Upcoming season likely Boulder Dinner Theatre’s last

BOULDER — Just weeks after the owners of the Boulder Dinner Theatre, or BDT Stage, sold the building for $5.5 million and told BizWest that operations weren’t expected to change, BDT officials are now acknowledging that the upcoming season is likely to be the four-plus-decade-old theater’s last. 

BizWest first reported in June that the roughly 12,000-square-foot space at 5501 Arapahoe Avenue was purchased by 5501 Arapahoe Investors LLC, an entity registered to the Ann Arbor, Michigan, address of real estate investor First Martin Corp. 

CBS News Colorado reported Friday that the new owner plans to build housing on the site.

“We haven’t made any set plans as of yet, but based [on] knowing that [the new owners] will want to start developing the land at some point, this next season will more [than] likely be the last season at least in that location,” BDT artistic director Seamus McDonough told BizWest in an email Saturday. “We don’t however know at all how long that season would be. Could be 18 months or longer [than] that. As of now we have not changed any day to day operations.”

BDT Stage was founded in 1977 by the late Ross Haley, then the theater director at Boulder High School, according to media reports. 

The theater, which closed for months during 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was sold in 2003 by Haley to Gene and Judy Bolles. Gene Bolles was an original investor in the operation, according to a BizWest report from that time. 

The SpongeBob Musical is set to run at BDT through early September.

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