There was a time when I could walk a few blocks, knock on a neighbor’s door and be led downstairs to watch a fully staged play in a completely fitted, 76-seat boutique theater. The Victorian Playhouse was just two blocks from the house where I babysat my nephew in high school.
For exactly 100 years, The Vic was the most distinct and storied live theater venue in Denver.
George Swartz, like hundreds of others, had moved to Colorado in the late 1800s to seek treatment for tuberculosis. Swartz loved to read Shakespeare to his family and friends, so when he built his new house at 4201 Hooker St. in 1911, he included a basement bungalow theater to accommodate his growing audience. He even called it the Bungalow Theatre, and it included a miniature proscenium, terraced seating and even an orchestra pit. Before long, the Bungalow became the first theater west of the Mississippi to have staged all 37 of Shakespeare's plays. Cost of admission: Twenty cents.
In the 1960s, when it was called The Gaslight Theatre, producer Paul Willett would invite all-comers to stay afterward and play poker. On any given night, the length of intermission was dictated by the line to the only toilet in the house. The bigger the crowd, the longer the break.
In 2011, a woman in the neighborhood bought the house for $430,000, tore out the theater and, one can only hope, is now visited nightly by the Vic’s many legendary ghosts.
On Friday, I went looking for the playhouse I had visited dozens of times on Hooker, a street name that always made my brothers and me snicker as teenagers. It’s now so indistinct, I drove right past it.
Theater spaces are disappearing, making it harder and harder for local arts groups to find and afford four walls and a stage. Meanwhile, the venerable Curious Theatre Company announced it is putting its hallowed Acoma Center performing space up for sale . Benchmark Theatre abandoned its salon theater in Lakewood. In January, Miners Alley Playhouse opened a new arts center in Golden and left its longtime theater behind. Their fates are all up in the air.
That got me thinking about all of the wonderfully whimsical little palaces and galleries and lobbies and barns and storefronts and total dumps that have vanished as performing spaces since I started chasing live theater as a beat in 2001. The number surprised even me – 30.
Like diners and movie theaters and drive-ins and bookstores, the disappearing places we choose to anchor our lives become part of our stories and histories.
To illustrate just how much we have lost, and to feed my own nostalgia, I decided to take myself on a graveyard tour of all the Denver theater spaces I know have vaporized since 2001. Some are now salons and restaurants and stores, but it was striking to me just how ignoble many of their fates were. Storage rooms. Vacant shells. Scraped out of existence. Local theater companies have been very good for the demo industry.
Sometimes companies like Su Teatro, Vintage Theatre and Miners Alley Playhouse move on and up to much bigger and better things. But this is about the places left behind. To me, there is something intrinsically objectionable in seeing dozens of theaters that once connected our communities and stimulated dialogue silenced or reduced to rubble. A definite metaphor for our troubled times.
One stop that hit way too close to home was Clementine’s, a thriving hair studio at 5665 Olde Wadsworth Blvd. It’s housed in Arvada’s oldest building, constructed in 1874 as a Grange Hall and converted into the Arvada Festival Playhouse in 1962. My mom was a reporter for the Arvada Citizen, and she often brought a full row of eight children along to see the plays she would always write up kindly. It’s where I saw my first play as an audience member. And it’s where, years later, I saw my first play as a theater critic (an abominable production of “Pippin”).
By my estimate, these 30 structural shadows represent about 6,000 lost seats that, had they gone uninterrupted by the economy, the pandemic or changing consumer tastes, might still be entertaining, educating, inflaming and changing us. Instead, we’re pumping $32 million into the box office to see a creeper film like “Longlegs.”
Come along with me on this little reminder of all we have lost in the Denver metro area since 2001, in the order of my drive. (Think of the Vic and Arvada Festival Playhouse as Nos. 1 and 2):
3. The 73rd Avenue Playhouse, 7287 Lowell Blvd. This theater was built inside a Westminster auto service garage that the owner rented to several local troupes at a reduced rate until he could afford to tear it down (which he finally did). Talk about metaphors. Now: It’s an open field.
