Best Living Book

Randal Myler and Brockman Seawell’s adaptation of onetime Boulder resident John Fanté’s novella 1933 Was a Bad Year entranced from start to finish. That’s mostly because Myler, who also directed 1933, staged the play with near-cinematic fluidity. He was aided by an ever-shifting backdrop of photographic montages: Vintage Boulder neighborhoods were suggested by contemporary snapshots that had been digitally sanitized to make each locale look as it did seventy years ago. The overall effect was largely one of an unbroken, almost symphonic backward glance — peppered with bursts of hijinks — at the forces that shaped a young man’s destiny.