The Solid Muldoon

When Giants Walked The Earth

An Original Operetta by David Volk & Kennedy Pugh

WORLD PREMIERE · OCTOBER 9–11, 2026
Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center · Pueblo, Colorado

The Story

Set against the colorful backdrop of 1870s Southern Colorado, The Solid Muldoon: When Giants Walked the Earth is an original operetta inspired by one of Pueblo County’s strangest true stories—the 1877 discovery of a supposedly petrified giant near Beulah.

At the center of the story is the Solid Muldoon, an astonishing archaeological “discovery” that quickly becomes a sensation. But the giant is not what it appears to be. As news spreads, the Muldoon draws together an eccentric traveling circus, an ambitious young newspaper reporter, railroad interests, fortune seekers and a community eager to believe that something extraordinary has been unearthed in the Colorado soil.

Blending historical fiction, circus spectacle and an eclectic original score, the operetta uses the famous hoax as the starting point for a larger story about truth, belief, ambition, belonging and the stories people choose to tell. The circus becomes both setting and storyteller—a strange world of fortune tellers, strongmen, clowns, ghosts and outsiders whose lives become intertwined with the giant and with one another.

Beneath the spectacle is a distinctly Colorado story. The arrival of the railroad promises commerce and change, the newspaper searches for the truth, and the circus offers reinvention to people searching for a place to belong. Looming over them all is a giant that is physically solid but increasingly difficult to separate from the hopes, lies and desires projected onto it.

Nearly 150 years after the original Solid Muldoon captured the public imagination, David Volk and Kennedy Pugh bring the legendary Colorado humbug back to life—not simply to retell the hoax, but to explore why people believe, why they gather around a story, and what remains after the spectacle is gone.