Production archive
Other People’s Money
2006 season · Production archive
Other People’s Money returned to The Vic, teaming director Janet DeRuvo with Wade P. Wood and Michael Balch in a remount of their critically acclaimed 1999 production. A corporate raider, Lawrence Garfinkle, threatens a hostile takeover of a “mom and pop” company, New England Wire and Cable. Company chairman Andrew ‘Jorgy’ Jorgenson enlists the attorney Kate Sullivan — daughter of Jorgenson’s longtime assistant Bea Sullivan — to try to protect the company. Caught in the middle is Bill Coles, Jorgy’s right-hand man.
The play is a modern love story: love of money, love of power, love of the game, love of community. Garfinkle has few loves in life. He loves doughnuts, dogs and money — money most of all. His latest object of desire is New England Wire and Cable: few debts, plenty of assets. But one asset he did not factor into his equation is Kate, the New York lawyer who is just as smart and tough as he is.
- Written by
- Jerry Sterner
- Directed by
- Janet DeRuvo
- Ran
- May 5 – June 17, 2006
- Cast
- Wade P. Wood · Michael Balch · Lisa Rosenhagen · Karen Kargel · Michael Grittner
About the production
Sterner’s 1989 play ran for more than a thousand performances off-Broadway and has outlived its decade because the argument in it never resolved. Restaging it in 2006 put a 1980s takeover fight in front of an audience about eighteen months away from watching the same instincts play out at national scale.
The remount also says something about how the Vic worked. A director and two actors returned to a production they had made seven years earlier in the same building, under different ownership, which is only possible in a city where the small-theatre community is durable enough to keep finding its way back to the same rooms. The director’s note for the production is kept in this archive.
Where it sat in the season
It was production 4 of 8 in the Vic’s 2006 season. It followed The Deadly Game (Mar 17 – Apr 22, 2006) and was followed by Steel Magnolias (Jul 7 – Aug 12, 2006). 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.
Also in this section: the director’s programme note for this production.
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.