2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 7

After leading the company back from the existential crisis of the shutdown, retiring president and CEO is enjoying a record-breaking year.

Philip Sneed sure knows how to make an exit.

After insistently building the Arvada Center back from the pandemic with dogged positivity, the genial but resolute president and CEO is preparing to go out on a high.

Since 1976, the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities has been a multi-disciplinary cultural hub offering free art galleries, concerts, history exhibits, and extensive arts education classes for all ages, all under one roof. But at the heart of it all is its professional theater program, second perhaps in scope only to the Denver Center in all of Colorado.

And its celebratory 50th season, which opened in September, is a banger – the likes of which the place hasn’t seen since before the shutdown. It is, by all accounts, a creative and financial blockbuster, with a varied slate so far of “Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap,” “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” and Disney’s ongoing, record-obliterating “Frozen.”

The first two titles exceeded their internal audience goals, Sneed said, by 30%. Hours before “Frozen” even opened on Nov. 21, it became the biggest-selling show in Arvada Center history. It is now projected to come in at about $1.265 million in ticket sales by its closing day on Jan. 4. By then, it will have sold about 21,000 tickets, second only to the Arvada Center’s monumental 2008 production of “Les Misérables.”

The Arvada Center gave a young Sneed, now 66, his first professional acting job back in the third show of its very first season. On June 30, he will retire, at least from the administrative duties he assumed in 2013. Talk about a hygge way to go out.

“I am so very proud to be ending my leadership career where I first got a paycheck in the arts,” he said. “And I just feel so good about the fact that 50 years later, the Arvada Center will give me my final check – until I do something else.”

First True West Award

I’ve always said you can’t win a True West Award for dying or retiring. But Sneed has made me the one thing he is not: A liar.

The True West Awards endeavor to tell or re-tell 30 positive stories of the theater year, and Sneed’s stewardship of the Arvada Center through every global glacier to come its way warrants recognition on its own merits.

But this one’s personal. Sneed also deserves some props for being a straight-talking truth-teller. He is, to a journalist, the unicorn of administrative sources: He answers questions posed to him best he can.

Back in 2023, when every other person with a C, E or O in their title was trying to apply lipstick to relentlessly dire reports detailing the ongoing devastation of COVID on performing-arts organizations, Sneed not only saw the big old elephant in the room wearing the pink ballet tutu. He talked about the big old elephant in the room wearing the pink ballet tutu: The alarming drop in in-house attendance at live theaters. (Also known as “butts in seats.”)

Sneed laid it down in a clear way others were unwilling to candidly acknowledge: Arts attendance might never return to pre-pandemic levels, he said. Ever. The very best that most any arts organization should hope for is to build back to within 15% of the “before times” numbers. “That will be the new normal,” he said. And a subsequent economic study of post-pandemic attendance figures soon showed Sneed nailed it to the percentage point. 

There are all sorts of ways of making numbers say whatever you want them to say. But the way Sneed tells them gives you a fuller picture, not a spin.

For example, when you ask an administrator straight-out how many tickets they have sold, they tend to treat the query as if fielded from a presidential debate moderator. They pivot elsewhere. 

Sneed put what’s happening at the Arvada Center into an understandable context – for better and worse.

“In the 2018-19 season, we sold an average of 9,961 tickets per production,” Sneed told me. “In the 2024-25 season, we averaged 10,313. And in the current season, we are projecting 11,361.”

That sounds pretty good.

But he also pointed out the most gutting consequence of the pandemic interruption: Companies have scaled way back on their offerings. For example, the Arvada Center offered nine stage productions in ’18-19, but only six the past two seasons – in large part because the cost of producing live theater has skyrocketed across the board.

Which means, thanks to my foundational math training from Sister Martha Clare just down the street from the Arvada Center at St. Anne’s Grade School, I can deduce from Sneed’s data that while the Arvada Center is attracting about 14% more bodies to every show it offers, the total number of bodies remains down by a disquieting 24%.

You can see why a new overall goal of a 15% reduction is but a hope devoutly to be wished – because the days of staging nine different titles every year are over.

I am going to miss that honesty. I asked him where it comes from.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just not a very good liar,” he said. I was taught that honesty and telling the truth are important, even if the truth wasn’t something that many people wanted to hear.”

Part of it comes from being raised by a Southern Baptist minister for a father. “Although he would not recognize the Southern Baptist Church today,” he said wistfully (and with more candid honesty). 

“I think that’s why I’m having a really hard time with a lot of what’s going on in the world today, because that value of telling the truth doesn’t seem to be prized very much at even the highest levels of our government.”

