4 minute read
Crown Jewel
The Sheridan Opera House is an ornate, beautiful example of living history
BY MARTINIQUE DAVIS
Walking across the threshold of the historic Sheridan Opera House is like stepping into Telluride’s fascinating past.
A sweeping grand staircase ushers eventgoers to a regal-yet-intimate 238-person venue, replete with two levels of burgundy velour and cast-iron seats set before a rich wood-wrapped stage. Ornate floral stencil paintings adorning the walls offer a rare example of the transitional period between the late 1800s Art Nouveau style and the Craftsman tradition of the 1920s, casting a fanciful feel over a space that has welcomed an incredible range of artists from early 1900s performers Lillian Gish and Sarah Bernhardt to late-20th century icons Smokey Robinson and John Prine to today’s big names, like Mumford and Sons and the String Cheese Incident.
Here, in the quiet of a place that has been called the “living room of Telluride”, you can almost hear the echo of 110 years of patrons’ feet dancing across the original, beautifully restored maple-wood floors.
Located on Colorado Avenue, the opera house is one of the community’s most palpable examples of living history, embodying Telluride’s transition from rough-and-tumble mining town to a certified Colorado Creative District with a vibrant and diverse arts scene. Today, the building isn’t an exact replica of the stately opera house J. A. Segerberg, manager of the adjacent New Sheridan Hotel, first envisioned in 1912, says the opera house’s PR and marketing director, Maggie Stevens. “Things have changed,” she says, explaining that the vestibule, offices and staircase aren’t original. “But we’ve done our best to restore it to what it looked like 110 years ago, so that when you walk in here, you’re transported to a different time in Telluride’s history.”
The opera house, which is also sometimes referred to as the “crown jewel of Telluride”, was
Melissa Plantz
RICH HISTORY
COLORADO’S MAGNIFICENT MOUNTAIN OPERA HOUSES
Telluride isn’t alone in having a historic opera house whose grandeur reflects its time as a prosperous mining hub. Launched in June, the Colorado Historic Opera Houses Circuit comprises five historic mountain opera houses — each is on the National Register of Historic Places and was constructed between 1878 and 1913 — and invites visitors to tour these magnificent buildings, an authentic way to explore this fascinating aspect of Colorado history. In addition to Telluride’s Sheridan Opera House, the circuit takes in similar structures in Central City, Leadville, Aspen and Ouray. Says Maggie Stevens, “The circuit was created to shine a light on the fact that these unique and beautiful buildings still exist and are still in operation.”
Facing page. Main photo: the Sheridan Opera House c. 1913; top inset: the theater set for a dinner party c. 1920; bottom left: the exterior in the years before the Chop House restaurant. This page. Main photo: Telluride’s ‘living room’ as it is today; bottom inset: actors John Wayne and Glen Campbell in front of the opera house when it was still attached to the New Sheridan Hotel. The pair were in the area in 1969 filming True Grit.
initially called the Segerberg Opera House when it opened in 1913, a time of prosperity for the area. The grand building, however, wasn’t immune to the winds of change that swept through the nation in the 1920s and 30s. Prohibition, the decline of the mining economy after the First World War, which was accompanied by a drop in Telluride’s population, and then the Great Depression brought about the closing of the theater’s doors in the early 1930s. The building sat idle for nearly 30 years, until organized programming returned to the renamed Sheridan Opera House in the 1960s.
In the early 1970s, the opening of the Telluride Ski Resort, the founding of the Telluride Film Festival and Bluegrass Festival and establishment of the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities (now Telluride Arts) led to a revitalization of arts and culture in the community — and the Sheridan Opera House was positioned squarely at that renaissance’s core. Film festival founders Bill and Stella Pence purchased and remodeled the building in the mid-1970s and later sold it to R.N. Williams and J.W. Lloyd, who added a new entryway, conference room and the third-floor Vaudeville Bar in 1983.
Many years of disuse and under-investment had left the stately building in need of major renovations, so in 1991 the nonprofit Sheridan Arts Foundation was founded, and in partnership with the Town of Telluride and the Colorado Historical Society, undertook a decade-long restoration of the building. In so doing, the donation- and grants-funded organization, which has spent $2.4 million to date, has helped reclaim a vital piece of local history.
Today, the opera house links Telluride’s past and present and, thanks to the generous support of the SAF’s supporters, Stevens says it functions much as it did a century ago. “The Sheridan Opera House was originally built to be a place people could go to let loose, to get together and to be a community — and that’s still our goal.”
To support the Sheridan Arts Foundation and Sheridan Opera House, visit sheridanoperahouse. com/donate.
