As I entered Boulder’s venerable dinner theater for the last time on Tuesday night, I was struggling – both as a journalist, and as an everyday theatergoer. Struggling to process the reality that, in just four days, BDT Stage would be silenced forever. Saturday night, it was.

I have probably been to this beloved beige box long known as Boulder’s Dinner Theatre a hundred times over the past 30 years. And just as I was about to open the front door and again be greeted by the familiar communal babel of 275 patrons enjoying their pre-show dinner, I realized: I have never known this place to be quiet.

I am almost always the last to arrive at BDT Stage, because I don’t much like to take 90 minutes to eat any meal. That means the buzz is already buzzing as I arrive, and the applause is generally thunderous as I leave. So I took a moment Tuesday to stop and live in this chilly silence and listen. Rising from the audio ashes, I could hear it: Wayne Kennedy as Max Bialystock, the world’s unlikeliest boy toy, in “The Producers.” Jeffrey Nickelson as Coalhouse Walker in a seminal production of “Ragtime.” Joanie Rubald and Alicia Meyers as the sexy cell-block sirens of “Chicago.” I heard it all. Laughter. Applause. Gasps. Chatter. Taps. Harmonies and high notes.

It’s hard to put the significance of Saturday’s closing performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” in proper perspective, except to say that BDT Stage presented 172 productions and 14,000 performances attended by 3.3 million patrons going back to 1977.

The sale of this land at 55th Street and Arapahoe Avenue to Michigan housing developers effectively ends the full-on dinner-theater tradition in the Denver metro area that dates back to 1970. That leaves only the niche Adams Mystery Playhouse in Denver and the gratefully thriving Candlelight Dinner Playhouse 45 miles north of Denver in Johnstown.

Old Denver loses again. And again. And again.

I’ve grown numb to writing these organizational obituaries. I’ve written them for the Country Dinner Playhouse, Heritage Square Music Hall and a dozen more. But somehow, against all odds, BDT Stage endured. Till now.

It’s a wonder my affection for BDT took hold at all considering the antagonistic way it began. I was a novice theater critic in 2001 when I accepted an offer to cover Colorado’s more than 100 theater companies for The Denver Post. The need to hold the Colorado theater community to a high and consistent artistic bar was a sacred contract between myself and readers of The Post. That means whether people in the theater community loved or reviled you at any given time largely depended on the number of stars attached to your most recent review.

My first BDT review was a rave for “Anything Goes” in November 2001. “BDT has a certifiable hit on its hands,” I wrote. But that was the last BDT review Denver Post readers would read for two years – because Ross Haley, the legendary, combustible founder and mastermind of the theater, outright banned me. Not because of anything I wrote – because of an ongoing beef he had with the competing Rocky Mountain News’ own legendary critic, Lisa Bornstein.

After missing a few press invites, I called Haley to ask what was up, and he ranted about his various grievances with Bornstein. “But, Ross,” I told Haley, who was both famously temperamental and fiercely loyal when it came to how his people were treated by the press – “I didn’t write any of those things!” Still, he said BDT was better off without either of the major daily critics, which was certainly his curious right.

My return to BDT in late 2003 came only after Haley sold the business to noted military surgeon Dr. Gene Bolles, who put an immediate stop to this exile nonsense. He asked me to come back to review “Chicago,” and I did. And fair is fair: I gave the show a deserved four-star review – and get this: Haley directed it.

But while Haley seemed to enjoy fostering needling relationships with local critics, I do owe him a sincere debt of gratitude for my own evolution as a critic.

It was during my exile that I reviewed an unrelated Boulder production of Neil Simon’s terrible play “Jake’s Women” at the nearby Nomad Theatre. At the time, I was still finding my own voice as a critic and my way around the ethical and intellectual minefields of the trade. Having come from a deep background in both sports and theater, I wanted to poke some of the hot air out of the prickly business of theater criticism. I told my agreeable boss that my goal would be to make readers laugh at least once in every review, using sports columnist Woody Paige as my guide.

What I did not realize yet was to have the basic decency never to make readers laugh at another human being’s personal expense.

