Colorado theater family sifts for meaning in ashes of Marshall fire
SUPERIOR • Award-winning actor Kelly Watt rose to prominence in the local theater community in 2009 playing a young woman named Luisa in “The Fantasticks.”
Whenever the character wears a mask, she sees a carefree world free of violence and ugliness. Whenever she takes it down, she sees the world as it really is: capricious, volatile — and capable of taking everything away in a matter of minutes.
It’s been nearly four months since a rapidly spreading winter wildfire, fueled by unusually dry grasslands and 100 mph winds, destroyed 1,084 homes in Boulder County, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado history.
The remnants of the Rosenberg-Watt home after the Marshal; fire on Dec. 30, 2021
One was a modest, one-level ranch house in “Original Town” Superior. It had four bedrooms, a porch swing and a newly built basement that served as a music studio for Kelly’s husband, Phil Rosenberg-Watt. He’s the kind of software genius who knows how to make magical computer cards that he loaded up with his 2-year-old son’s favorite songs using a radio-frequency chip. Queen, “Hamilton,” Putumayo and more — all at Alexander’s baby fingertips like you might use as an elevator access card. All gone, along with all his dad’s synthesizer, upright Young Chang piano, amplifier and sheet music dating back decades.
Kelly Watt drives away from the Marshall fire.
On some days, Kelly Watt sees life like Luisa. When she feels enormously grateful for both the big and little things — like that Alexander’s filthy $20 plastic turtle sandbox from Target somehow didn’t burn up just outside where the front door once stood. And that, in her frantic 40 minutes of packing back on Dec. 30, she made the split-second decision to save the 14-year-old family dog’s collar and ashes just a few months after Annie died of natural causes.
“In some ways it’s kind of liberating, because now I don’t have any of the things I used to have,” Watt says. “Now we are starting from scratch, and that’s both an amazing opportunity and a valuable lesson in impermanence.”
But on other days, she sees life without the mask. When she sees her grandma’s sewing machine melted into the charred remains of the front yard, along with bicycles, a garage and the electric Nissan Leaf left inside. Somewhere in those sacred, toxic ashes are what’s left of the antique, toddler-sized wooden rocking chair that had been built for Alexander’s great-great-grandfather back in 1903. The original architectural drawings of the house. The kilt that Phil wore in a high-school production of “Brigadoon.” The play kitchen the parents had given Alexander for Christmas just five days before the fire.
Those are the days when it really sinks in that it will be at least two years before the Rosenberg-Watts will be settling into a newly rebuilt home that will forever not be what, before Dec. 30, had been their forever home. Home, Kelly says, isn’t home anymore, of course.
“What I already hate is that our lives are now always going to be defined by ‘before and after’ the fire, and that is always going to be both incredibly heartbreaking and catastrophic for me,” she said. “The fire will always be the main event in my lifetime. The one that cleaves my life, more so even than before and after meeting Phil.”
Kelly Watt, third from left, starred in “The Fantasticks” in 2009 at the Victorian Playhouse.
Kelly Watt and Phil Rosenberg-Watt met while performing in the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” in 2008.
On the other hand
Not to be contrary, but a masked Luisa might actually say the whole meeting-Phil story might give the fire story a run for its money.
It ends poignantly: Even after kindly volunteers had meticulously sifted through all of the remains of the house, Rosenberg-Watt’s wedding ring had not yet been found. But he had a pretty good idea where it might be, so he donned a hazmat suit, went back in and dug it out. It’s worse for the wear, but Rosenberg-Watt has decided not to polish the ring back to its original condition. You can’t read the engraving anymore, but the only two people who need to know what it says know what it says: “Grow Old With Me.” That’s a lyric from a Jason Robert Brown song that Rosenberg-Watt sang to his wife at their 2013 wedding reception, backed by an 18-piece band at the Englewood Civic Center.
That’s also where this story begins back in 2008. That’s when these two rising actors were cast to play Sally and Schroeder in the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” at the very same Englewood Civic Center. They were married there five years to the day after the play closed.
