Miners Alley Sets Sights on the Future With New Education Director, Performing Arts Center

Len Matheo and Lisa DeCaro, the husband-and-wife leadership team of Miners Alley Playhouse, are laying out their vision for the future while walking us through the Meyer Hardware Store in Golden. The theater purchased the 30,009-square-foot real estate in 2021 and is renovating it into a multimillion-dollar performing arts complex.

"We want Miners Alley to be one of the state's premier regional theaters, like the Arvada Center or the Denver Center on some levels, but better, because of the localness in Golden," says Matheo as he stands in the center of what will be Miners Alley's 157-seat starter theater, set to open later this year. "The goal is to be like the Creede [Repertory Theatre] of the Front Range. You fly into Denver, drive forty minutes from the airport, and then stay in the town for the year-round theater."

After years of lobbying its community for the resources to expand, the theater's efforts paid off in a big way.
"Right before the building came up for sale, we were still doing theater with half audiences because of the pandemic, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do this anymore," admits Matheo. "We had done a lot and were tired. But right when I thought maybe I wanted to get out, the city says, 'We’ll give you two million dollars to purchase the hardware store.' Lisa and I have been bugging the city for money for ten years, showing up at council meetings and saying, 'Maybe you don't give a shit about the arts, but look at our economic impact!' Well, I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease."

When Matheo and DeCaro took over the theater in 2013, they brought not only a wealth of theatrical knowledge, but also advanced business expertise from founding Courtroom Performance in 1997. "It's a business teaching lawyers theater skills for the courtroom," DeCaro explains.

"We’ve realized that if we’re growing to the next level and becoming a multimillion-dollar theater organization, we need to hire a lot more people to help us reach that next level, which was one of the things that made us start looking for an education director," Matheo says.

Miners Alley filled that role with Dr. Heather Beasley, a Colorado-based playwright, director, dramaturg and teaching artist who was most recently associate artistic director at Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado (BETC). "One of my interests is building our future audiences, so I wanted to find a place where I could do that," says Beasley. "I believe that most people who still attend theater as adults were first exposed to it when they were in K-12 education. To me, the most important place we can be working in live performance is in education."
Beasley will also take some weight off Rory Pierce, the director for children's theater programming who was also running Miners Alley's education program. The theater currently offers a full season of children's theater, three after-school programs in the spring, winter and fall, and nine weeks of theater camps over the summer. As for what comes next, Beasley says the theater plans to offer a mixture of on-site programming at schools in the area as well as in Miners Alley's new facilitiy.

"We really are looking to do a combination of skills-based training and education," says Beasley. "Right now it's primarily for students, but I want to expand it to adults so that it really becomes a performing arts center for all ages. Our real programming slate will come once we move into the new space. In the meantime, the Schools to Stage program is already ramping up."

That endeavor was funded by Nick and Geraldine Montaño, who gave Miners Alley the seed money to provide Title I students the opportunity to attend theater outside of school. Miners Alley launched Schools to Stage in early March, when Foster Dual Language Elementary, which was supposed to attend a performance of Charlotte's Web at the Arvada Center that was canceled due to snow, reached out to see if Miners Alley had anything else going on that the children could attend.

"We were doing Mother Goose, written and directed by Kate Poling, which we performed on the set of The Great American Trailer Park Musical," Pierce recalls. "It featured a prominently Hispanic cast and included dialogue in both English and Spanish, which ended up being perfect for this particular group of students. We did two performances in one day and reached 177 students; they paid nothing for the tickets or buses, and the teachers and students were so happy and excited. Weeks later, we are still hearing from them how much they enjoyed the show."

Laura Trinkle, a second-grade teacher at Foster Elementary, was just one of the people thanking the theater for its efforts to accommodate her students. "When the play began, I sat there wondering if [Miners Alley] had been told about our student population and if [it] had written this play just for them," she remembers. "Exactly half of my students live in trailers but are almost never represented in books or media. I was blown away when I realized that the setting was a trailer park and the main characters were bilingual. ... Thank you for writing such a thoughtful play, for choosing Spanish and for helping my students to see themselves on stage." Miners Alley will expand such positive community efforts once it finishes renovations on the Meyer Hardware building to transform it into Meyer Square, a community space with theater, outdoor performance space and pedestrian spots.

