The Denver Performing Arts Complex, begun in 1972 as a scribble on the back of an envelope, is now home to the new Ellie Caulkins opera house, which has its grand opening Saturday.
The 12-acre complex is the largest performing-arts facility in the nation at one location. By any measure – acreage, available seats or variety and quality of cultural offerings – the DPAC must rank among the top four in the nation, according to president Randy Weeks of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the umbrella that runs the complex. That puts it in company with New York’s Lincoln Center, Los Angeles’ Music Center and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
“What makes ours different than most arts complexes is that first, it is complete,” Weeks said. “DPAC is home to opera, ballet, symphony, a regional theater company and large Broadway touring productions. But there are only a few others that have combined, multivenue complexes to the magnitude we have here, all under one roof.”
The DPAC came to be after Donald R. Seawell was walking past 14th and Curtis streets one day in July 1972. He stopped to consider the Auditorium Arena, then an aging 1908 eyesore amid what he called “a mass of urban decay.” He pulled an envelope from his pocket and sketched out a crude blueprint covering four blocks.
Seawell was a dapper New York attorney whose client and business partner since 1956, Denver Post publisher Helen Bonfils, had just died. He took his scribbling straight to the office of skeptical Denver Mayor Bill McNichols, who cited a study saying there weren’t 3,000 people in Denver at that time who had attended even one professional theater production in their lifetimes.
“Well, millions of those 3,000 people have attended the theater now,” Seawell said recently.
In fact, 4 million have attended plays performed by his Denver Center Theatre Company. Millions more have seen performances at the DPAC by Opera Colorado, the Colorado Ballet, the Colorado Symphony and Denver Center Attractions.
Today the complex consists of 10 performance facilities, offering a combined 10,807 seats. By comparison, the Kennedy Center offers 7,040.
The DPAC is entirely owned by the city of Denver, which also operates the three largest facilities – the Buell, Boettcher and the soon-to-open Ellie Caulkins, formerly the Auditorium. The DCPA manages the five-space Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, Tramway and Garner-Galleria theaters. The Bonfils theater complex was built by the foundation and in effect handed back to the city in exchange for rent of $1 per year.
The DCPA has two performance divisions. The resident Denver Center Theatre Company performs up to 11 plays annually. Denver Center Attractions presents national Broadway touring shows in the Buell such as “Wicked” and produces its own local theater productions such as “My Way” in the Garner-Galleria. The DCPA also administers a master’s in fine arts program and the National Center for Voice and Speech.
The DPAC is also home to the Colorado Children’s Chorale, Denver Brass, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance and Denver Young Artists Orchestra.
All told, the DCPA and the city combined to offer 1,473 performances at the complex in 2004, drawing 1,056,831 people. The numbers would have been much larger had the Caulkins not been closed for renovation. By comparison, the Kennedy Center offered 3,000 performances in 2004.
No one would know the complex operates in the red – at least the part of the operation run by the city’s division of theaters and arenas.
“It varies, but the best the annual deficit has been in the 15 years since I have been with the city was $130,000, and the worst was $1.6 million,” said Rodney Smith, director of programming and event services. The problem has been the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, which runs up huge losses as the Boettcher’s primary tenant.
So why keep doing it?
“That’s the age-old question,” Smith said. “The way we’ve been able to deal with it in the past is that the division of Theatres and Arenas also manages Red Rocks, the Coliseum and, before, the old McNichols Sports Arena. When we had all that, we had an operating surplus, so the deficit at the arts complex was just absorbed into that surplus.
The city has not raised rents in part because the Colorado Symphony Orchestra would be forced to relocate, along with the opera and ballet.
“But I maintain that what we do at the arts complex is really a quality-of-life issue for this community,” he said. “How do you put a dollar value on the fact that we have a real strong symphony that plays to (325,000) people a year? How do you put a dollar value on the fact that we have all these components together in one home at this complex?”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-056 or at jmoore@denverpost.com.
