Long before the creation of the Denver Center Theatre Company, Denver’s premier theater was staged at the Bonfils Memorial Theater at East Colfax Avenue and Elizabeth Street.
Over 33 years, the Bonfils’ seductive stage called out to everyone from New York celebrities to a state Supreme Court justice to a future Miss America to legions of ordinary folk. It even saw the occasional streaker and bomb threat.
It was a community theater that was professionally run.
When former Denver Post publisher Helen Bonfils built her 550-seat theater palace as a memorial to her parents, it was the first new live theater built anywhere in Denver in 40 years. It soon became the epicenter of Denver society.
By the time it closed in 1986 as the Lowenstein Theater, it had hosted more than 400 mainstage and children’s productions. Its legacy includes a summer festival caravan that toured city parks, a free annual outdoor summer musical in Cheesman Park and a black-box cabaret. Its long list of legendary directors includes Alexander Ivo, Robert Wells, Harry Geldard, Bob Bannister, Buddy Butler, Bev Newcomb-Madden and Gary Montgomery, nephew of British military hero Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
The building has sat unoccupied for 19 years, but a new plan to turn the Lowenstein into a cultural retail center only made what had been long assumed now obvious: While the building’s exterior will be preserved, this beloved gem’s days as a performance venue are over.
The current plan calls for the Tattered Cover Book Store to take over the existing theater, while the Denver Film Society and Twist & Shout records will operate in a new facility to be built next door.
The Bonfils story includes actors collapsing onstage and being bailed out of jail just before curtain. There are tales of ghosts and hookers both being shooed away by diligent house manager Joe Farrow. Onstage, the canon included antiwar stories, cautionary tales of nuclear destruction and some of the first staged works with homosexual characters (“Boys in the Band”), all playing opposite professionally staged children’s stories like “Pippi Longstocking” and “Golliwhoppers.”
In honor of a closed chapter in the city’s history, The Post asked longtime producer Henry Lowenstein and many of those who performed there for their memories.
Lowenstein remembers the theater as “one of the best-designed and best-equipped theater buildings that existed at the time.” For many actors, Michael Gold said, “it was the start of our careers. And it was all good theater with the sole purpose of entertainment.”
For untold millions of Coloradans, the Bonfils served as their first experience in live theater. And for many of their grandchildren as well.
