2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 20

Theatermakers give flowers to departing Denver Center visionary Charlie Miller after it ends programming wing

When you are dedicating a month to telling 30 positive stories of the Colorado theater year, it might seem incongruous to bring up the most depressing news story of the year.

But there is something positive in it. Lots, in fact.

On Oct. 7, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts made the unexpected announcement that it would “no longer be investing in the development and production of new immersive experiences” for reasons that basically come down to this: It costs too much for the Denver Center to produce new immersive work.

Worse, it announced that Charlie Miller, Off-Center’s genial and generally adored co-founder – a man rooted in the Colorado theater community since his age was in the single digits – will be leaving the DCPA at the end of March “after 17 years of visionary leadership,” according to a statement attributed to president and CEO Janice Sinden.

No new immersive experiences? But, wait: Isn’t theatergoing attendance in traditional spaces eroding? (It is.) Haven’t all theatermakers been desperately exploring new storytelling possibilities to capture the imaginations of younger audiences (and curious older ones) who would rather go to an escape room or throw axes than sit passively in a darkened box for two hours? (They have.) And didn’t the DCPA just spend the past 15 years establishing itself as the undisputed regional leader in creating new immersive experiences? (It has.)

So what does all this mean? Is immersive theater dead?

“Immersive theater is not dead,” said Amanda Berg Wilson, artistic director and co-founder of a boundary-pushing Boulder collective called The Catamounts – and a frequent contributor to Off-Center projects.

“It is thriving, and it is fertile.”

You just have to work your way past the shock of the moment for that to make any sense.

First, you have to understand that this particular demographic of the local theater community is grieving for Miller, and the spirit of creativity and collaboration he brings to his projects.

“I didn’t see Charlie Miller as an executive that I had to be afraid of,” said Jessica Austgen, a playwright and improv comedian in Off-Center’s founding 2010 ensemble. “I saw him as a goofball who dressed up like a pirate with me and ran around screaming.”

Read more: DCPA announces end of Off-Center

They are also grieving the economy that Miller represented to the Colorado theater community. Whenever Off-Center launched a project, people got hired. Hundreds of them over the years. The Denver immersive community has largely grown out of roots that Miller himself planted through audacious projects conceived and developed by fellow local artists. Many among the vanguard of Denver’s immersive theater community are intertwined with Off-Center: Berg Wilson, Patrick Mueller (founder of Control Group Productions) and Austgen (designer of immersive experiences for Meow Wolf Denver), to name a few.

But mostly, it’s the audience Miller and co-creator Emily Tarquin organically cultivated over time who will miss the range of experiences they brought to their lives.

At first, Off-Center staged comedy sketches. Game shows. A remote walking tour of Denver. A one-on-one date at a museum. (My best date to date).

With “Sweet & Lucky” in 2016, Off-Center fully embraced mysterious, large-scale stories that played out over many rooms in fully designed off-site warehouses. By the 2020-21 season, Off-Center had begun to dwarf its parent Denver Center Theatre Company in attendance, drawing a boggling 151,249 to its three interactive audience experiences.

Then came “Theater of the Mind,” co-created by Talking Heads mastermind David Byrne, which drew 42,000 to a warehouse in northeast Denver – just 16 at a time! Good enough for Chicago’s esteemed Goodman Theatre to add the title to its 2025-26 season. (It opens on March 11, with several Denver artisans still attached – namely, Berg Wilson and fellow Denver-based co-director Betty Hart).

The boost to the DCPA’s national profile was immeasurable.

All told, Off-Center offered 70 unique experiences, attracted 653,000 audience members and claimed more than $80 million in economic impact.

And none of it happens without Miller. “Charlie changed the game,” said Berg Wilson. 

“Obviously, the Denver Center has sent a lot of new plays out into the world. But the thing is – has the Denver Center ever sent a show to the Goodman?”

That would be a no.

