Gay Theater in Denver, Part IV

What I did not know until I spoke to Steve Tangedal at length a few weeks back was that Theatre on Broadway garnered significant funding throughout their successful run because of, you guessed it, Bingo! Ticket sales alone would never have gotten the sheer number and quality of the productions they put on from the early 1990's until approximately 2005.

What killed the golden Bingo goose for them came from an unlikely source: the legal end to smoking in public places. When the law took effect in 2005, the Bingo players who smoked stopped coming, and there must have been a good many of them. Monthly income from Bingo plummeted, Steve told me. Effectively, it killed TOB.

TOB had successfully expanded, too, before the end came. In addition to their regular site at 13 S. Broadway, they opened the Phoenix Theatre and staged plays there from approximately 1999 until 2007. They also staged productions at the Denver Civic Theatre until 2007, as well.

Steve provided me with lists of plays they put on in addition to the ones I attended (I did see Psycho Beach Party at some point. And it, along with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Jerker or the Helping Hand, and Two Boys in Bed on a Cold Winter's Night, were successful as late night gay theatre.)

Here are the ones he remembers:

Shakespeare's R & J
Naked Boys Singing
Laramie Project (created at the Denver Center, becoming one of the most produced titles in the country for quite some time)
Making Porn
10 Naked Men
Ruthless! The Musical (which launched the Broadway career of Annaleigh Ashford)
Crumple Zone
Pageant
Parallel Lives
Torch Song Trilogy
Gross Indecencies: The Trials of Oscar Wilde (which I may have seen at the Phoenix Theatre)
Dirty Blonde
Last Summer at Bluefish Cove
Stop Kiss
Southern Baptist Sissies
Sordid Lives
Corpus Christi
Gertrude Stein and Companion
Laughing Wild
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
The Eyes of Babylon
Some Men
The Sum of Us
Porcelain
Dying Gaul
Lips Together Teeth Apart
Beautiful Thing
Varla Jean Merman's Under a Big Top
Snakebit

It's an impressive list using any criteria, and I am sorry I missed almost all of them in the final years of TOB.

Fortunately, Steve is now working to create a new gay theatre production company at a venue right at Five Points. We can all wish him good fortunate because if he attains even a portion of the success he gathered at TOB, he'll have another remarkable run.

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