Good Show, In Its Rookie Year, Walden Playhouse Stages a Success
March 26, 2004By LISA BORNSTEIN
Rocky Mountain News
It wasn't the most auspicious beginning.
The Walden Family Playhouse was scheduled to open, but the theater was still under construction. In a movie cineplex. In an outlet mall. On the western edge of the suburbs, far removed from the rest of Denver's professional theater scene.
And Walden was a children's theater that planned to present entirely original material.
And to make a profit at it.
But on the one-year anniversary of its debut (pushed back three months by construction delays), Walden Family Playhouse looks like a success, judging by all visible signs (a privately held commercial theater, it doesn't release any financial figures). In 12 months, the theater has presented seven original plays, all with educational components and six of them musicals with original songs. More than 100,000 tickets have been sold, many of those to schools across the state. Local actors have found regular work, and nationally known writers and directors have come to Denver to work at Walden. And now the theater is looking to package touring productions of its shows and send them to performing-arts centers across the country.
"It seems short and yet it seems like 10 years," says producing artistic director Douglas Love. "I think, because all of our shows are brand-new, each one of them can feel like a year. Plus, I've been here a little over two years and watched this theater grow from a mound of dirt."
Love is the local leader in what is quickly becoming a media mini-empire owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. Walden Family Playhouse is just one cog in what hopes to become a synergy machine. The children's theater lives in the Colorado Mills outlet mall as one theater of the Regal Cinema multiplex, itself owned by Anschutz.
Walden Family Playhouse is a subsidiary of the Beverly Hills-based Walden Media, itself a producer of family entertainment. Walden Media produced Holes, based on Louis Sachar's best-selling book, and grossed more than $67 million with the movie. Walden Family Playhouse then staged Sachar's play of the story this fall and had its biggest hit. Next on Walden Media's agenda is a live-action version of C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, an almost-inevitable success and almost-inevitable crossover to the Playhouse's stage.
"Holes was a tremendous success for us, not only in ticket sales but in the response that the entire community gave us," Love says. "What's so great about this situation is that we are a big movie studio... And that we're so uniquely placed to be the guys that not only are creating new stuff that then we can exploit in different media but that we can take the stuff that resonates in our audience and bring them to the stage."
Originally, Walden had planned to make the Lakewood theater its flagship, opening similar venues around the country. The plan has changed, Love said. Although some cities have been interested, new buildings are no longer the priority.
"I think that we're kind of putting venues on a back burner now," Love says.`Walden wants to take the shows it develops in Denver and tour them around the country, much as other children's shows currently play buildings such as the Buell Theatre. Already, each show's set has been built in an easily collapsed design. When set pieces could have been reused, new ones were built, just so there would be complete sets ready for touring. They're currently sitting in a Lakewood warehouse, waiting for that first tour, which Love says is coming in 2005.
As with any new beginning, there have been some speed bumps, starting with a delayed opening that compressed the first four-show season into just half a year. The Playhouse began before it had a building, working out of a single downtown condo.
"It was a good team-building experience for us to do that," Love says.
While Love had extensive theatrical contacts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, he was the new kid in school in Denver. Here he discovered that the daytime plays knocked out many actors.
"I didn't realize that so many actors in Denver also had these daytime careers," Love says. "Where I've produced, actors have survival jobs instead of entire careers. I've seen someone and thought, oh, great, this person would be perfect for this role, but they're not going to give up the 401(k), and also they have career goals."
But Walden has built a roster of regulars, including Sheryl Renee and former math teacher Eric Mather, and has increased the roster of union actors in the city.
Over the past year, Walden has gradually increased the number of local designers it uses. Local designers are more readily available for consultation, and they relish the larger budget Walden works with, Love says.
"It took a minute for us to get to know the designers in town," he says. "I focused on the actors at first. Design elements are really important to me. One of the distinctions I think we've been successful at here is that we do large-scale, visually interesting productions. I want kids to fall in love with this art form like I did."
To make the Playhouse a fuller package for school groups, which are the bulk of its audience, it not only layered its productions with educational aspects but produced supplemental guides that showed just how and which of the CSAP standards the plays served.
Burlington Elementary third-grade teacher Mary Pat Weingart brought her students on a 340-mile round trip to see Holes.
"To see the play, we had to leave at about 6 in the morning," Weingart says. "Some of these kids just don't even get to go to Denver, much less to see a professionally done play."
For Sheila Sears, managing director of educational outreach, the challenge has been more in managing school-year and CSAP schedules than in preparing the lesson plans.
"It's still hard for us to measure how much the (lessons plans) are being used, but I know they are being used," Sears says. "Answer 'A' is 'They look great, I used them with my fourth-graders.' Answer 'B' is, 'They look great, I just don't have time.'"
Sears' favorite part of the job is visiting with children before and after the show. Some have been scolded by their teachers into paralysis (No talking! No laughing! No moving!), and Sears tries to loosen them up.
"We had a big house of late-primary, early-middle-school students, and their teacher stood up there and lectured them: 'If you so much as accidentally drop your program, you're never getting out of the classroom again," Sears recalls. "I think, 'There goes 40 or 50 kids who will never go to another theater performance in their lives." But that's the rarity now. I don't see that anymore."
Instead, she finds children who may be the world's most focused audience.
On Holes, she found students checking out the show's poster and correcting it.
"The kids pointed out to me that the yellow spotted lizard only had 12 spots, so it wasn't right, because in the book it had 13," Sears says. "One thing that was really magic about Holes is that 90 percent of the kids had read the book. You have to be really smart about how you approach them, because they have very specific thoughts and questions about things and specific ideas about how things should be."
After the inaugural production, Rock Odyssey, Sears heard from a woman who brings her granddaughter to every show. Six months later, the grandparents were discussing camping in upstate New York. Their 5-year-old granddaughter piped up.
"Ithaca!" she said. "That's where Odysseus went!"
Walden by the numbers: How the family playhouse has fared, as of March 12
Total number served: 101,500
School groups: 416, including 36 home-school groups
Subscribers: 1,500
Walden Family Playhouse
Where: in the Regal Cinema multiplex at Colorado Mills, at the intersection of Interstate 70, West Colfax Avenue and Indiana Avenue
Next show: Kitty Hawk, a musical celebration of the centennial, starts April 6.
Information: 303-590-1475
