Formerly “Now Playing”
The last bill
This page held the current production for six years. This is what was on it at the end.
Nothing is playing. This page carried the Denver Victorian Playhouse’s current production for six years. The theatre gave its last performance on 8 April 2011 and the room was dismantled the following month. The page is kept here as a record of what was last on the bill.
The last bill: The Field
The final full production at the Vic was The Field by the Irish playwright John B. Keane, directed by Rita Broderick, which ran from 25 February to 2 April 2011. ‘Bull’ McCabe is a tenant farmer obsessed with the field he has been renting from a poor widow. He alone has transformed it from rocky wasteland into lush green pasture. But when the widow decides to sell the property without considering his work, an outraged McCabe is determined to buy it at all costs.
The theatre billed the cast as some of the finest actors in Denver: Jim Hunt, Paige L. Larson, Josh Hartwell, Brian Landis Folkins and Steve Kramer. It closed on a Saturday, and the following Wednesday the house it was performed in went under contract.
The very last performance: The Seagull King
Five days after The Field closed, the Vic gave a staged reading of The Seagull King by the Australian playwright Michael Griffith, directed by Rick Bernstein, on 7 and 8 April 2011. It was announced as the final performance at the Vic and it was.
Wallace, a down-and-out actor, is resident in a nursing home — but now someone is trying to coax him out: Shakespeare. And the emissary the Great Bard has sent is a single mother of two, Leanne, who doesn’t know it and also doesn’t like Shakespeare. When there is a splinter in your soul because of a dream, and you are on the verge of losing everything, what would you do to make it through?
The cast was Rita Broderick, Brian Landis Folkins and Joey Wishnia. Tickets were five dollars. That the last thing ever performed in the room was a staged reading about Shakespeare pulling an old actor back to the stage is a coincidence the theatre did not have to arrange.
What was still on the calendar
Two productions had already been announced for later in 2011 when the sale went through: The Irish… and How They Got That Way by Frank McCourt, directed by Wade P. Wood, advertised for 15 April to 21 May; and a return engagement of Tom Lehrer’s Tomfoolery, advertised for 3 June to 2 July. Neither opened at the Vic. The season calendars record them as they were published.
For everything staged in the room between 2005 and 2011, see the production archive. For how the theatre came to exist at all, see a century in one basement.