Mark Ragan, Gilpin County.  When Nederland bartender Jess Schmeling was six years old and living on the East Coast, her mother took her to a local production of Guys and Dolls.

“I remember sitting there in the dark, totally mesmerized,” she recalled. “I knew instantly, this is what I wanted to do. This would be my life’s passion.”

It was the same lightning bolt of discovery that hit Timberline assistant fire chief Chip Smith. The imposing six-foot, four-inch Smith had arrived at the University of Nebraska on a football scholarship but quickly fell in love with singing and performing.

So thrilled was he about his new calling that Smith once shaved his head to audition for a college production of The King and I.

When the Wizard of Oz opens Friday night at the Gilpin School Auditorium, playgoers will see these two familiar faces strutting the stage, not as the genial firefighter or the wise-cracking bartender at Backcountry Pizza, but as two theater professionals whose wide-ranging background in performance is all but unknown to their friends and neighbors.

Smith will find his roar as the Cowardly Lion while Schmeling will stalk Dorothy and her ruby slippers as the odious Wicked Witch of the West.

The Oz production is the first fully staged musical by the new Peak to Peak Players, the new theater company devoted to bringing the arts to mountain communities. For a company with huge ambition but modest budget, the appearance of two experienced character actors was a godsend.

Wizard of Oz Director Jacquelyn O’Brien recalls her reaction the day Smith and Schmeling walked into the company’s second-floor audition space at Rollinsville’s Stage Stop.

“I couldn’t believe our luck,” she said. “We had no idea who would show up that day, and suddenly, standing before us was the perfect Lion and Witch.”

O’Brien had already been gobsmacked by the 16-year-old high school student Grace Pouliot, who stunned the room with her eye-moistening rendition of Somewhere over the Rainbow.

“To have Grace and Jess and Chip audition for Oz, well, it was really too good to be true,” said O’Brien.

Of course, it helps that Smith and Schmeling are two of the most recognizable faces in Nederland and Gilpin County.

On a recent afternoon at Roy’s Last Shot, it took Smith ten minutes to make his way to our table as he stopped to greet friends and exchange pleasantries. He’s a passionate believer in “creating community,” and he is a natural at it. Like Harold Hill in The Music Man, a role he took on his 20s, Smith is a charismatic, inspirational figure to adults and children alike, but unlike the smooth-talking traveling salesman in the famous musical, Smith is the real deal.

He spent his entire life as an impresario — directing, producing and acting in over 150 shows. He’s appeared in productions ranging from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Fiddler on the Roof to Camelot, mostly playing the title roles. He’s acted and sung everywhere, appearing on stages as varied as the Aspen Musical Festival to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan.

Did you grasp that last fact? Our assistant fire chief has sung principal roles at Carnegie Hall, often under the direction of the country’s most famous choral directors, and he did most of this during his summers off from his 28-year teaching gig at Hastings College in Nebraska.

Teaching, performing and inspiring young people are among the joys of Smith’s life. It’s what gives him energy, what makes him feel alive.

You could see it all on display one day last week during Oz music rehearsals. In a room packed with toddlers and pre-teens, Smith grabbed and held the attention of his young charges like a wrangler corralling new colts.

“How do you feel about that nasty witch,” he asked his giggling and squealing cast. “I want to see it on your faces. I want to hear it in your voices.”

Once, when he failed to get the performance he was looking for, the towering Smith leapt onto the stage and danced alongside three little boys, his booming baritone calling out instructions.

“One, two three, one two three, one two three.”

Playing opposite Smith is Schmeling’s nasty and frequently funny Wicked Witch.

Trained at New York’s famed American Academy of the Dramatic Arts, Schmeling studied at the same Madison Avenue campus where Grace Kelly, Robert Redford and Ann Hathaway got their theater chops.

After graduating from the academy, Schmeling bounced between New Jersey and Texas, acting in summer productions whenever she had the chance. She once performed in Once Upon a Mattress while cleaning rooms at the Silver Bay resort in upstate New York.

Then one day in 2007, Schmeling received a call from her brother urging her to visit him in Nederland.

The call had come at the right time, a period in her life when she felt adrift; lonely and confused.”

She can still remember the night she drove to Nederland.

“It was just before Midnight and the full moon was hanging over the mountains. I immediately began crying. It felt like I had come home.”

Schmeling has lived in Nederland for 13 years. She makes her home in a 400-square foot cabin in the woods near Rollinsville. She hauls water from a natural spring.

“I’m kind of like the witch when you think about it,” she said. “I live by myself in the dark woods and love every minute of it. The only thing I have missed in my life is the theater, and now I have that.”

Smith and Schmeling are the clear favorites of the children in the young Oz cast.

You haven’t really lived until you see Gilpin County’s Munchkins squeal in terror — and that’s real terror — when Schmeling’s witch swoops down among them cackling and screeching.

Nor can you afford to miss Smith’s trembling Cowardly Lion as he makes his way to Oz, flanked by his new buddies Dorothy, Scarecrow and the Tin Man, or in the Peak to Peak production, the Tin Woman.

But here’s the good news: you needn’t deny yourself these pleasures.

Make your way down Peak to Peak Highway on Friday, Saturday or Sunday and spend a few hours in Kansas and the Emerald City.

You won’t need ruby slippers to get you there.

The play was held August 10, 11 and 12 at the Gilpin School Auditorium.

(Originally published in the August 9, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)