Center, Curious Theatre, Phamaly and many more. She is originally from Minnesota and graduated from North Dakota State University.

“Some people put clothes on actors telling a story. Linda Morken greatly improves the stories those actors are telling,” said “Scrooge” director Steven J. Burge. “She translated the ideas that I clumsily tried to explain much more beautifully than the word salad I spat at her deserved.” That produced a Wild-West-meets-Billie-Porter, gun-slinger-inspired Christmas Yet-to-Come.

“She’s a genius, and she is divine to work with.”