Production archive
Educating Rita
2009 season · Production archive
Bored with her life as a hairdresser, and under pressure from her husband to start a family, Rita enrols at a British university determined to better herself. Professor Frank Bryant is the disillusioned English lecturer assigned to teach her. While Frank watches Rita embark on a radical transformation, he discovers she has more to teach him than he ever imagined.
- Written by
- Willy Russell
- Directed by
- Rick Bernstein
- Ran
- January 2 – February 21, 2009
- Cast
- Rita Broderick · Wade P. Wood
About the production
Two actors, one room, one desk, and an eight-week run: Educating Rita is about as economical as a full-length play gets, and it is the single title in the Vic’s archive that most exactly matches the theatre’s means to a script’s demands. Russell’s 1980 play is a tutorial set entirely in a professor’s study, and the audience is effectively a third party to the seminar.
The performance drew the house a nomination in the The Denver Post’s Ovation Awards for the 2009 season, one of three the theatre collected that year. The reference in one review to the wind blowing through the basement door is not a metaphor; the stage was reached from the side of the house, and audiences knew it.
What the press said
“The British-born Broderick is in her second skin as Rita, as fresh as the wind blowing through the Vic’s basement door.”
“Bernstein’s direction is his best in memory, and even rivals that of the best of the productions this year…Her acting is brilliant.”
“Rita Broderick as Rita is wonderful. She captures the attitude, flamboyance, class, energy and optimism of Rita perfectly…Wade P. Wood is a nice contrast.”
Where it sat in the season
It was production 1 of 7 in the Vic’s 2009 season. It was followed by Greater Tuna (Mar 6 – Apr 25, 2009). 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.
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.