Barefoot in the Park

2007 season · Production archive

After a six-day honeymoon, a new lawyer and his young bride move into the high-rent apartment she has chosen for them — six wheezing flights up. It is bare of furniture, the skylight leaks snow, there is no room for the bed, and the outlandish gourmet who lives on the roof uses it as the only access to his padlocked premises. It is enough to break the heart and burst the lungs of any stylish young lawyer.

Written by

Neil Simon

Directed by

Sarah Roshan

Ran

July 27 – September 1, 2007

Cast

Andy Lacerte · Hannah Middleton · Peter Burghardt · Anne Myers · Luke Allen Terry · Wade P. Wood

About the production

Simon’s 1963 comedy ran for over 1,500 performances on Broadway and has never really left the American repertory; it is one of the handful of titles that a small house can programme knowing the audience already trusts it. Its single-room set — a top-floor walk-up so bare that the emptiness is a running joke — costs almost nothing to build, which matters when the whole stage is a converted basement.

The Vic paired it with My Husband’s Wild Desires to make a summer of light comedy, then turned in September to a visiting company’s war stories. That swing from Neil Simon to Chekhov-by-way-of-Pulp-Fiction inside a fortnight is about as good a summary of the house’s programming as the archive offers.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 5 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It followed My Husband’s Wild Desires Almost Drove Me Mad (Jun 15 – Jul 21, 2007) and was followed by The Feast of the Flying Cow (Sep 7 – Oct 6, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.