4. Germinal Stage Denver, 2450 W. 44th Ave. This was home to Ed Baierlein’s band of artistic rabble-rousers for 25 of the company’s 40-plus years and 130 productions. In 2013, Baierlein sold the property for $650,000 and went out with an epic, 45-person staging of an aptly titled polemical lecture called “Offending the Audience.” Now: Retail, namely the El Jefe Mexican restaurant .
5. Denver Puppet Theatre, 3156 W. 38th Ave. For 25 glorious years, Annie Zook operated up to four simultaneous marionettes while telling family-friendly stories to young audiences. Six months into the pandemic, it closed. Now: Apartments.
6. Oriental Theater, 4335 W. 44th Ave. The Oriental is well-established as a prime venue for concerts in the 800-capacity range – but it once hosted full theatrical runs that often got swallowed whole in its cavernous space. One memorable evening was “Mile High Miracle,” a play about two men stuck in the same hospital room watching the Broncos win their first Super Bowl. Now: No live theater.
7. Federal Theatre, 3830 Federal Blvd. Like the Oriental, the Fed is a former movie palace that hosted plays by Arcos Azules, Cheshire Cat and other companies. It is now a church.
8. Theater 29, 5138 W. 29th Ave. In 2018, local playwrights Lisa Wagner Erickson and Ellen K. Graham founded this 30-seat boutique as a space for self-producing playwrights to develop and produce their own plays. It closed in 2022. Now: Soon-to-be headquarters for Illegal Pete's legal business operations.
9. Bindery Space, 2180 Stout St. For 17 years, the longtime home of Brian Freeland’s groundbreaking LIDA Project experimental theater took audiences where few others dared to go: Columbine. 9/11. Manson. Israel. Justin Bieber. Now: Renaissance Stout Street Lofts. In 2011, the company moved to the …
10. Laundry on Lawrence, 2701 Lawrence St. The LIDA Project built a sweet, 99-seat theater that anchored this still thriving artist collective. But Freeland moved to New York in 2013 , and his theater was torn out in favor of just another office.
11. Crossroads Theater at Five Points, 2590 Washington St. The city of Denver rescued but badly managed this cursed jewel of a small theater that, along with its attached coffee shop, now appears intact but utterly abandoned.
12. The Bakery, 2132 Market St. This funky little performance venue and recording studio was a godsend for little fringe companies like Fearless and the Grapefruit Lab collective. It closed in July 2020. Now: Appears vacant.
13. El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High St. In 1989, at age 17, Denver’s only Chicano theater company bought the Historic Elyria School in northeast Denver and performed there until 2010. That’s when it took ownership of the New Denver Civic Theatre at 721 Santa Fe Drive. Now: It’s the administrative office for the Tepeyac Community Health Center .
14-15. Kim Robards Dance Studio, 1385 S. Santa Fe Drive. Paragon Theatre, one of Denver’s best but most peripatetic companies, finally settled into the sweltering dance studio until Robards bolted for northwest Denver in 2011. The space is now, ignobly, used for storage by the next-door Urban Lights LED store. Paragon then set its sights on turning the Larimer Hot House restaurant into its forever home in the newly hip RiNo area. Warren Sherrill and Michael Stricker transformed the space into a 99-seat theater at 2810 Larimer St., then abruptly folded the company after one production. Now: Our Mutual Friend Brewing .
16. The Avenue/Playwright/Vintage Theatre, 2119 E. 17th Ave. Craig Bond’s Vintage Theatre was bounced by its landlord in 2011 to make more room for the next-door Vine Street Pub , ending a 28-year tradition of live theater in the neighborhood. Vintage then bought the shuttered Shadow Theatre Company’s new two-theater arts center in Aurora for $1 million.
17. The Avenue Theater, 417 E. 17th Ave. After 15 years of sandpapering the city's funny bone to dust in their loveable little dump on 17th, Bob Wells and John Ashton moved The Avenue 16 blocks west into a brand-new gem off Logan Street. The company closed in 2019 and the building caught fire a year later. Now: It’s a vacant lot.
