Selggin and the Battle of the Mollinduffs

2008 season · Production archive

An interactive children’s musical. Selggin and the Niggles live a peaceful life in the kingdom of Oterad — usually. Something is not quite right, and you can feel it in the air, literally. All the creatures in all the Kingdoms need your help. Count Wollefkrad is up to no good yet again; he and his dastardly Mollinduffs are keeping Selggin and her friends from being who they truly are. Forgetting your purpose in life is a very confusing thing to happen, and “the mark of the Count” is spreading throughout the forest. Mortimus has travelled very far with a very important quest — if only he had the confidence to remember what it was. Can Selggin and her friends work out how to win the battle before it’s too late?

Written by

Rita Broderick, with music and lyrics by Trevor Rutkowski

Ran

March 1 – April 5, 2008

About the production

An original piece written for the house rather than licensed into it, and the Vic’s first venture into weekend children’s programming. It shared the spring 2008 calendar with Stones In His Pockets, running in the daytime slots the evening play left free — a scheduling trick only available to a company that owns its building.

Children’s work returned to the calendar in the theatre’s last years, with Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2008 and 2009 and a Saturday-morning holiday series in 2010. For a house with seventy-five seats, a family matinee is a straightforward way to use a room that would otherwise sit dark six days a week.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 3 of 10 in the Vic’s 2008 season. It followed Stones In His Pockets (Feb 22 – Apr 5, 2008) and was followed by Crimes of the Heart (Apr 17 – May 17, 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.