Speaking of symbiotic dates, their son, Alexander, was born on Aug. 2, 2019 — also Phil’s birthday. And one month to the day after the fire unalterably recalibrated their lives, Watt turned 40. It was a bittersweet January day made better by one of Phil’s sentimental gifts: A birthday message and song from the very same Jason Robert Brown who penned musicals the couple love like “The Bridges of Madison County” and “The Last Five Years.” Brown told Kelly through the Cameo celebrity video-greeting service, “I understand that the last few months have been a total (bleep) show.”
Kelly Watt and Phil Rosenberg-Watt stand in the remnants of their Superior home.
Back to the beginning
Kelly Watt grew up in a tiny country village 225 miles south of Chicago. Seriously tiny: The population of Muncie, Ill., is just 132. So her decision to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder had a major impact on the town’s census data. One of the treasures she brought with her to Boulder was a big, framed, irreplaceable photo of a sunset she had snapped at age 14 or 15 on her parents’ property back in Illinois, before they got divorced. As the fire approached on Dec. 30, Kelly took that frame down from the wall, but couldn’t carry it to the car in those ferocious winds.
Phil Rosenberg-Watt was an all-in theater kid at Bear Creek High School. For 20 years, he’s kept a plastic bin that’s packed with specialty shirts his drama club made for every musical they staged, like “George M” and “Guys and Dolls.”
Phil went on to get a master’s degree in software engineering at Regis University and is now a senior software engineer at CableLabs in Superior. Kelly has been senior director of admissions at nearby Naropa University since 2017. Like most Colorado theater actors, the couple have found a way to work their performing passions around full-time careers.
As Kelly’s stage career bloomed, Phil gravitated toward musical direction — that’s the member of the creative team who teaches actors the songs in a musical. He was the musical director when Kelly played Luisa in “The Fantasticks” at the now-closed Victorian Playhouse and earned both Denver Post Ovation Award and Colorado Theatre Guild Henry Award nominations for an impeccable performance that perfectly captured the playful sexuality, tension and heartbreak of a young girl coming of age. Subsequent signature roles have included playing Marian in Performance Now’s 2011 “The Music Man” and Shelby in Vintage Theatre’s 2015 “The Spitfire Grill.”
Even seven years later, Watt still meets up every few months with castmates Megan Van De Hey and Annie Oberbroeckling. Both have spearheaded efforts to put relief funds into the Rosenberg-Watt family coffers. Van De Hey recently performed a cabaret at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center to call attention to a Gofundme campaign. It’s what show people do, she said.
“Kelly Watt is the epitome of a giver,” said Van De Hey, currently performing in “Kinky Boots” at the Arvada Center. “Everything she does is about cultivating culture, community and togetherness. So when she lost everything, helping her in return was just a no-brainer.”
Megan Van De Hey, Anne Oberbroeckling and Kelly Watt in “The Spitfire Grill” at the Vintage Theatre in 2015.
If the fire never happened, Performance Now’s just completed staging of the musical “1776” would have marked the couple’s first time working together on a show since Alexander was born. Kelly was cast to play Abigail Adams and Phil was set to be the music director for the show. “To do that show, together,” Kelly says now, “would have been really special.”
Instead, the show went on without them, but not entirely. Producer Ken Goodwin recently cut the family a $1,000 check on behalf of the Performance Now cast, crew and board of directors.
“Once you are family, you are family for life,” Goodwin said. “Phil and Kelly are part of our family.”
Old Town, new home
When people think of Superior, many surely think of the many sprawling housing subdivisions and shopping opportunities that surround the town 8 miles south of Boulder off U.S. 36. But “Original Town” was made up of about 100 funky little homes built in the 1900s over about an eight-block radius just west of McCaslin Boulevard. Past tense because … it’s all gone.