18. Changing Scene/Bovine Metropolis, 1527½ Champa St. Al Brooks’ downtown theater was truly the epicenter of Denver counterculture from 1996-99. Next it became home to a succession of improv comedy troupes. A Dumpster fire on Thanksgiving night 2022 shut down the fledgling Jester’s Palace comedy theater and the popular Los Cabos Peruvian restaurant below it. Now: It’s (partly) an escape room called Great Escape .
19. Byers Evans House, 1310 Bannock St. For years, this historic museum hosted its own theater company that would present stories of history and the macabre. Now: It’s the Center for Colorado Women's History .
20. Three Leaches Theatre, 985 Santa Fe Dr. This was a storefront home for the Dirtyfish and Spark theater companies. Now: Denver Works , a nonprofit helping people with stable employment.
21-22. Theatre Group. One of the most successful, storied and stormy companies in local theater history operated for 36 years out of two theaters, the Phoenix (aka Theatre Off-Broadway) at 1124 Santa Fe Drive, and Theatre On Broadway at 13 S. Broadway. Denver’s robust and only gay company was evicted from TOB in 2007, and it has been a Matthew Morris skin salon ever since. The Phoenix chapter ended in litigation the next year, and that space is now The School of Botanical and Medical Aesthetics . But Theatre Group’s enduring legacy is not how it ended – it is decades of cutting-edge theater ranging from groundbreaking stories to proudly camp.
23. Ralph Waldo Emerson Center, 1420 Ogden St. The dank basement was a “be it ever so humble” early home for Shadow, Emancipation and other (mostly) companies of color. A full $3.3 million restoration of the larger building was completed in 2017. It is now known as the Frank B. McGlone Center, which houses several social-service agencies.
24. The Betsy Stage, 1137 S. Huron St. A company known for three things: 1. Free admission. 2. Adaptations of international folktales for children (the “Bitsy” Stage). 3. Being the first local company to permanently close after the pandemic shutdown began. Now: Storage King USA.
25. Country Dinner Playhouse, 6875 S. Clinton St., Greenwood Village. In many ways, echoes still reverberate from the abrupt closing of the state's second-largest theater in May 2007. CDP entertained more than 5 million theatergoers over 37 years. Now: It’s a Restaurant Depot (“Where restaurants shop!”)
26. Pinnacle Dinner Theatre, 9136 W. Bowles Ave. This massive, 520-seat theater in southwest Jefferson County (formerly the Ascot Theatre) reopened in November 2004 and closed less than a year later. Now: It’s the Red Rocks megachurch .
27. West Colfax Event Center, 9797 W. Colfax Ave. This small, strip-mall theater was home to The E Project, then the Edge Theater. After The Edge moved out, it became the Disguises costume rental store , which has also since moved. Now: vacant.
28. Walden Family Playhouse, 14500 W. Colfax Ave., Lakewood. With great fanfare, Walden Media announced in 2003 that it would open a year-round children’s theater at the new Colorado Mills Mall to develop new, national-caliber works out of one designated theater in the new multiplex. The company created eight original musicals and employed dozens of Colorado artists, but Walden suddenly pulled up stakes and shut it all down after one year. The effort was financed by Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz, who also owns the Denver Gazette. Now: It’s just one of the random Regal Cinema theaters in the mall.
29. Heritage Square Music Hall, 18301 W. Colfax Ave., Golden. When T.J. Mullin reopened and renamed the famed Heritage Square Music Hall in 1988, his popular ensemble of triple-threat performers became known for their silly spoofs of classic stories and blue-collar pop-music revues. It closed with a big New Year’s Eve party on Dec. 31, 2013. Now: Seemingly unused private property owned by Martin-Marietta.
30. BDT Stage, 5501 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder. The iconic dinner theater, which closed in January, presented 172 productions and 14,000 performances attended by 3.3 million patrons going back to 1977. It’s soon to be demolished and made into luxury housing.
One thing is certain: When you’ve lost this many central places to gather and tell stories, you are losing part of your civic soul. Denver can’t afford to lose any more, though of course, we will – and with numbing, memory-erasing regularity. And whenever one closes, its stories go with it.
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