The irony hangs as heavily as the tears that are now falling freely as BDT Stage’s Jan. 13 closing date looms ever closer.

“We couldn’t have asked for a more successful year,” said Artistic Director Seamus McDonough.

2023 will go down as one of the very best in the 47-year history of this beloved metro entertainment icon that opened in 1977 as the 275-seat Boulder’s Dinner Theatre at the corner of 55th Street and Arapahoe Avenue.

BDT’s five-show farewell year was sold to about 80% capacity, McDonough said. And since June, that figure is more like 95. All remaining tickets to the emotionally charged farewell production of “Fiddler on the Roof” have been gone since November.

'Fiddler': When theater becomes (real) life or death | John Moore

In June 2022, BDT owners Gene and Judy Bolles sold the 12,000-square-foot property for $5.5 million to Quad Capital Partners, a Michigan real-estate company that builds upscale housing in university towns.

When the longstanding Country Dinner Playouse abruptly shuttered in 2007, shocked employees and audiences found out by showing up for a scheduled performance of “Evita” only to find a padlock on the front door and a note saying the owners had run out of money.

Because of construction delays, the BDT family had a more humane 18 months for the ending to play out in Boulder. McDonough was allowed the rare opportunity to craft a full final year that has catered to the theater’s longtime audience base while bringing back an array of adored performers from the past five decades.

Still, after Jan. 13, it’s over for good, and one of the longest-standing cultural traditions in Colorado will be wiped off the map like the village of Anatevka that’s emptied out by the end of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Since the sale, indignant but under-informed cries have gone up all over town questioning the Bolles’ decision to sell a popular Colorado business when it is clearly thriving (for now, anyway). But the deal is done. “Gene and Judy are getting older, and they are at the stage of their lives where they are really trying to move on,” McDonough said.

In truth, BDT’s fate was sealed years ago by changing consumer tastes and Boulder’s increasingly suffocating tax rates. The Bolles did actively seek a buyer who would keep the dinner theater running, but no such buyer exists.

Like many businesses, BDT was on the upswing when the pandemic hit. No matter. “There are no buyers for a for-profit business like ours unless you can show that you are making money year after year,” McDonough said. “Even in the best years, our profit margins are small because of rising costs and Boulder’s taxes.”

And how bad are those taxes? Consider that in Boulder, businesses like BDT are charged the trifecta of property taxes, sales taxes and an admissions tax. Add it all up, and “for every $70 ticket we sell, $15 to $20 goes to taxes,” McDonough said. That’s more than twice what BDT would pay if the theater were located in any other metro county, he said. 

And as a for-profit business, BDT cannot receive any government funding in return, such as the SCFD sales tax that each year pumps $60 million into 320 metro nonprofit arts and science organizations. BDT has had no seat at that table. No wonder the dozens of actors and employees are presently packing their backstage bags like the Anatevkans they play in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

That it’s all ending with perhaps the most famous musical of them all could not be more fitting. “Fiddler on the Roof” tells of a peasant community in 1905 Imperial Russia that celebrates life, mourns death, rejoices in marriage and always cares for one another – until they are forced to make difficult decisions in the face of political oppression, religious intolerance and new ideas coming from a rapidly changing outside world.

Sort of like BDT Stage, which chose “Fiddler” as its farewell show because it is the most popular title in its history. BDT has now presented this musical seven times – at least once in every decade of its existence.

And audiences are getting what they want – longtime BDT favorites Wayne Kennedy and Alicia K. Meyers playing the dairyman and his no-nonsense wife – him for the fourth time, her for the third. They’re part of a tribe of actors who have remained uncommonly connected and consistently employed at BDT across decades.

“I wanted to make sure we were going out with a bang,” McDonough said. “This is an opportunity most theater companies never get. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to say goodbye to these people we have been performing for for decades.”

McDonough began working at BDT Stage 24 years ago as a 14-year-old janitor. His father, Tim, was an original BDT employee in 1977. His mother worked in the box office for eight years. One sister bussed tables and worked a spotlight. Another helped as “kid wrangler” for shows that required young actors.

“My family has been involved since Day 1, so to be able to see it through to the last day – that’s unheard of,” he said. “I am very proud that, through it all, my family has been here.”

Just as he has been here for the larger BDT family.

“The number of times Seamus has come to the rescue of someone is legendary,” said Seth Caikowski, who directed “Something Rotten” for BDT in February. “He’s even bailed people out of jail.”

The closing of BDT Stage will leave the bustling Candlelight Dinner Playhouse, located 45 miles north of Denver in Johnstown, as the last major dinner theater in Colorado. In Denver, the niche Adams Mystery Playhouse keeps chugging along after 17 years at at 2404 Federal Blvd, now the last of a once mighty cottage industry that has gone the way of the drive-in.

The final director of the final show is Kenny Moten, who worked in the BDT box office as a college freshman and went on to create one of the most popular franchises at BDT and beyond. “Motones & Jerseys” is an evening of nostalgic music that’s presented as a kind of audience-participation game show.

“The closing of BDT is another example of another place that we’re losing that makes it harder to be a working theater artist in Colorado,” Moten said. “We’ve been losing a lot of these places over the past 20 years, and this is a reminder that what we do is becoming harder and harder to do in a regional market. But we also have a pretty vibrant community here, and I just hope that people still seek out art. But that’s 47 years of theater we’re losing – and it’s just sad to see it go.”

It’s really getting hard for the company to make it to the teary end of each performance, which builds to a thunderous curtain call that takes on increasing meaning as the number of remaining performances dwindles toward zero.

“The way the show ends, with the full acting company onstage looking at one another and soaking up what those moments mean, as a family, and being forced to leave … it hits very hard,” McDonough said. “The holidays are our busiest time of the year. Our people are working so hard. They are so tired.

“And yet, in that last moment of the show, you can see them just looking at each other and realizing, ‘This is it.’ We have been a family for so long, and we are not going to see each other every day in a few short weeks.

“It just hurts.” 

BDT Stage 2023/The final year

• “The Buddy Holly Story”
• “Away in a Basement: A Church Basement Ladies Christmas”
• “Something Rotten”
• “The Sound of Music”
• “Fiddler on the Roof”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.