Kelly and Phil moved from Westminster into their “O.T.” home in 2015. The house on Lot 103 was a neighborhood anomaly because it was only eight years old. The location was perfect — it was close to Phil’s job, and Kelly could both bike to work and walk across the street to Target. They lived right across the street from the Superior Historical Museum, there were four parks within walking distance and, best of all — there was no homeowners association. You could pass a $1 million home and a mobile home walking along the same block. For some reason, Phil loved that none of the homes had sidewalks. He thought it gave O.T. its character.
After Alexander was born, Kelly soon knew pretty much everything about everyone in the neighborhood, because that’s when she started going on three walks a day and meeting everyone in the path of her stroller.
“If someone in our neighborhood bought a new pair of shoes, I knew about it,” she says with a laugh.
It’s still surreal for the couple to recount the events of that last Thursday in 2021. At 10 a.m., Kelly was having brunch with friends in Boulder. Phil was working from home in the basement when he first smelled the smoke.
“I turned on the scanner to listen to the fire department and then started messaging colleagues,” he said. When he arrived as always to pick up Alexander from his day care in Louisville at noon, the talk about the fire was still mostly speculative. “But I told someone at the school, ‘You guys really want to start thinking about how you are going to get these kids out of here,’” Phil said. “Later on, she told me that push saved their butts, because they loaded all of the kids onto buses and got them out safely.”
But getting back to the house was difficult, because police were already directing traffic away from the fire area. When Phil finally made it home, he told his young son, “Let’s start packing. We’re going on a trip.” While listening in on a ham radio, Phil heard fire officials say the flames were spreading so fast, they had no choice but to let the fire run its course. Kelly, meanwhile, was still working her way back to the house, driving through raining ash and thinking that it was time for Alexander’s nap.
When she got home, the three quickly packed for what they wanted to believe would simply be an overnight stay at Phil’s mother’s house in Sedalia. But deep down, Phil knew: maybe not. Although they never did receive a call to evacuate, it was time to go. The last thing Kelly grabbed were Phil’s and Kelly’s favorite stuffed animals from their childhoods, which they kept together in the closet.
“My advice to anyone who ever finds themselves in a position like this is to pack like you are never coming back,” Kelly said. “Always.”
Kelly and Alexander left in the family truck, though it would take hours for them to get anywhere. Phil stayed behind and packed a few final things until he was nearly overcome by a lack of oxygen in the air. When he saw the neighbor’s house on fire, he dashed to the basement, grabbed the data server that stored all of his family’s critical documents, photos and videos, and left. As he drove away, he could see his park, the museum across the street and the Element Hotel engulfed in flames. He got off on Wadsworth Boulevard and pulled into the Ball Aerospace corporate headquarters and used the ham radio to call Kelly, who was still stuck in traffic.
Phil Rosenberg-Watt after rescuing two dogs in the Marshall fire.
He then took a call on his cell from a neighbor’s son who pleaded with Phil to go back and save their three dogs. Three dogs that, to be honest, “I wasn’t a fan of because they were barking all the time,” said Phil, who didn’t even know their names. This was the house with the fence that Phil already had seen was on fire. Phil drove back into what was now a ghost town, stepped over that burning fence, kicked in the front door, grabbed the two dogs he could see and carried them back to his car.
“By now all the smoke detectors are going off, and burning embers are flying in from the outside so I had to leave,” said Phil, who only found out later that another neighbor had already grabbed the third dog. He then delivered them to an agreed meeting spot in Lafayette and headed back toward Sedalia, where he reunited with Kelly, covered in ash and smoke.
Alexander? “He slept the whole way,” Kelly said.
After a horrible night of non-sleep, the couple just had to know if their house was still standing. “I couldn’t deal with not knowing,” Kelly said. So that morning, they drove back into what looked like a war zone and were chased away by a sheriff’s deputy in less than a minute. But that was long enough to know. “When everything you know is suddenly gone, you can see a lot further than you ever could before,” said Kelly. “We could see that our neighborhood was gone long before we actually arrived at the house.”
