GOLDEN – The iconic Meyer Hardware store drew a melting pot of people to the heart of downtown Golden for nearly 50 years.

But Meyer Hardware never had a piano bar.

On Saturday, the town’s enduring little Miners Alley Playhouse theater company will take a major step up from supporting player into a leading role in the greater community. That’s when MAP, as it is colloquially known, will open the first performing arts center in the town’s 161-year history where Meyer Hardware long stood at 11th and Arapahoe streets.

And it will have a bar. Eventually, a piano bar.

The first phase of the new Miners Alley Playhouse Performing Arts Center will launch with the christening of a new state-of-the-art theater just one block and a world away from the troupe’s home for the past 20 years. And, in keeping with MAP’s populist vibe, the opening production will be a fun one titled “The Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical” (running through Dec. 31).

Artistic Director Len Matheo calls the public-private partnership he has coalesced “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elevate the performing arts in Golden.”

But, as they famously say in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “To walk away, you have to leave something behind.” And on Dec. 31, MAP will leave behind the 130-seat boutique theater that has been its home since 2003. That’s when Rick Bernstein moved his longstanding Morrison Theatre Company into what once was the former Golden Ram restaurant above what once was Foss Drug on Golden’s main strip.

We say that so often: “What once was … (fill in the blank).”

“This is home,” Matheo said last week while standing in the doomed space he took over from Bernstein in 2014 with his wife, Lisa DeCaro, along with friends Jim and the late Brenda Billings. “But we are going to make a bigger and more inviting home.”

How much bigger? Consider that the existing theater takes up 3,500 square feet. When both phases of the new arts center are complete, MAP will be operating on 30,000 square feet – an increase of 757 percent. The stage area is, by itself, twice as big as the old one.

So the shows are about to get much bigger.

From humble roots

First opening MAP back in 2003 was a miracle of community spirit, like an Old West barn-raising. Bernstein’s plan to open a small community theater for the people of Golden would require a daunting initial loan of $200,000 from the Golden Civic Foundation.

“After they got their breath back, they said, ‘Well, we’ve never given a $200,000 loan before,”‘ Bernstein said at the time.

Fast forward 20 years. MAP has since staged more than 100 productions – several of them seminal in Colorado theater history. Attendance has steadily climbed from 8,000 to 20,000 a year – 92 percent of them coming from outside Golden. (That means MAP engages more people every year than the town’s current population, estimated at 19,408.) More than 1,000 actors and designers have been gainfully employed, and thousands of students have been engaged in school-related programs.

The Colorado Business Committee for the Arts estimates that, since 2018 alone, MAP has brought $7.5 million into the Golden community.

Which explains why that $200,000 project in 2003 is now a $17 million community undertaking in 2023.

This all started with MAP’s $4.95 million purchase of the hardware store back in November 2021. Of that, $2.5 million came from the state’s arts office (known as Colorado Creative Industries), and $2 million came from the Golden Downtown Development Authority and the Golden Urban Renewal Authority.

Authoring that winning bid was something of a Hail Mary pass – that was actually completed.

Meyer Hardware opened in its final location back in 1973, though its roots in Golden go all the way back to 1892. Joe Meyer bought the business and renamed it after himself in 1945. Grandson Steve Schaefer ran things for the final 25 years until his retirement in 2021. It was time to let it go.

When the family put the property up for sale, most everyone assumed it would be gobbled up by developers. But MAP’s underdog bid was backed by the Golden Civic Foundation, the city of Golden, several downtown businesses and the general goodwill of the community.

“When people found out the property was for sale, everyone was saying, ‘Please, no food courts and no condos,” said Matheo, who had an ace (don’t say “hardware!”) up his sleeve in Steve Schaefer, who donated $8,000 to MAP’s subsequent fundraising efforts just to have a specialty drink named for him at the new MAP bar.

The impact all of this will have on Golden is already plain to see. MAP employs six full-time and four part-time staff members, along with more than 200 subcontractors throughout any given year. The company operates on an annual budget of about $1.2 million, which ranks in the top 15 among Colorado theater companies.

