By Rosemary Fetter
Curtis Street circa 1910-1920, when movie palaces lined the streets, their lights visible for miles.
The Denver Performing Arts Complex owes its existence to Frederick Gilmer Bonfils, a showman in his own right. Co-founder of the Denver Post, a newspaper that during its early years wallowed in melodrama and sensationalism, Bonfils was a bombastic Corsican with a penchant for histrionics. In many ways, it’s fitting that the Bonfils treasure trove would eventually fund the city’s premiere theatrical venue.
Second only in size to Lincoln Center in New York City, the Denver Performing Arts Complex got its start thanks to Helen Gilmer Bonfils, Fred Bonfils’ younger daughter. Stage-struck from childhood, Miss Helen waited until after her disapproving father’s demise to make her stage debut in 1934 at the Elitch Theater Company, where she was soon performing regularly in their repertory group. She accepted roles on Broadway under the stage name Gertrude Baron and together with her first husband, director George Somes, produced musicals and plays in New York and London. Later in her career, Bonfils won a Tony Award for her production of Sleuth by British playwright Anthony Schaeffer.*
The Denver Performing Arts Complex is the largest in the nation under a single roof. Photos courtesy Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau.
As heiress to the Bonfils estate, which totaled nearly $24 million, Helen donated to numerous charities, although her first love would always be the theater. In 1953, she provided $1.25 million to build the Bonfils Memorial Theater on East Colfax Avenue, which presented Denver Civic Theater productions and children’s programs until 1986. The building currently houses the Tattered Covered Book Store.
After her husband died in 1956, she married her chauffeur, “Tiger Mike” Davis, a mismatch that ended in divorce after 11 years when (according to Showtime by Tom Noel and Amy Zimmer), Davis begin a relationship with singer Phyllis Maguire, long-time mistress of mobster Sam Giacana. Meanwhile, Helen continued running the newspaper with the help of Pulitzer prize-winning editor Palmer Hoyt, who she recruited from Portland, and her close friend and attorney Donald Ray Seawell, chair of the American National Theater and Academy. With offices in New York and London, the prestigious Seawell listed among his clients Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and Noel Coward.
In 1966, Bonfils’ health began to fail and Seawell became president and CEO of the Post. He also gained control of the Fredrick G. Bonfils and Helen G. Bonfils Foundations, which he consolidated in 1982. In 1980, eight years after Helen Bonfils’ death, Seawell sold the Post to the Times Mirror Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times. The lion’s share of proceeds went to the Helen Bonfils Foundation, which Seawell used to fulfill his (and Bonfils’) long-time vision of a major ($100 million) performing arts complex downtown.
In 1972, voters approved a bond issue authorizing allocation of $6 million for a performing arts complex and garage at 14th and Curtis streets. The Denver Symphony and Boettcher Foundation took on fundraising for a concert hall, while the Bonfils Foundation bankrolled the theater complex. Under a special agreement, the City would own and operate the arts center and lease the Bonfils theater complex back to the DCPA for $1/year for the next 50 years. Seawell hired the creative Kevin Roche of Connecticut to design the complex, and groundbreaking commenced in December 1974.
Using the prototype of the galleria in Milan, Roch designed a glass galleria with the former street intersection at Curtis covered by a barrel-vaulted glass roof. The complex would occupy four city blocks and include the 1907 Denver Auditorium, which accommodated the city’s first national political convention. A little-known feud occurred between the future arts complex and the emerging Auraria Campus across the street, slated to open in late 1976, over the necessary re-alignment of Speer Boulevard. Several plans would be proposed and discarded, including one that half-seriously suggested that northbound lanes of Speer Boulevard be routed underneath the Performing Arts Complex. In the end, not surprisingly, the greater land mass went to the theaters.
The Helen Bonfils Theater Complex opened to grand acclaim on Dec. 31, 1979, with a performance of Bertold Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. The original three theaters included the 750-seat Stage Theater, which can be reconfigured to suit each performance, and the smaller Space Theater. An experimental 200-seat black box theater, the Source, would be renamed the Glenn R. Jones Theater in 2003. A fourth venue, the Frank H. Ricketson Jr. Theater, opened in 1980 with a separate box office and screening room. In 1998, architect Kevin Roche designed the Donald R. Seawell Grand Ballroom, a glass and steel structure that sits atop the building. The 10,000 square foot space, which has been dubbed Denver’s “party center,” can accommodate more than 1,000 diners.
Denver Center Attractions, which has been part of the DCPA since 1979, housed in the Auditorium Arena, which eventually became too small for large-scale Broadway productions. In 1984, the building was gutted and a proscenium theater built. With an open glass front and huge interior, the Buell (named for architect Temple Buell, whose Foundation donated $3 million to the project), compliments the historic Denver auditorium, remodeled in 2005 as the Ellie Caukins Opera House, and the 1970s Boettcher concert hall, currently slated for expansion and re-design. The Buell is large enough to comfortably attract national touring acts, including The Lion King, A Chorus Line and the upcoming Grease (debuts Oct. 12) and Mamma Mia! (Nov. 2).
Since 1989, Scientific and Cultural Facilities District has distributed funds from a 1/10 of 1 percent sales and use tax to cultural facilities throughout the metropolitan area. As a Tier 1 organization (which receives 59 percent of funding), in 2010 the DCPA received just under 12 percent of the total budget, or approximately $4.5 million for educational programs, and “Free for All,” which provides free tickets for certain performances.
Along with the nine theaters of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, the downtown theatrical neighborhood now includes the 600,000 square foot Colorado Convention Center and the new 5,000-seat Wells Fargo Theater, which hosts more than 30 concerts each year. Thanks to visionaries like Donald Seawell and former mayors from Robert Speer to Bill McNichols and John Hickenlooper, the Theater District is restoring the glamour of yesteryear, when the lights of Curtis Street could be seen for miles.
Helen Bonfils would be delighted.
* The 1972 movie, which starred Michael Caine and Sir Lawrence Olivier, was nominated for two Academy Awards. A remake in 2007 featured Caine in Olivier’s former role as a crime novelist and Jude Law as the struggling young businessman having an affair with his wife.
