Comments (0) Best Theater Venue We Lost - 2012
The Denver Vic
The life of the Vic — a 75-seat theater in the basement of a Victorian house in northwest Denver — was closely interwoven with the history of the city. The venue was created by a Shakespeare-loving tuberculosis patient named George Swartz, who moved to Denver for the climate and loved reading the plays to his friends. In the 1950s, Paul Willett took over the space, transformed it into the Gaslight Theatre, and ran it for almost twenty years. After his death, it became the Denver Victorian Playhouse, and then, after its purchase by Wade and Lorraine Wood in 2005, the Denver Vic. In this venue, the Woods staged everything from an evening of Tom Lehrer to John B. Keane's searing The Field — but they never figured out the formula for keeping the place solvent. Early last year, they put the building that housed the Vic up for sale, and the buyers turned it back into a single-family dwelling. And so that creaky, ghost-ridden, venerable old landmark of a theater — where Swartz's friends once gathered for Shakespeare evenings and contemporary audiences sipped tea and nibbled cookies during intermissions — has slipped into the history.