Make no mistake, “Jake’s Women” was not good. There was no chemistry between the lead actors. I fairly pointed out that they never even made eye contact. Instead, the woman always seemed to be looking over her scene partner. I could have just said it like that and moved on. But I wanted to make readers laugh. So instead, I wrote that “the actor’s eyes are so fixated on the ceiling catwalk, with frantic eyes aloft and arms permanently extended, that I wondered if a baby might be falling from a burning building.”

I thought that was pretty funny at the time. But those words still haunt me, 20 years later.

Haley, who had no connection to that production, broke his silence to call me and rip me a new one. “You want to know why you’re not welcome at BDT? Because of what you wrote about ‘Jake’s Women.’ Because if you can be that cruel to that actor, you can be that cruel to one of mine.”

He was 100 percent correct. It was a cheap, personal shot. I never once thought about what it might have been like for that actor to read that line that had been printed in 500,000 newspapers. From then on, I never filed another review without re-reading it from the point of view of the people I was writing about.

The years that followed at BDT were filled with monumental, magical performances spanning silly to serious. As much as I love (real) cats and hate musicals called “Cats,” Artistic Director Michael J. Duran’s 2004 production set the local standard.

A career highlight was chronicling the 2007 partnership between BDT and Denver’s Black Shadow Theatre Company to put on one of the grandest musicals of all-time – ”Ragtime.” Neither company could have pulled it off without the contributions of the other. What they staged together was monumental.

I crushed out when I received an email from legendary librettist Lynn Ahrens, who read my review. “I love knowing that our show can be done – and is being done – in so many varied and challenging ways, and is bringing people together on so many levels,” she wrote. “Thanks for covering it.”

I’ve written many times over the years what has made BDT special from the start has been this idea of a semi-fixed ensemble. While many actors came and went, there always seemed to be eight or 10 in any given show who had been consistently performing there for 10, 20, even 30 years. Audiences grew to love them, even as they aged out and made way for new generations of core company members who themselves would grow older on that stage. Marriages, divorces, births and rebirths are a central part of the BDT story. It even birthed Amy Adams, whose first professional stage show was BDT’s “A Chorus Line” in 1994.

I must also proudly point out that, in my estimated 100 visits to BDT Stage, I ordered the chicken cordon bleu off the menu an estimated 102 times. That’s because I not only ordered the greatest food pleasure ever concocted every single time I went there to see a show, I also twice drove all the way to Boulder during the pandemic shutdown to pick up carry-out orders – which the kitchen was offering to keep revenue coming in. What can I say? I had to do my part. I love the stuff. And I cannot be shamed.

Whenever I shut off the laptop for good, I will count among my greatest achievements as both a journalist and consumer champion that I saved the chicken cordon bleu from gastric obscurity. Because, when management once foolishly removed it from the BDT menu, I used the full power of my Denver Post bully pulpit to demand its return. And it worked. Sort of.

The whole reason for the ill-advised menu change at the time was that BDT was feeling the heat from competitors to offer “finer food fare.” So, while the CCB was brought back, the meddling chef replaced its signature sauce with a fancier, zangy orange gunk – and I once again was forced to don my typing cape and bring public shame down upon BDT. Patrons joined my cause. I cried happy tears when the original recipe was restored. I savored it one last time on Tuesday.

Watching the final scene of “Fiddler on the Roof” that night was one of the most meta experiences of my theatergoing life. There on the stage were tearful gypsy actors playing tearful gypsy peasants being forced to leave the random piece of ground they long called home. Pieces of ground don’t get more random than the corner of 55th and Arapahoe in Boulder.

“People who pass through Anatevka don’t even know they’ve been here,” Kennedy, as Tevye, says like a knife to the throat. Once the beige box is demolished and nondescript houses take its place, people will soon drive down Arapahoe and have to think twice about exactly where BDT once was. It’s inevitable.

But, while BDT will soon become as difficult to find on a map as Anatevka, I have a pretty good feeling that 3.3 million people will forever remember that they’ve been there. If only in those sacred moments of silence.

Dear little village, little town of mine.