EVERGREEN • The cast of 30 opened Friday’s performance of “Annie Get Your Gun” perhaps smiling a little more widely and kicking their dancing feet a little more insistently than before. One cheerful lad clenched his teeth so hard, it looked like his braces might pop right off onto the stage.

They performed the opening song with renewed determination and purpose. And when they got to the last line, they belted Irving Berlin’s famous lyrics with more collective meaning than perhaps anyone else since the composer first dropped his ironic love letter to show-biz on patriotic post-war American audiences back in 1946: “Let’s go on with the show!”

And with that, a grateful audience hollered a little more loudly than they might have before this community-wide labor of love was necessarily paused for nine days by the Sept. 10 shooting of two students just 2 miles to the south at Evergreen High School.

It was like a collective roar of relief. An Annie Oakley bullseye. Exactly what people needed to hear.

It was a performance of this particular musical unlike any other anywhere or at any time.

“For these kids to be able to come out on stage, it gives them back both purpose and connection, and that’s what they need right now.” — Heather Aberg, Resilience 1220

This musical had only been open for one weekend before the shooting. Before the sprawling “Evergreen Strong” banner was immediately hung at the town’s entrance on Highway 74 to now remind all comers that the 47th U.S. school shooting of 2025 played out in this most unlikely mountain town nestled next to a majestic lake 30 miles west of Denver.

The show, like the town of Evergreen, came to a full stop for a period of urgent communion and reflection. The decision to resume performances on Friday came only after great consideration and consultation with community members, students, parents, therapists, trauma experts, theater industry professionals, cast, crew and staff.

In a town of just 8,600, any school shooting will, to varying degrees, graze everyone. No one is spared. The “Annie Get Your Gun” cast includes three Evergreen High School students, as well as parents and teachers of other students there. “And we really placed a higher priority on their well-being over everybody else,” said Ovation West Executive Director Graham Anduri.

“You have to understand, those three students were right there,” he continued. “I mean, they were literally in the classroom that the shooter walked right past. There were bullets flying over their heads. It was unimaginably horrific.”

Ten days later, he said, they are still processing. “I would say that they are safe — but nobody is OK. It is undeniable that we are all forever changed.”

And yet, when the question of whether to resume performances was put before students, Anduri said, “Those three were really adamant that, ‘We want to do this show.’ ”

When the decision was finally announced late Tuesday night that performances would resume on Friday, “the cast rejoiced in unanimity,” director Tim Kennedy said.

“When a group of artists have spent the amount of time and work they have put into this show, to then possibly lose the ability not only to perform that show but also to share all that work with the community — that would have been a huge loss for them,” Kennedy said.

Especially given that Evergreen High School remains closed. The students’ routines have already been disrupted by the shooting. They have nowhere to go during the day.

“All of their classes have been taken away,” Anduri added. “Their extracurriculars have been taken away. They don’t need one more thing to get canceled.”

Heather Aberg, co-founder of Evergreen-based Resilience 1220, a nonprofit that provides mental-health (and specifically suicide) counseling to young people ages, yes, 12 to 20, was at Friday’s performance to listen to anyone who needed to talk. In her opinion, it was vitally important that the show go on.

Canceling, Aberg said, might have been received by the students as a kind of punishment. As another thing that was being taken from them.

“Everyone processes trauma differently,” she continued. “What we say in trauma therapy is that our body keeps score. Our trauma is trapped in our bodies. So, for these kids to be able to come out on stage and be fully present in their characters, doing what they love, along with their castmates — that is super-healing. It’s very grounding. It gives them back both purpose and connection, and that’s what they need right now.”

Just as important, it gives them the ability to help their friends, family and neighbors in the audience to process their own grief through the joy of performance.

“Absolutely,” Aberg said, “because at a time when you feel powerless, that is power, right? This is what your skill set is, and you can offer that to other people. So yeah, I think this whole thing is just awesome.”

That’s a word repeated by Ruth Hund, who attended the show on opening night back on Sept. 5. She wasn’t planning to see it a second time, but that was before the events of the past 10 days. When she learned that performances were resuming Friday, she wanted to be nowhere but Center Stage, the 101-year-old physical home of Ovation West Performing Arts — an umbrella that includes the 75-year-old Evergreen Players theater company and the 50-year-old Evergreen Chorale.

“My own personal statement in life is making a difference with joy,” Hund said. “That’s what I think the arts do. They bring joy to us. They make a difference. And they allow us to have these conversations.”

And not just about the shootings. Kennedy has arranged multiple panels to discuss the lingering sexism in the original 1946 script, as well as the many Native American issues of the time period, including American and Canadian atrocities at government-run boarding schools that systematically eradicated Native cultures through forced assimilation and horrific abuse.

