For decades, Denver did not have a single top-caliber venue for dance or classical music.
The Friends of Chamber Music, Colorado Ballet, Opera Colorado and other area organizations simply had to make do with ill-suited halls and average acoustics at best.
The landscape began to change in April 2003, when the University of Denver opened its much-praised Gates Concert Hall as part of the $70 million Newman Center for the Performing Arts.
Now, the city’s performing arts scene is set for a seismic shift Saturday when the $92 million Ellie Caulkins Opera House opens with a gala concert featuring more than a dozen noted opera singers, including soprano Rene Fleming and bass-baritone James Morris.
The 2,268-seat theater, which sits at the entrance to the Denver Performing Arts Complex at 14th and Curtis streets, will be the city’s first building tailored to the needs of opera and ballet since the Tabor Grand Opera House was razed in 1964.
Denver joins a handful of other American cities – Seattle, Miami and Dallas – that are constructing or have recently completed such structures. Still, these new opera houses remain a rarity.
Stephen Lord, artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera and a frequent guest conductor with Opera Colorado, said the project puts Denver ahead of many other major cities that continue to suffer from subpar opera facilities, including Philadelphia and Boston.
“I live in Boston, supposedly the cultural Athens of America, and no one can get a theater together there,” he said. “Denver is so forward looking, and Boston is so behind looking. It’s awful. Would that we had this sort of thing to galvanize the community behind our opera company there.”
As important as the Newman Center and Caulkins Opera House are, they are just part of a burst of cultural construction underway in Denver. Other projects include a $90.5 million addition to the Denver Art Museum and a new home for the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver.
“We’re on a roll, with all the great things that are happening,” said Ellie Caulkins, the opera house’s namesake and Opera Colorado’s lifetime honorary board chairman. “I feel very great about Denver.”
At the same time the city is capturing the national spotlight as an up-and-coming cultural center, the Caulkins Opera House is also bringing heightened attention to the organizations that will be its two main tenants, the Colorado Ballet and Opera Colorado.
To take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the opera company hired a New York-based publicist who is working to attract critics and writers from across the country and even abroad to cover Saturday’s opening.
“The new opera house makes everyone stand up and pay attention to Denver’s potential as an important opera company in this country,” said Marc Scorca, president and chief executive officer of Opera America.
A decade ago, the mood in certain sectors of the performing arts community was considerably more grim.
Forty or so years had passed since the now-97-year-old Auditorium Theatre (renamed in 2002 the Quigg Newton Denver Municipal Auditorium after a former mayor) had been converted into a theater. It was becoming rundown and woefully out of date.
“It had become a lousy building,” said Jim Copenhaver, an arts management consultant and chairman of the Foundation for the Denver Performing Arts Complex. “It wasn’t serving either of the primary constituents. The acoustics were terrible. It was a place that nobody wanted to go.”
In 1994-95, the foundation, which had raised private funds for the Buell Theatre and other improvements to the complex, conceived a strategic plan for the complex calling for the auditorium’s renovation.
Copenhaver and other foundation leaders lobbied for the overhaul, and the idea gradually gained momentum. The group made the first donation – $25,000 – to the Friends of Denver’s Historic Auditorium Theatre, which was formed in 2001.
Led by Stephen Seifert, now executive director of the Newman Center, and Jeremy Shamos, the new organization took over the fight to get the project on the ballot, finally persuading then-Mayor Wellington E. Webb to endorse a $25 million bond issue in May 2002.
During his administration, Webb’s arts agenda included the establishment of what is now the Office of Cultural Affairs, the institution of a 1 percent-for-art ordinance and passage of a $62.5 million bond issue for the Denver Art Museum’s addition.
“The only piece that was missing out of that was the City Auditorium,” Webb said. “It was my view that it would kind of finish the complex.”
The Friends spent nearly $500,000 campaigning for the bond issue. The measure passed in November 2002; nearly 68 percent of the voters approved it.
Because the Newton Auditorium enjoys landmark status and a storied history, its exterior structure has been preserved. Workers returned the exterior to its 1908 appearance, except for the original corner cupolas, which could be restored later.
Some parts of the original building were left exposed, including several iron columns in the 67-foot-tall lobby and the massive stone foundation walls in the Chambers-Grant Salon on the lower level.
The auditorium’s interior was gutted, and the Caulkins Opera House was built inside the shell of the original building.
“Bringing the new architecture together with the old architecture and having it feel in harmony was really a challenge,” said Peter Lucking, principal in charge and lead designer.
“The opportunity, though, that it gives you is the building has a feeling that it has been there longer than it really has.”
In conceiving the Caulkins Opera House, Lucking and his team of architects at Denver-based Semple Brown Design decided from the outset to shoot for nothing less than the best. Their goal: Create a building that could make the list of the world’s top 10 opera houses.
To do that, they chose a lyre shape for the theater, because it provides some of the best acoustics and evokes the historic feeling of the celebrated European opera houses.
“The house is very, very traditional,” Lucking said. “The colors that we chose are traditional opera-house colors. They’re the reds, very rich colors, because people have an expectation, and part of becoming a great house is fulfilling that expectation.”
Although the hall seats more than 2,000 people, it has an intimate feeling. The most distant seat is just 113 feet from the stage compared with 127 feet in the Auditorium Theatre or 130 feet in the Buell Theatre.
At the same time, the architects chose a dark gray-green that will cause the rear walls of the theater to essentially vanish, focusing attention on the front of the seating sections, which will be lined in cherry wood and subtly lit.
“By doing that,” Lucking said, “the space becomes more intimate, and by lighting the balcony fronts and getting that sparkle, people’s faces on the balcony fronts are lit, and the performer can see those faces.
“So the relationship between the stage and the performer and the audience and the house starts to be created.”
The hall also evokes a sense of movement, with a series of sinuous lines that run around the ceiling and curve down the sides of the theater to the stage.
“The trick is to make the audience feel at whole with the stage, to embrace the stage,” Lucking said. “Visually all those elements are leading your eye to the stage and bringing your eye down to the stage to the performance.”
The opera house is equipped with up-to-date light and sound equipment, plus a comprehensive $2.8 million Figaro titling system that will allow audiences to follow the text of an opera on seatback screens in front of them. The Caulkins will be just the third American opera house with such a feature.
“I felt really strongly that to build a new opera house today and not include that technology would be a mistake,” said Jack Finlaw, director of Denver’s Division of Theatres and Arenas.
The lobby areas have been designed with ease of circulation in mind. The theater has 106 toilets, compared with 40 in the Auditorium Theatre and 69 in the Buell Theatre. Men’s and women’s restrooms are paired, so partners don’t have to search for each other.
“We don’t want people to have to spend their whole intermission waiting in line in a restroom,” Lucking said. “They’re there to enjoy it. They’re not there to go through pain and anger before they get their drink.”
Seifert believes that people who attend a performance at the Caulkins Opera House will have much the same reaction as many attendees at the Newman Center who experience its elegancy and superior acoustics for the first time:
“Oh, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