Kelly can’t describe what it felt like to stand on her street corner and see her life reduced to rubble. “Your brain protects you from the really bad (bleep) that you don’t want to remember,” she said. She does recall being driven away by Phil and starting to sob in a way she never had before. “I have had loss and grief but never to that scale,” she said. “It came from somewhere, and it just kept coming.”
Phil, searching for a bathroom, randomly pulled into the Walmart in Englewood that stands just a few hundred feet from where he and Kelly met and were married. “Only now, I am uncontrollably cry-walking and I’m realizing that no one around us can possibly know what is happening,” Kelly said. “But it was a very public display of ugly.”
Long road to recovery
The family stayed in three temporary homes in the weeks following the fire before being set up in a fully furnished rental house in Louisville. It’s a mixed blessing, given that staying there is no guarantee while their house is eventually rebuilt.
Kelly and Phil now find themselves overwhelmed by generosity, grief and guilt. “People leave bags of toys by the front door on a regular basis. They make monetary donations. They leave gift cards,” Phil said. It was suggested they start an Amazon wish list that gets filled as fast as the couple can add items.
People ask what the family needs now, but the better question is what the family is going to need two years from now. Right now, a coffee date would be nice. An understanding ear. Play time with their son. But what Kelly says she would love more than anything else: “For Phil and me to get to do a show together, when the time is right.”
And if that happens to be a musical written by Jason Robert Brown, all the better. Kelly has one of his lyrics permanently affixed to her Facebook page. It’s from the song “Nothing in Common”:
“When people think I’m failing, they never understand. The temporary setbacks are part of what I planned.”
The couple haven’t been told definitively what to expect from the nearly $40 million that has been raised to help the wildfire victims rebuild their homes. Every family was quickly issued an initial $3,000 check from Community Foundation Boulder County. More meaningful to the family have been gestures from strangers, like the couple from South Carolina who donated $500.
Kelly struggles knowing that her misfortune is an emotional burden for friends and family. “I realized right away that it is really hard for people to come and visit us, because we are really a wreck, and being around us right now no doubt makes them feel sad,” she said. “This whole thing makes them question their own mortality.”
She also struggles with reconciling the blessings that come from a high-profile tragedy like the Marshall fire does not extend to others who are experiencing a more mundane, systemic form of everyday homelessness.
“Really early on after the fire, I drove up to a stoplight and saw a homeless person like you see on a corner all the time,” she said. “I thought, ‘That person doesn’t have a home. And I don’t have a home. But that person is way worse off than me in so many ways, but they are not getting the help that we are getting. Listen, we need help right now. We do. But in some ways it’s hard to accept help because there are always people who are worse off. We both have steady jobs. And we were both able to take time off from those jobs to try to figure out life. That’s not true for everybody.”
“We’re not lucky that our house burned down, but we are lucky that it was in the most destructive fire in Colorado history because everyone is paying attention.”
The fire has been a trauma that the Rosenberg-Watts and hundreds of other families will be processing for years. It’s taught Phil, a self-described cynic, to accept that things can always get worse. “From my experience,” he said, “they always do.”
And it’s forced Kelly see the world without the mask.
“My takeaway is that this could happen to you,” she said. “There is no getting back what you had. There’s not.”
Schroeder’s plastic piano was the only one of three pianos on the home to survive the fire.
But then, a bit of Luisa comes back. Watt remembers the piano and the synthesizer that her husband lost in the fire, but also remembers what did survive: the cake-toppers from their wedding in 2013. The one of Schroeder’s plastic piano representing the love that brought the couple together in the first place.
And whenever the mask starts to slip, there’s always Alexander.
“There is nothing like having a small child to force you to be both in the moment and OK with whatever is happening,” she said.
John Moore is The Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Reach him at john.moore@denvergazette.com
To assist the Rosenberg-Watt family, please visit:
- The family’s blog page
- The family GoFundMe recovery page
- The family’s Amazon wish list page
To assist victims of the Marshall fire through the Community Fioundation Boulder County, visit commfound.org
Kelly Watt and Phil Rosenberg-Watt stand in the remnants of their Superior home.
The Superior Historical Museum burns Dec. 30.