Some of the most handsome spaces in the new interior are the lower-level salon for private receptions and the artists' dressing rooms backstage, which many visitors will never see. But in general, this is a commodious and ingenious solution to a challenging design problem.
Minor irritants include barstool-height seats in the back of the balcony, four odd rows on each side wall of single seats facing the stage, and a concrete orchestra floor that slopes under your feet as you sit. Its visual pleasures include warm cherry-wood surfaces, the soaring height and stairway/column corners of the lobby, and the ceiling and balcony curves of the auditorium. The Caulkins Opera House (which its publicists would like you to call "The Ellie") is not itself a major work of art. Large arched Palladian windows crafted in 1908 now decorate the inside as well as the outside.īut otherwise the interior was totally gutted and rebuilt, with considerations of operatic acoustics, ideal opera and ballet sightlines, artist and visitor amenities, and a general feeling of unpretentious intimacy uppermost in the mind of the designer, Peter Lucking of Denver's Semple Brown Design.
The looming old steel verticals remain visible behind the new glass-railed staircases on two sides of the spacious main lobby. The four outside walls of a Beaux Arts tan sandstone box - originally the Denver Municipal Auditorium, where the Democratic National Convention nominated William Jennings Bryan as its presidential candidate in 1908 - had to remain intact, along with the 18 pairs of five-story-high steel box columns and the 160-foot-wide roof trusses they support, which were regarded as historical monuments in their own right.
Opera Colorado would like to expand its own seasons, and the skilled professionals now in charge (president Peter Russell and artistic director James Robinson) hope that the new hall will entice other companies and artists - as well as opera-loving tourists - to come to Denver.Īs for the new/old building itself, the primary wonder is how it got built. But that leaves a great many evenings and matinees to fill up, within a downtown performing arts complex, split by an inviting glass-vaulted promenade, that already has a symphony hall in the round, a 2,800-seat house for touring musicals, and an array of legitimate theaters. Colorado Ballet, which now shares the Caulkins Opera House, will put on 70 performances there next season.
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