The space originally opened its doors in 1945 and has been a staple of the community; when owner Steve Schaefer decided to retire in 2021, there was real concern about what was going to happen to the property. "When the building came up for sale, we, along with many other downtown businesses and nonprofits, put together a proposal to purchase it," says Matheo. "We showed the owner that the community wanted this as opposed to condos, food courts or all that other stuff that is promulgating everywhere."

As we walk down the alley toward what will one day be the Miners Alley Performing Arts Center, DeCaro and Matheo point out the various businesses lining the alley that were instrumental in their efforts.

"It’s all super local,” says DeCaro. “There's the branding firm [Stone Strategy & Design] that helped us out, and Miners Saloon was on board."

"Those businesses, along with the Golden Civic Foundation and the Downtown Development Authority, helped us figure out where we were going to get the $5 million we needed to purchase the hardware store," adds Matheo. "Ultimately, the city gave us two, and we got a very good loan for the other three from a local bank called On Tap Credit Union."

The support from the community allowed Miners Alley Playhouse to purchase the hardware store in December 2021. Although the new building is larger than Miners Alley's current location, DeCaro and Matheo assure that they plan to maintain the intimacy that makes their shows so beloved. They worked with Semple Brown Design to develop plans for the new complex in two phases.
The project is in its first phase, which involves renovating the hardware store into the 157-seat thrust theater with dressing rooms, a box office, a lobby and a bar area. That phase is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

"For phase two, there will be two other black box theater spaces, which will add another sixty seats in one and another fifty seats in another," adds Matheo. "We'll have a deck so that the audience can literally walk over to the deck at intermission and hang out outside. There will be windows throughout the whole side of the building, so you’ll just be in here and be able to look out and see beautiful mountains all around; we are envisioning it being like the Oregon Shakespeare in Ashland."

Eight gender-neutral bathrooms are also being installed; this is just one of the many 21st-century updates they are making to the building. The basement, meanwhile, provides ample room for a "mixture of shop space to build in and storage," DeCaro says.

Currently, sets for Miners Alley’s shows are built in the basement of its space, on stage or “wherever is available," Matheo says. "Having a designated space to build is a game-changer."
A spot on one wall in the basement is filled with colorful handprints. "The last night that [the previous owners] were in the store before they turned it over to us, they had a party in the empty basement," Matheo explains. "There were kids riding around on bicycles, people having a good time, and the entire family put their handprints on the wall; we’re going to try to keep this in honor of the family who came before us."

They also want to honor other local organizations by making the space available to them, and plan to offer more subsidized seating for Golden residents.

"We already offer subsided seating for hard-to-reach and underserved populations, but our goal is to offer more deals for residents," says DeCaro. "Between paying $5,500 a month in rent and only having between 100-125 seats, depending on the show, we just haven’t been able to afford it, so the exciting thing about being in this new space is we’ll be able to offer all kinds of cool stuff to other people to make it more of a community space."

The couple estimates the renovations will cost $15 million. On August 29, 2022, the theater received a $2.5 million Community Revitalization Grant from Colorado Creative Industries in support of its efforts. Following its 'Let the Sunshine In' Gala with a live performance from the cast of Miners Alley's 2022 production of Hair, the team has entered the silent phase of its capital campaign.

"In other words, rather than holding a lot of fundraisers, we are going to people individually to try and get a big chunk of the additional money needed," says DeCaro. "For their contributions, people will get naming rights. Some families will get the opportunity to put their name on the performing arts center, the main stage, each black box, the bar and everything else inside the space. I have a friend who is excited about naming the bathrooms because she is happy there won't be a line only for the ladies' room!"

The Miners Alley team hopes to have the starter theater ready by the end of the year for its performance of A Christmas Story, which opens November 24. In the meantime, the theater will continue to produce its 2023 season, which includes The Oldest Boy: A Play in Three Ceremonies, opening May 19; Avenue Q, opening August 11; and The Cherry Orchard, opening October 13, in its space at 1224 Washington Avenue.

"Golden people are excited about this," says Matheo. "Our audience used to be about 10 to 15 percent Golden, but the last two shows have been about 30 percent. I know we are the envy of a lot of other cities because we received such a large investment from the community, so I just want to be sure we properly thank them. The city has really come through for us, and in turn, we hope to continue to come through for them by bringing visitors to Golden and creating excitement."