The Denver Center for the Performing Arts announced its eagerly awaited plans for a return to live indoor programming Tuesday with an emphasis of delivering shows it had previously promised audiences before the pandemic brought one of the nation’s largest nonprofit arts organizations to a virtual standstill in March 2020.

“The DCPA is getting back to it,” said a relieved Broadway Executive Director John Ekeberg. “I can feel the momentum starting to build.”

The Denver Center confirmed dates for 30 touring productions and a modified, homegrown DCPA Theatre Company indoor season that will begin Nov. 19 with the grand opening of the rebuilt and renamed Wolf Theatre – the flagship formerly known as The Stage Theatre. That will mark the official end of a 20-month indoor hiatus.

Broadway touring productions return with the Dec. 2 opening of Disney’s “The Lion King” in The Buell Theatre. The touring lineup also includes the previously confirmed musicals “Hamilton,” “Hadestown,” “Mean Girls,” “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” and the Tony Award-winning revival of the play “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The Theatre Company lineup includes “Choir Boy” (by Tarell Alvin McCraney); Edward Albee’s classic couples battle “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; and the world premieres of both “Rattlesnake Kate” (by Aurora native Neyla Pekarek and Karen Hartman) and “In the Upper Room” (by Beaufield Berry). All are titles that would have been staged by now had the pandemic never hit.

“Choir Boy” is a coming-of-age musical drama about a gay, Black teenager who is an outsider at his prep school. “Rattlesnake Kate” tells the legendary story of a Greeley rancher who encountered and killed 140 rattlesnakes to protect her young son in 1925. Pekarek was a longtime cellist and vocalist with the Grammy-nominated folk-rock band The Lumineers. “In the Upper Room” tells the multigenerational story of a Black family trying to break from the grip of its strong-willed matriarch.

The Denver Center plans to sell all shows to full capacity. Whether audiences will have to be masked indoors will be determined based on state and union guidelines at the time of any given show.

The Denver Center was poised to have perhaps the biggest year in its history before the shutdown put an end to indoor performances. Just two months before the shutdown, the DCPA had announced a massive schedule that was thrown into limbo by the outbreak. The Denver Center has since lost more than $80 million in unrealized revenue.

“Being mindful of what we had promised before the pandemic was definitely part of our thinking,” Theatre Company Artistic Director Chris Coleman said. “But it was also about the fact that we are so in love with these shows that we just had to find a way to include them.”

As for Broadway, “We had announced many of these shows were coming to Denver back in February 2020, and my priority was to fulfill that promise and bring as many of them to Denver as we could, even if the timeline was going to shift,” said Ekeberg. “And frankly, I think we were pretty successful.”

The only previously announced national tour that has been scratched is the Tony Award-winning musical “The Band’s Visit” – news that Ekeberg said was communicated to subscribers a year ago. The Denver Center was only four performances into a largely sold-out run of “SpongeBob SquarePants” at the time of the shutdown, and that tour permanently closed at the time.

One previously unannounced title on the Theatre Company season is “Quixote Nuevo,” by Octavio Solis. It’s a Tejano-infused reimagining of the “Don Quixote” legend set on a fictional modern-day border town in Texas. The title was suggested to Coleman by director Lisa Portes, who won him over by telling him: “People are going to be hungry for joy.”

Missing from the new Theatre Company season are the previously announced “Light Up the Sky,” by Moss Hart; “Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous,” by Pearl Cleage; “Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,” by Luis Alfaro; “Emma,” adapted by Kate Hamill from the novel by Jane Austen; and “The Children,” by Lucy Kirkwood. The season is two titles shy of a normal-scale season, and Coleman said all those titles will be considered for future stagings.

Highlights from today’s announcement include:

• The Theatre Company’s first post-pandemic offering will be a special event called “Wild Fire,” a commissioned, traveling world premiere by Jessica Kahkoska that explores the devastation from last year’s fires on the lives of Grand County residents. It performs just one night each at four outdoor venues in Denver, Dillon, Winter Park and Grand Junction between Aug. 16-22.

• The newly renamed Singleton Theatre (formerly the Ricketson) reopens Jan. 7 with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” And the renovated and renamed Kilstrom Theatre (formerly The Space) bows on Feb. 11 with “In the Upper Room.”

• The Galleria Theatre welcomes audiences back Dec. 11 with “The Other Josh Cohen,” a rock-and-roll romantic comedy about a good guy named Josh and his lifelong battle with bad luck.

• The Theatre Company will resume its nationally regarded Colorado New Play Summit in late February.

• And “Hamilton” is coming back Feb. 16. Enough said.

Because of COVID uncertainty around the return of field trips, DCPA Education will not be staging an on-site Theatre for Young Audiences title this year. In 2019-20, “Goodnight Moon” was seen by more than 40,000.

“I would describe the DCPA’s return to live performances as something of a completion of the broader Colorado artistic community’s return from the isolation and economic devastation of the pandemic,” said Coleman.

Amanda Berg Wilson, founder of a Boulder theater company called The Catamounts that has produced a series of outdoor shows during the shutdown, is glad the Denver Center is back to doing what it does.

“We need the mothership in the fleet making work on the scale only they can,” she said. “I’m glad for our ecology to have that element thriving again.”

The Denver Center has been largely hamstrung from joining in the larger, ongoing reopening of the arts across Colorado both by the continued closure of Broadway and the financial implications of social distancing. “And those factors are completely out of our hands,” Ekeberg said.

The Denver Center engages with more than 941,000 visitors a year and generates a $175 million economic impact in ticket sales alone – during a normal year.

“No one has ever been through anything like this before,” said Coleman. “I would liken the Denver Center to a huge ocean liner. Our cost structure is such that starting back up is just an enormous task. We’re just slower about reopening because we have to be. And I think that has been a wise strategy for us. I think once we start back up, it’s going to be worth the wait.”

For many, that wait will end when Disney’s “The Lion King” returns to the city where it launched its first national tour in 2001. It’s a musical that begins with the grand pageantry of flying birds being walked down the aisles of the theater, followed by a massive elephant that requires four actors to maneuver and 18-foot giraffes on stilts.

And when that moment marks the official return of Broadway touring productions on Dec. 2, Ekeberg said, “it’s going to be unequaled – a moment unlike any other experience we have had before.”