The show goes on

Grant from State Historical Fund ensures high school students keep their theater, and so does Boulder

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Growing pains first took the Tara Performing Arts High School to the Nomad Playhouse in 2001 — they didn’t fit the smaller venues they’d used in the past and needed a space their first graduating class could use for an all-school production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Catherine Barricklow, who was in that first graduating class from Tara and whose mother, Elizabeth (Betsy) Barricklow, was one of the school’s founders, recalls sitting in the green room, where actors wait to go on stage, and looking at a wall covered with signatures from actors who had shared that stage.

“It gave me a sense that this was much more than a rental in a middle school somewhere else in Boulder,” she says.

Catherine Barricklow found the Nomad Playhouse in middle school — a happy surprise in her neighborhood that was doing theater of a high caliber. In high school, when Tara first rented the Nomad, she was able to work in that playhouse herself, something she says she and her classmates felt was an honor.

The relationship got off to a bit of a rocky start. During the second scene in their first performance of The Winter’s Tale, the lights went out.

“At the time the electrical was less than reliable, and so we had to stop the performance for a moment, figure out whether we could troubleshoot the problem, it turned out we couldn’t so we went on with the play under rehearsal lighting, under fluorescent lighting, and then waited to fix the problem until intermission,” she says. “So funky, to say the least, less than well-kept but definitely well-loved.”

She’s gone on to be stage manager and production manager for The Public Theater in New York City and now is an adjunct professor of theater at Brevard College in North Carolina, but she’ll be returning to the Nomad to help run a gala to celebrate some recent good news for the school. After spending the last year and a half under contract to purchase the Nomad Playhouse, the Tara has finally set a closing date of March 31.

The nearly $300,000 raised by the school through campaigns that have seen Tara graduates making video testimonials on the importance of theater, and this theater in particular, and letterwriting campaigns from current students, were recently joined by a $200,000 grant from the Colorado State Historical Fund recognizing the 155- seat theater built as historically significant. It’s close enough to the estimated $722,000 in costs to acquire and run the theater for three years for the school’s board to sign off on the purchase, says Betsy Barricklow.

“What in fact it does is it creates that the Nomad will be a theater in perpetuity and that’s something that we feel really good about,” says Gregory Fisher, head administrator for and cofounder of Tara Performing Arts High School. “It was dicey as to whether it could maintain itself as a theater for a long time, so this gives it the push that it needs to be able to always be a theater for the North Boulder and Front Range community.”

Catherine Barricklow remembers her mother, Betsy Barricklow, coming together with Gregory Fisher and Laurel Fisher to create the Tara Performing Arts High School in the family kitchen — and housing their photocopier there for a while. The school now has an enrollment of around 50 students in a Waldorf-based high school curriculum and took over management of the Nomad on Oct. 1.

“To be able to watch the development of this idea from what was really just this kitchen operation to a full-fledged campus in North Boulder to the possibility of owning and also bringing the Nomad back and updating it so that it can really be the gem that it is in North Boulder history and for the community, feels like full circle to me,” she says.

The Nomad Playhouse was built in 1952 to house a then one-year-old group of volunteer thespians, the Nomad Players, who had come together initially to perform theater in a circus tent on a patch of grass borrowed from a neighboring liquor store. A year of wind, rain and heat drove them to look for a more weather-resistant structure and they turned to the affordable, fast and easy Quonset huts of World War II. James Hunter, the same architect who worked on City of Boulder civic buildings including the public library, assisted in the design. He incorporated salvaged lumber and sheeting from an abandoned mine. The play house was filled with scenery, flats and footlights built by the Nomad Players themselves. Early audiences were seated on chairs borrowed from a mortuary.

The Nomad Players’ membership swelled to as large as 300 and included in its ranks Larry Linville, who played Dr. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H and Tonyand Emmy-nominated Joan Van Ark of Knot’s Landing and Broadway success.

“I guess [the Nomad Players] were quite renowned locally,” Gregory Fisher says. “Whenever we do a play, we have all their programs, so we sift through the alphabetical program that we have to find out whether it was done and most of them were done, because they did over 100 plays in their period of time.”

But by the mid-’90s, problems started to appear — the fire marshal closed the building for code violations and the Players sold two-thirds of the roughly acre and a half of land that had been donated to the theater to pay for upgrades. The Nomad Players were Boulder’s longest running theater troupe by the time it disbanded around 2005 and the playhouse went dark.

But in those years while the Nomad Players were waning, the Tara High School was growing. Students had done some of their plays in a space called Kelly’s Barn, but that space had never been large enough to house the allschool musical, and they were reaching a point in enrollment and audience size that made that venue a pinch for any production. The Nomad Playhouse is within walking distance of the school campus, and the school began renting that space in 2001.

When rumors began circulating that the theater was at risk of being bulldozed, realtor John Kelly purchased the theater and leased it to the school. The hope was always that Tara would own the theater, but having just spent money on their own main campus, that wasn’t an option at the time Kelly bought the theater, Betsy Barricklow says. They became the theater’s anchor tenant in 2006, renting the space five months out of the year and investing in its upkeep and improvements.

Plans for ongoing renovations, which will follow a site assessment by a historic preservation architect, include updates to the façade that will be reminiscent of its 1950’s style. They’ll undertake practical measures like air conditioning to make the theater more comfortable in the summer months (it is currently cooled by a swamp cooler that doesn’t win back more than 5 degrees off the outside temperature, Fisher says, making 90 degree summer days a bit uncomfortable for patrons). Seats that are now so well-worn that the springs are visible through the fabric will also be refurbished.

“It’s such a beautiful theater in its own way, and it has so much rich history with the players having been there since 1952,” Fisher says. “We feel really lucky to be able to bring that history back to the theater.”

The lobby has already seen a fresh coat of paint, new granite countertops, new carpet and remodeled bathrooms, and they plan to add photos from productions done by the Players through those done by Tara. The green room has also been completely redone, and like the Players in the 1950s, students have done much of that work themselves.

As they’ve gotten acquainted with the space over the years, they’ve unearthed old lighting boards and an orchestra pit. It took nine years for them to discover a bomb shelter-like prop room that was loaded with props from the 1950s. Cables run around the theater for monitors that are now gone but the wiring is ready for new uses. The whole thing, Fisher says, has been like a bit of a pirate’s treasure trove. From a theater techie’s perspective, the possibilities are bountiful.

The hope is that the upgrades and the variety of acts at the celebratory gala to mark the school’s acquisition of the theater will convince other arts organizations to see the theater as a good space to host film screenings, theatrical performances and concerts. Performers at the event will include Van Ark. She’s preceded by legends, including that she was first cast from an audition she was only available to attend when the quarterback didn’t ask her to prom as she’d hoped and that she had her first stage kiss on the Nomad stage in The Diary of Anne Frank.

That green room wall covered in signatures has since been painted over. It’s part of the message, Catherine Barricklow says, that the school wants to pass on to those who go on to grace this revived stage: “While you leave a mark in theater with the work that you do in the building, the mark that you make is essentially on the human beings who sit in the audience. So the impact that you leave is on each individual who watches the performance and everything else is ephemeral, and the theater should be a house for that.”

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