Catch Me If You Can

2008 season · Production archive

Daniel Corban is a man with problems most of us wish we had. He’s an advertising man with a taste for the good life until he meets Elizabeth, the girl of his dreams. He marries her after a whirlwind romance and takes her on honeymoon to a beautiful mountain retreat. His life is perfection — until she suddenly disappears. Add an eccentric detective, a mysterious priest, a beautiful girl and Sidney the deli guy and you have the recipe for a wildly unpredictable whodunit with more twists than a corkscrew.

Written by

Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, based on the play by Robert Thomas

Directed by

Edwin Fronheiser

Ran

June 16 – July 12, 2008

Cast

Christian Mast · Wade P. Wood · Dell Domnik · Robin Wallace · Nils Swanson · Catherine Accardi · Jon Farnlof

About the production

Not to be confused with the later musical of the same title, this 1965 comedy thriller is adapted from a French original and belongs to the era of the single-set stage mystery: a cabin, a telephone, a series of arrivals, and an audience invited to decide which of them is lying.

The genre suits a very small house for the same reason farce does. Everything is timing and entrance, nothing is spectacle, and the closer the audience sits the harder it is for a performance to hide. Programming it in midsummer, between a Pulitzer-winning family drama in the spring and a British farce in the autumn, is a fair sample of how the Vic balanced its year.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 5 of 10 in the Vic’s 2008 season. It followed Crimes of the Heart (Apr 17 – May 17, 2008) and was followed by The Glider (Jun 11 – Jul 10, 2008). 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.