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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Gay Theater in Denver, Part III

After a couple of conversations and email exchanges with Steve Tangedal, I realized that I saw Ten Percent Review and even The Boys in the Band at Theater on Broadway's first venue, 135 S. Broadway. That was likely 1991, the first year I lived in Denver.

In addition, I got in on the first gay play in the new venue, 13 S. Broadway, Breeze From the Gulf by The Boys in the Band creator, Mart Crowley.

I was also there from the start of their "coming out" first gay season with the following productions:

Six Degrees of Separation
Raft of the Medusa
Jeffrey
The Boys in the Band

Obviously, I got hooked and made TOB a regular visit whenever a new production was mounted in the following years:

Love, Valour and Compasion
Howard Crabtree's When Pigs Fly
Howard Crabtree's Whoop Dee Doo
Poor Superman
Party
Execution of Justice
Cabaret
A Perfect Genesh

Steve informed me that he flew to Howard Crabtree's farm in Buck's County, PA, to load up the original off-Broadway costumes designed by Crabtree himself for TOB's production of Whoop Dee Doo. For When Pigs Fly, TOB had three different revivals.

That was the '90's. Unfortunately, and I cannot explain why, I never attended any performances after the late 1990's. In my next post, I will list the many productions that I missed, as well as finally explaining the "Bingo!" reverence.

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Gay Theater in Denver, Part II

Bingo!

I will explain that remark in a later post on this subject, but the most long-lived and consistently entertaining Denver gay theater company was Theater on Broadway (TOB).

Located at 13 S. Broadway from approximately 1991 until 2006, it was awarded the "Best Season for a Theatre Company" for three different seasons. It was presented with the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1998.

Theater on Broadway did not start out quite so grandly nor at all gay. It had its humbler beginnings in Lakewood, of all places, as the Lakewood Players from 1972-1978, performing in several venues all over Lakewood. Steve Tangedal, my source for much of this information, joined the company in 1979. They were then performing at the Green Mountain Recreation Center up until 1988, with support from the city of Lakewood that, unfortunately, diminished as the Greed Decade continued.

With financial support from the city of Lakewood all but gone, the company moved to the DU Studio Theatre until 1989, when they actually became The Theater on Broadway by relocating to 135 S. Broadway for two years. In 1991, they moved one day, in the middle of a successful production, to what would become their most successful location, the one depicted above and mentioned earlier, 13 S. Broadway.

It was there that I became aware of TOB from the very beginning of its gay phase, after the passage of Amendment 2 in 1992, an event that injected an unintended, though serious, dose of reality and gay pride into many aspects of Denver gay life.

Not only did several gay organizations rally to successfully fight Amendment 2 on the streets and in the courts, mentioned as a backdrop and additional motivation for my writing the Rainbow Arc of Fire series, it energized Steve Tangedal to evolve TOB into a venue for gay plays and musicals almost exclusively. The Denver annual pride parade and festival in 1993 expanded significantly in length and size and attendance. It was the first time I actually marched in the parade.

TOB was already performing Six Degrees of Separation, a play with a significant gay character and a hilarious nude scene, so it became an easier transition to All Gay All The Time!

Many of the original players and participants from the Lakewood days had already left the company. Now, located in Denver, it was easier for Steve to recruit gay and gay-friendly actors and assistants to help with the transition.

 

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Gay Theater in Denver, Part I

My good friend Roger back in the late 80's had read about a play that was being performed in Denver at Jack's On the Platte theater on Platte Street, a half block north of My Brother's Bar. The theater was on the second floor of the building, and the theater company was the Hunger Artists. There is still a coffee shop on the first floor, but I am not sure the theater is still there.

The play was called Breaking the Code about the British mathematician and wartime code breaker, Alan Turing. After a robbery at his home by a man with whom he had had sex, his admission to the police branded him as a homosexual, still a crime during post-war Britain, no matter the contributions of the law-breaker. This was the same law that had entangled, and eventually also broken, Oscar Wilde fifty years earlier.

The play was both powerful and sad. Roger and I had stuffed ourselves on fajitas and hot fudge Sundays at Racines restaurant earlier in the evening. We had driven from Colorado Springs to Denver to see the play and, of course, had the hour-long drive back afterwards. But in those days, few of us who lived in the Springs thought of the distance as any impediment since we drove to the bars in Denver almost weekly.

That was my first experience seeing a gay play in Denver, but it would certainly not be my last. The next play was a bit more hazy to me. Eastern Standard was a sophisticated look at the relationship between people of privilege and those who were not well off in New York in the 1980's. About the aptly called "greed generation" of the Reagan Era, this play looked at the consequences of those years upon those who suffered from the excesses, either those who had benefitted or those who had been crushed. The theater could best be described as a belfry of a church a couple of blocks west of Broadway. I later saw the same play in North Hollywood where one of the lead actors had played the on-again, off-again gay son on Dynasty.

During the 90's, many gay plays turned up all over Denver in venues as varied as the plays themselves. Ten Percent in Maple Grove ran for several months in the same theater, Jack's, as Breaking the Code. There was also a four-actor (two men, two women) musical called Ten Percent Review that was performed at the original Theater On Broadway venue at 135 S. Broadway. Later, in the same theater The Boys In The Band played. I do recall that Lonely Planet ran for a time in a former movie theater somewhere along S. Ogden St., well past I-25. Later, at the Acoma Theater, a former church on Acoma and 1st Street, just a couple of blocks north of the old Racines location just off Speer, the two parts of Angels in America debuted, along with an actual bat in its belfry during at least one performance that I attended. The Acoma Theater and Industrial Arts company also premiered Take Me Out, a baseball-themed gay play.

Not to be outdone, the Denver Center also provided several gay-themed plays throughout the late 80's and well into the 90's: Torch Song Trilogy, Angels in America, Lily Tomlin's Search for Intelligent Life, and Forever Plaid. Obviously, the last two were not specifically gay, but the performers and creative talent behind the two productions were as gay as one can get. I met a few of the actors in Forever Plaid over the two different, lengthy runs of the musical. The last time I read the CD insert, one of those same actors was still performing in Forever Plaid in Las Vegas. (I wonder how much longer he can play any of the characters because he's got to be getting a bit long in the tooth to still be a member of an early 60's boy band, temporarily resurrected.)

In a much smaller venue at the Denver Center, now the location of the gift shop along 14th Street, premiered more intimate plays such as Five Card Stud and a pair of plays by a Texas playwrite and actor who performed his own one-man pieces. At Five Card Stud my friend Frank and I sat so close that we could have played a hand with the actors and also could see the ice in their glasses slowly melt over the course of the play.

Of course, the most consistent and long-lived venue for gay-themed plays throughout the 90's and early 2000's was Theater on Broadway. But I will save that discussion for the next blog.

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