“Well, that’s what we’re doing with David Byrne, who is as relevant as he’s ever been right now with his national concert tour,” Berg Wilson said. “He is using his considerable social media right now to tell the world that ‘Theater of the Mind’ is going to the Goodman – and that is all Charlie Miller.”

Miller, Austgen added, has a kind of second sight when it comes to creating impactful experiences. “I think his perception is different from anybody else in town,” she said. “It was panning for gold – and what Charlie panned was generally gold.”

A look back/2025 in review

For all the success Off-Center had over the years, 2025 was a costly and creatively disappointing year with two underperforming offerings called “Monopoly Lifesized” and “Sweet & Lucky: Echo,” a sequel that closed a month early. And yet, immersive theater in Denver was big, bountiful and beautifully bizarre in its boundary-bumping ways.

• Berg Wilson, who co-founded The Catamounts in 2010, the same year Miller started Off-Center, created two wildly different experiences in 2025.

“Ghost Quartet,” staged indoors at Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center, was an intimate period concert that blended folk, jazz and pop music while actors told interconnected tales of haunted characters crisscrossing the centuries – all while plying the audience with whiskey.  

“A Town Called Harris,” written by Austgen, was a quirky mystery that blended Agatha Christie suspense with a playful, Scooby Doo kind of energy at the historic DeSpain Schoolhouse in Westminster. The actors played members of “The Westminster Junior Historical Society” who enlisted the audience’s help in uncovering the reason the city of Westminster really did change its name from Harris. The audience had both fun – and cookies.

• A most promising development was the coming launch of a new immersive company called Denver Immersive Repertory Theatre (you can call them DIRT), opening this spring in the 10,000-square-foot former Patagonia store at 15th and Blake streets. It was announced last July that DIRT would be among the first recipients of funding from the Denver Downtown Development Authority’s $570 million downtown revitalization initiative.

The opening experience (sometime this spring) will be “Midnight’s Dream,” an open-ended reimagining of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” through the lens of Celtic folklore.

The founder of DIRT, and both the writer and director of “Midnight’s Dream,” is Steve Wargo, who describes himself on his website as a recent transplant to Denver after two decades in New York.

On last week’s Onstage Colorado podcast, Westword’s Toni Tresca said to expect audiences wearing masks and moving between 11 distinct environments and encountering more than 20 characters performing multiple interweaving storylines at once. Sounds a lot like a Denver variation on “Sleep No More,” which in 2011 essentially launched a new era of experiential theater in New York City. Info: denverimmersive.com. 

• OddKnock Productions set about transforming a 3,700-square-foot storefront at 26th and Blake streets into what it calls a “Test Kitchen” for theatermakers to cultivate their own projects. It’s an initiative backed by the RiNo Arts District and the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. And, speaking of “Sleep No More,” OddKnock was founded by actual members of the NYC company: Brendan Duggan, Parker Murphy and Zach Martens. 

• Meow Wolf Denver hosted immersive experiences in 2025, notably “Phenomenomaly,” a pop-up, game-play performance that was apparently a big deal. Meow Wolf Denver’s home base – but wait, that’s so ordinary; let’s call it “Caterwauling Canine at Mile High” – described “Phenomenomaly” as “an interactive looping show that features a parade through the Converged Worlds and characters connected to the great Flickerwerm migration.” (Disclaimer: I have yet to understand a single word that has ever come out of home base.)

