The Denver Victorian Playhouse was a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a brick bungalow in northwest Denver. It was built in 1911 by a man who wanted somewhere to read Shakespeare aloud to his neighbours, it operated on and off under four names for a hundred years, and it closed for good in the spring of 2011, when the house was sold and the stage, the seats and the lighting rig were taken out.
These pages are the theatre’s own record, restored. They hold what the Vic published about itself between 2005 and 2011: the productions it staged, the notices those productions drew from Denver’s critics, the programme notes its directors wrote, and the story of the building it happened in. Nothing here is on sale and no performances are scheduled. The venue does not exist.
A hundred years in one basement
In the late 1800s George Swartz moved to Colorado to treat his tubercular lungs. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, and as part of his treatment he began reading the plays aloud in the evenings — first to his family, then to a growing circle of friends and curious neighbours. When he built a new house on the northwest side of the city, he designed a theatre into the basement to hold the audience he had accumulated.
The room was finished in 1911. It had a miniature proscenium, terraced seating, benches along the walls and an open orchestra pit later covered by the stage apron. Local legend has it that the Bungalow Theater, as it was then called, was the first theatre west of the Mississippi to have staged all of Shakespeare’s plays. It was, as the theatre liked to point out, the original home theatre.
After Swartz died in 1937 the building served as meeting space for various organisations. In 1956 the theatre was re-established with the arrival of Paul Willett; renamed the Gaslight in 1964, it gained national attention under his direction for regional premieres of Equus, Slow Dance on the Killing Ground and Arthur Miller’s The Price. Willett ran it until his death in 1984. Over the next two decades it was renamed the Denver Victorian Playhouse and passed through various hands, closing in 2000. In May 2005 it was taken over by Wade and Lorraine Wood, and it reopened that September.
The full history of the building is set out separately, along with what the archive records about each of its four names.
What Denver said about it
“Every Coloradan deserves a night at The Vic.”
“There’s no theater experience in Colorado like a night at the Victorian Playhouse, carved in 1911 out of the basement of a hallowed home in northwest Denver.”
In 2006 Westword named the theatre Best Theatrical Resurrection in its annual Best of Denver awards, and named its production of Dead Man Walking Best Production Based On Principle in the same year. In 2012, the year after the Vic closed, the same paper gave it a last award: Best Theater Venue We Lost.
The final seasons
The theatre’s last full production was The Field by John B. Keane, which closed on 2 April 2011. A staged reading of The Seagull King followed on 7 and 8 April and was the last performance of any kind given in the room. The house went on the market and drew an offer within a week; the sale closed on 3 May, and the seats, the lighting rig and the stage itself were removed before it did. The buyer was a neighbour who wanted an ordinary family home.
Two productions announced for later in 2011 — The Irish… and How They Got That Way and a revival of Tomfoolery — never opened at the Vic. The season calendars record them as they were advertised.
Selected productions
Twenty-nine productions from the theatre’s final six years are documented here in detail, and the production archive lists every show the Vic staged between 2005 and 2011. A few from across the run:
About this archive
Everything factual on this site is restored from the Denver Victorian Playhouse’s own published pages as they stood between 2005 and 2011. Press quotations are reproduced with the attributions the theatre printed and nothing has been added to them; no biography, credit or claim has been invented for anyone named here. Contact details, booking mechanics and the street address have been removed, because the theatre is gone and none of them lead anywhere.
Denver’s theatre history is documented more broadly by Denver Public Library’s Special Collections and Archives, and the wider landscape of small American theatres of this kind by Theatre Communications Group.