Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

With only 210 seats it has grossed more than 27 million dollars - Denver's little theatre that could. The Garner Galleria Theatre, tucked under the parking structure across from the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, opened in April 1992 with Forever Plaid and has been the city's home of cabaret ever since. Old-timers knew it first as StageWest, then simply the Galleria Theatre; in 1996 it took its lasting name in honour of Bob Garner, the pioneering presenter who convinced New York producers to send Broadway tours to Denver in the late 1970s and effectively built the city's touring-theatre market. The format is pure cabaret: a tight, club-like room with table service, reasonably priced seats and a drink in hand, run by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts as the intimate counterweight to the Buell Theatre's big touring musicals. The programming leans comedic and musical - revues, small musicals, interactive comedies - built for long runs. And the runs have been historic. Always... Patsy Cline ran three and a half years from 1995 with a local cast, then the longest-running show in Denver history; I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change topped it with a four-year residency from 2000 to 2004. By its twentieth anniversary the room had hosted more than 6,300 performances of 23 shows - an extraordinary strike rate for a house this size. Its position inside the four-block Arts Complex makes logistics easy: the attached garage, light rail at Theatre District station, and the restaurants of Larimer Square and 14th Street all within a few minutes' walk. For visitors wanting Denver theatre without the big-house formality, this is the room locals recommend first. The production history maps the format's range: Forever Plaid returned for encore runs after christening the room, The World Goes 'Round brought Kander and Ebb's songbook, Swingtime Canteen swung through the 1940s, and intimate musicals like The Last Five Years found their ideal scale here. By the twentieth-anniversary season the theatre had staged more than 6,300 performances - proof that in Denver, a 210-seat room with table service can outdraw houses five times its size, one long run at a time.