• Control Group Productions, a community-driven dance and theater collective headed by Patrick Mueller (another original cast member of Off-Center’s first “Sweet & Lucky”), hosted “Field Trip,” a two-day, three-part interactive exploration and celebration of the radical madness and marginalized history of East Colfax Avenue. Mueller, whose year was disrupted by a major health event, stood up to the Trump administration’s weaponization of the National Endowment for the Arts by refusing to renounce his group’s commitment to DEI – and a $10,000 grant that would have come with it. In early 2026, Control Group will present “ Happy 2B Nappy: Our Hair Story” by Kenya Mahogany Fashaw, and “Red Willow,” a 2-mile interactive nature walk at dusk in South Platte Park that asks: “How do we confront evil without sacrificing decency?” Info at controlgroupproductions.org 

Coming up/Immersive in the headlights

• Audacious Theatre has two remaining performances of its popular seasonal hit “Drunk Christmas,” an interactive, streamlined adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”: Tonight (Saturday) at Bruz Beers and Sunday (Dec. 21) at Alamo Drafthouse Sloan’s Lake. Audacious is about to embark on its 10th anniversary season and is working on opening its first permanent immersive venue, called The Audacious Space.

• Band of Toughs, an intermittent, genre-mashing theater collaboratory with the best name in the history of Colorado theater, will be back Jan. 16-24 with an original immersive mashup called “Gin & Gothic: A Brontë Rocktale.” It’s described as a Victorian gothic romance and literary adventure with a live band, and a splash of sibling rivalry. It’s happening in and around Altona Grange, a historic 131-year-old community center in Longmont. Info: bandoftoughs.org

• The audience for “Mixed Messages” – described as “part ‘SNL,’ part ‘Adult Swim,” part MTV) – will enter the Bug Theater and be immediately pulled into a mind-bendingly surreal streaming service called “The Impliers TV.” It’s a world of rapid-fire sketches, music videos and offbeat commercials that turns into an emotional meditation on connection and heartbreak. “We put this up over the summer, and had a line around the building of people wanting to get in,” said producer Alice Gillette. It’s happening at the Bug from Jan. 16-17. Info: theimpliers.com/mixedmessages

So, what’s next?

Miller’s plans have either yet to be finalized or announced, but as a young father, it’s a decent bet we aren’t losing him to another state. That raises hope that his role in the Denver immersive community he has so caringly cultivated might merely be morphing.

After all, the Denver Center’s announcement did promise that “while this chapter is closing, our commitment to bold, transformative theater remains stronger than ever.” If that is to be believed, perhaps we will see the Denver Center working with local immersive creators as more of a partner than a producer. We shall see.

But if you think the Off-Center story ends with creative and commercial disappointment, Berg Wilson says, “hold on.”

“It’s tempting to say, ‘The last thing Charlie did was something that wasn’t successful, and that apparently proved to (the CEO) that immersive wasn’t worth investing in,” she said. “But actually, the last thing that Charlie’s going to do for the Denver Center is opening “Theater of the Mind” at the Goodman in Chicago. And that’s a hell of a way to go out.”

Austgen’s heart is clearly broken by the decision to suspend Off-Center. It is, she said bluntly, a short-sighted response that she believes the Denver Center is going to regret.

“Immersive theater is what’s coming next. That has not changed,” Austgen said. “And for the Denver Center to have gotten off the bandwagon right now was a big mistake. They were ahead of the game, and now they’ve fallen off the track. Immersive experiences are thriving at places like Meow Wolf and Universal. People want to be part of the experience. Make that: Young people want to be part of the experience.

“And if you take away their agency, they’re going to go somewhere else.”

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.

More True West Awards coverage

• 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

• Day 7: Philip Sneed will exit Arvada Center on a high

• Day 8: Ed Reinhardt’s magic stage run ends after 27 years

• Day 9: Costume Designer Nikki Harrison

• Day 10: DU’s tech interns getting the job done

• Day 11: Husbands, wives keep home fire burning

• Day 12: Denver School of the Arts’ Drama Dash

• Day 13: Theater as a powerful response to violence

• Day 14: Elitch Theatre no longer a ghost town

• Day 15: A double play for playwright Luke Sorge

• Day 16: ‘Legally Blonde’ at the Air Force Academy? Elle, yes!

• Day 17: Kelly Van Oosbree is the cat in the hats

• Day 18: Phamaly presents a ‘Pericles’ for the neurodivergent

• Day 19: Justine Lupe and Coloradans on the national stage