A Broadway sensation

It’s hard to overstate just how huge of a hit ”Annie Get Your Gun” was on Broadway, with its 1946 production starring Ethel Merman running for 1,147 performances over four years. That led to a long run in London, a popular film adaptation in 1950 and early TV adaptations.

The musical tells the fictionalized story of Annie Oakley, a real-life illiterate sharpshooter who overcomes all manner of gender abuse to become an international star in Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West Show. In the process, she falls for fellow sharpshooter Frank Butler, whose prevailing patriarchal attitudes, shall we say, do not age well into 2025.

Still, the problematic aspects of the story make for a manageable re-examination of a musical that was written to uplift spirits in the immediate aftermath of World War II with a feel-good romance that ultimately acknowledges gender roles had shifted during the war to a much greater reliance on women in the workforce.

To 1946 audiences, Annie Oakley was a revolutionary character — a capable and strong woman who excels in a male-dominated profession. (Even if, ultimately, she is the money behind a business run by two men.)

But the Evergreen shooting brought back the painfully divisive issue of guns in America as close to home as home gets. And Anduri, Kennedy, and the Ovation West board of directors were determined to do whatever it took so that the show, with its heavy reliance on competitive gunfire, does not retraumatize anyone in the audience. No one is shot, or even shot at, in the story, but there are dozens of gunshots throughout the performance. Or at least, there were.

Anduri issued a remarkable statement on Tuesday detailing sweeping changes that would be made to accommodate audience sensitivities in the wake of the shooting. Namely, every gun has been replaced by a round walking stick, and every gunshot has been replaced by the sound of a bell — drummer Martin Robinson tapping on a soothing triangle from the orchestra pit.

“We went through a number of different sounds trying to find something that had enough of a presence so the audience could hear it, but still feel safe,” said Kennedy, who admits with good humor that the Tinkerbell-like sound definitely qualifies as whatever you would call the opposite of overkill.

“When we did it the first time, Daniel Sares, the actor who plays Frank Butler, said, ‘I think an angel just got its wings,’ ” said Kennedy. “We all burst out laughing.”

Also: Aberg or another mental-health professional from Resilience 1220 will be on-site during all remaining performances to provide support.

But the most extreme proposed protective measure never got past the idea stage. Anduri actually tried to get the name of the musical changed — at least in Evergreen — to “Annie Get Your MAN” (which to be fair, is actually a much more accurate summary of the story.)

For better or worse, the Irving Berlin estate gave that idea a polite “no.”

“Yeah, we kind of went for the moon on that one, but unfortunately, they really didn’t go for that,” Anduri said with a laugh. (Still, better than, say, “Annie Get Your STICK.”)

If all those changes are what it took to get the show back up and running, then audience member Steef Sealy is all for it.

“This community has been going through a lot of turmoil in the past week or so, and they decided that instead of being quiet in the midst of all the terror that’s going on, they saw that there is power and laughter and music — and that’s why I’m here tonight,” he said.

“When you sit in a room with a bunch of people and the lights go down and the music goes up — you are transported. We’re all laughing and applauding and hearing these songs we grew up with. There’s just nothing like it.”

So what does that say about the power of art in times of tragedy?

“Art has lived for centuries, because it means something, “Sealy said. “That’s why it perseveres.”

But in this particular circumstance, the main focus rightly remains on the well-being of those three Evergreen High School students who were in the building on Sept. 10.

The shootings gave Michele Crowe, who already bore the most responsibility in the rehearsal room as the actor playing Annie Oakley, even more of an opportunity to lead the ensemble out of the darkness.

After all, she served as a Marine Sergeant and did two combat tours, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Sept. 14, which if not for the shooting would have been a matinee performance day, the cast gathered for a potluck and emotional check-in. It was the first time they had seen each other in a week.

“It was pretty somber,” Crowe said. “After the therapist talked to everybody for a good while, I took all the kids outside and said to them, ‘Listen, I know a lot of adults are talking at you right now, kind of telling you how you might feel, or how you’re going to feel. Well, you might not feel any of those things — and that’s OK. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that those people have honestly never experienced what you’ve experienced. And I kind of have.

“I know what it feels like to have bullets fly by my head or to watch my friends get hurt and trying to find out what’s going on.’

“I told them, ‘I’m not going to pry and ask you what happened, or what you’re feeling. But if you want to talk to me, just know that I have been there.’

“And one of the boys told me, ‘I just want to get back out there on that stage.’ I think they all know that this show is helping them — and they know it’s helping other people.”

Being together, both with one another and with the larger community, Kennedy added, “has been some of the most important healing they’ve been able to do.”

The most common refrain Anduri heard when he was deliberating whether to cancel the show, he said, “is that we can’t let evil win in this situation.

“And so, we are going to let art be our source of healing, our source of goodness, our source of light. That’s why we’re here doing what we do here tonight.”

Not art as a distraction but rather as an act of defiance. Doing, as Berlin famously penned, “what comes naturally.”

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazettedev.gazette.com.