That, there, too, is Sneed to an uncommon T. At a time when violent rhetoric has become ordinary and there is talk of criminalizing diversity initiatives, Sneed has doubled down, creating an organization-wide inclusion initiative, while also leveraging a Board-approved policy that requires equity to be “a primary factor” in all organizational decision-making.

Sneed just doesn’t take kindly to bullies.

It has also been Sneed’s personal passion to expand humanities programming at the Arvada Center, including events addressing controversial topics like the Matthew Shepard murder, the Israeli-Gaza war, and the 25^th anniversary of the FBI raid that closed the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear weapons manufacturing plant.

Back to his beginnings

Sneed was a senior at Golden High School in the spring of 1976 when he auditioned for the first set of three shows at the Arvada Center.

“I did not get cast in the very first production, because I couldn’t tap dance,” he said of “Anything Goes.” “However, I did get into the third production, which was ‘The Contrast.’” It was a non-speaking servant role, but it was his professional debut as an actor.

It was the first full-circle moment for Sneed, whose parents moved to Colorado when he was 13 and took out a lease in an apartment building at 68th Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard just a few hundred steps south of where the Arvada Center would eventually be built.

Sneed got paid a flat fee of $6 a show for five performances. He still has the $30 pay stub.

Sneed moved to California to earn his MFA in acting at the University of California San Diego. He was the Producing Artistic Director at The Foothill Theatre Company in Nevada City, Calif., before returning to his home state to run the Colorado Shakespeare Festival – both artistically and financially – from 2007-13.

That was a pivotal time in Sneed’s career, and one he takes great pride in. Sneed shook up the programming model, adding musicals like “Woody Guthrie’s American Song” and non-Shakespeare plays like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He established an international cultural exchange that brought four actors from the Maxim Gorky Drama Theatre of Vladivostok to Boulder to perform with the locals in a production of Gogol’s “The Inspector General.” He also brokered a deal that brought some of the Denver Center’s top actors to Boulder for the summer, such as John Hutton, Sam Gregory and Leslie O’Carroll.

In 2013, 37 years after bowing on the Arvada Center stage, Sneed came home as its Executive Director, a title later changed to President and CEO. Think of that as his second full-circle moment.

In 2016, Sneed oversaw the Arvada Center’s separation from the city of Arvada and its transition into an independent, nonprofit organization. That required a year-long reorganization and the establishment of a new cooperative agreement with the city, which still contributes about $5 million in operational and maintenance support.

Steering the Arvada Center through the existential crisis of the pandemic included an emergency whittling of the annual budget to $8 million – and gradually back up to its current $14.7 million. That’s about $3 million more than when Sneed took over in 2013, an increase of 36%. He also secured an essential $6.2 million in federal COVID assistance. Importantly, he’s also grown private philanthropic support from an annual average of $250,000 to $1.1 million.

Lynne Collins, who came to Colorado to join Sneed at the Shakespeare Festival, joined him again at the Arvada Center in 2016 and was named Artistic Director in 2022.

“I am endlessly grateful to Philip for the life and career I’ve had here in Colorado,” Collins said. “I think what is notable about Philip as a leader in this part of his career is that he really does love the art and the artists. He just comes alive. You see it in his eyes. And it’s not just a love for theater. He really loves the gallery stuff and what’s happening in the education department, too. He just loves the work we do, not just the spreadsheets.”

And Sneed, husband of longtime costume designer Clare Henkel and father of Creede Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Emily Van Fleet, is not taking his foot off the gas entering 2026. A national search is underway to identify his replacement, “and my goal is to set my successor up as much as I can for success.” That means the big decisions for 2026-27, he added, will already be in motion.

Yes, there was a 35-year gap, but Sneed finds it lovely that the circle of his work life ends next year where it began.

“I love that my life bookends at the Arvada Center,” he said. “I’m just really proud of that.”

Note: The Denver Gazette True West Awards, now in their 25th and final year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community throughout December by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.

Arvada Center/Upcoming theater

• Through Jan. 4: ‘Frozen’

• Jan. 23-May 8: ‘Junie B. Jones The Musical‘

• Feb. 13-March 29: ‘Romeo & Juliet’

• March 27-May 10: ‘Come from Away’

More True West Awards coverage:

• ‘Frozen’ is melting Arvada Center box-office records

• Arvada Center, now 50, was born into a patriotic fever

• Philip Sneed will leave the Arvada Center poking the bear

• 2025 True West Awards, Day 1: Matt Zambrano

• Day 2: Rattlebrain is tying up ‘Santa’s Big Red Sack’

• Day 3: Mission Possible: Phamaly alumni make national impact

• Day 4: Jeff Campbell invites you to join him on the dark side

• Day 5: Cleo Parker Robinson is flying high at 77

• Day 6: Mirror images: Leslie O’Carroll and Olivia Wilson