Performer Spotlight
Ryan Noll
“You can take the kid out of the theatre but you can’t take the theatre out of the kid,” could be said about Ryan Noll, active in Denver theatre. He caught the theatre bug in grade school and stayed active all the way through high school. “I fell in love with performing,” he recalls.
Once in college, however, Ryan was persuaded to pursue a more practical path and graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, with a BFA in Visual Communications. He joined FOCUS Catholic, a nonprofit that supports university students in living a life in Christ, where he currently serves as Senior Manager of Digital Operations, and moved to Denver, Colorado.
Theatre stayed backstage in Noll’s life for the next several years. Then in 2022, a friend told him about an upcoming production by Village Arts, a theatre run by Village Seven Presbyterian church in Colorado Springs. Noll won a leading role in the musical, Newsies, and leaped back into theatre with gusto.
Subsequently, Noll joined the Ogden Players, a local group of theatre enthusiasts who perform Shakespeare in Denver backyards. While set pieces are minimal, the plays are fully staged with costumes and props
.Noll took dual roles in Love’s Labor’s Lost one summer and directed Twelfth Night the next year. He also played Count Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing. He describes backyard Shakespeare as an “applied Shakespeare experience.” “It’s Shakespeare made accessible,” he explains. “You don’t have to pay $75 to see a play. For people that don’t patronize the arts very often, perhaps they’re intimidated by the language of Shakespeare, they won’t spend the money to go to Denver Center for the Performing Arts.”
This past summer, Noll, who is also a vocalist, and some of the Ogden players celebrated the Church’s Jubilee of Hope with a cabaret-style show, singing Broadway tunes about hope. The performance attracted about 80 people.
St. Thomas More parish, in Centennial, Colorado, was excited to have Noll participate in the recent staged reading of excerpts of the play When Malcolm Muggeridge Met Mother Teresa, by Catholic playwright Charles (Cathal) Gallagher. Noll gave an animated performance as Terry Shaler, BBC producer for journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, and showed off a very creditable British accent
.Luckily for Denver, Noll plans to stay active in the arts. “The arts are a form of small-s sacrament where God imparts meaning to us via materials and symbols,” he says. “It’s my belief that not only is it the Catholic’s duty to utilize the arts for this reason, but given the definition above, it’s almost a birthright. Rightly considered, the arts are the sand in a sandbox that belongs to us and that we already know how to play in.”