But for all the buzz about the economic impact, Matheo and DeCaro are leaning more into something else entirely. They see MAP as much more than a place for people to just come and see plays. They see the new MAP as Golden’s new town square.

“When we first started this, we spent a lot of time talking about the economic impact of the arts,” DeCaro said. “But now we’re talking about connection.

“Study after study shows exposure to performing arts increases empathy, increases connection and increases a sense of community. Every time a performing arts center opens, the people around it feel they benefit from it. They feel more connected to their community, and they get involved. Now more than ever, at a time when everybody’s so divided and people are so crazy and everybody’s worried about kids not having empathy because they’re on devices all the time – this is the antidote to all of that.”

Vision for the future

DeCaro said the center, designed by Denver’s Semple Brown Design, had to be planned in two phases to end its current overlap of paying both a mortgage on the new space and $6,000 in monthly rent for the old space. MAP needs to raise about $10 million to finish the second phase, which DeCaro expects to come from naming rights, governments, grants and giving from corporations, family foundations and individuals.

Plans call for doubling the size of the mainstage theater that will open this week with 157 seats wrapped around the stage in a half circle (none more than 20 feet from the playing area). In Phase 2, seating will expand to 300 and will then fully encircle the stage.

With the uncommon blessing of abundant available space, MAP plans to open a second, smaller studio theater (called a flexible “black box” in the industry) that will allow the company to dramatically increase programming options throughout the year for the theatergoing public.

Another huge component calls for a large education center with multiple classrooms that will allow MAP Education Director Heather Beasley to accommodate not only expanded programming, performances and learning opportunities – but also make room for a gathering space where young people can hang out after school and do their homework.

A local couple named Michele and Matthew Hoovler have pledged $500,000 to the education center.

The blueprints also call for multiple community meeting spaces. The large lobby will use its wall space to tell the intersecting stories of Meyer Hardware, Miners Alley Playhouse and the Morrison Theatre Company, which Bernstein opened back in 1989. The lobby bar that opens Saturday is just a temporary one. Its back wall will come down in Phase 2, allowing space for a full lounge and social area. There is a real box office for the first time as well as fancy new all-gendered bathrooms. The theater sports all-new, top-of-the-line lighting and sound equipment.

The audience will never see it, but backstage will be a whole new world for the company’s performers and technicians. Actors will be moving from cramped dressing rooms the size of a jail cell to new ones the size of a living room. And, for the first time, they will have actual showers. For designers, there will be abundant room for set and costume storage. There is so much space back there, in fact, that MAP plans to build several actual apartments that will house visiting artists who won’t even have to leave the building to go from their beds to the stage.

But that’s almost all Phase 2, so a tour of the facilities last week required some active imagination. All around, activity and energy levels were running sky-high as workers scrambled to get the space ready to welcome the public on Saturday. Everywhere you looked, crews were hard at work.

One busy group was building the “Trailer Park” set in the new space while, at the same time, an entirely different crew was over at the old place getting not one but two simultaneous farewell productions ready for their holiday openings: MAP is offering both the popular stage adaptation of the classic family film “A Christmas Story,” as well as a children’s production of “The Story of the Nutcracker” in the old theater.

Much of the construction work is being supervised by longtime MAP Operations Manager Jonathan Scott-McKean, who took his only momentary break of this busy day to tackle my not-so-tough challenge to name three things that will be better about the new MAP.

“It smells better,” he began. “There will be cupholders – but not yet. And no columns!”

Anyone who has attended any performance of any show at MAP over the past 20 years will identify with that last one. Scott-McKean was speaking of the load-bearing poles that have obstructed sightlines at the old MAP from the start, causing manifest audience aggravation and untold visits to chiropractors for craned necks.

“Those columns have been the bane of my existence,” said Matheo, who estimated it would have cost him $100,000 to have those cursed poles removed from the old theater. Maybe that’s why it’s not so terribly hard for him to say goodbye.

“I really do believe that things come and things go and they end. That’s part of life,” he said. “I will miss the old place. There’s nostalgia there. But life begins anew.

“This is really just the beginning.”