Marking five years for OnStage Colorado

Nearly 500 reviews and thousands of calendar listings later, the site is going strong

It was over the long Labor Day weekend in September 2018 that I launched the OnStage Colorado website. As I mark five years since that first posted review (Vietgone at the Denver Center), I think about all the many hours of time I’ve dedicated to the site alongside the many things doing this project has brought to me.

By the numbers, we’ve posted some 470 reviews, 300 news items, 55 podcasts and many, many thousands of calendar listings. There’s no way to add up all the miles driven to all these shows, nor ways to quantify the time I’ve spent fighting with the various pieces-parts of the website. I had to learn WordPress and all its ins and outs, and when I made the fateful move to add a calendar component to OSC, a WordPress plugin called The Events Calendar became both a helpful way to do so as well as a big, gnarly albatross around my neck as I found out how much it bogs down the site.

Why do I do it? Well, I started it because, after many years working in newspapers in Eagle and Summit counties, we moved down to the Front Range and I ended up in the tech world doing marketing and communications. As such, everything I’ve written about professionally since 2012 has had something to do with satellites and, as part of the corporate environment, subject to many layers of review. I wanted something of my own where I was sole arbiter of the content, and something that involved writing of a more creative nature and in an area that interested me: theatre.

In the 1990s, I was very active in theatre at the Breckenridge Backstage and Lake Dillon (now Theatre Silco) theatres. I still don’t know how I managed to edit a daily newspaper and do several shows a year on top of being a single dad, but I must’ve had a lot more energy then than I do now! A marriage, a blended family of six (soon to be seven) a move to LA and then back to the High Country interrupted my theatre stuff, and it’s been since 2011 that I’ve walked the boards as The Old Man in A Christmas Story at the Backstage alongside my son Andy as Ralphie.

I don’t really have much interest in acting anymore, and with my creative writing muse fading away, creating OnStage Colorado was a way to keep my hand in both theatre and writing while also filling what I saw as a real vacuum in the amount of coverage theatre was getting. There wasn’t any kind of statewide site that paid attention to the many smaller theatres in Colorado, nor was there a comprehensive theatre calendar where one could find most of the shows no matter what part of the state they were in. And, of course, the number of regular theatre writers and even general A&E writers at Colorado newspapers has dwindled to almost nothing.

The goal was and still is to be able to get to the majority of productions no matter where they are in the state. I’m still far short of that since I only have a few reviewers outside the metro area, but we do what we can. At some point, I plan to offer some paid advertising opportunities for theatres to help support the site and afford some modest stipends for the reviewers. Monetizing any website is a big step and I’m still not 100 percent sure how to do it properly due to potential conflicts between theatres paying for ad space and ensuring editorial integrity. So stay tuned …

As websites go, OSC is still quite small — with 72,000 users on the site in the past 12 months and a monthly average between 5 and 10,000 users depending on the time of year (the holiday season being the busiest). Our newsletter has about 900 subscribers.

But I do think the site has had a positive impact for local theatres, shining a light where one may have been missing before and giving these organizations a decent amount of free publicity to help them fill seats. And for me, becoming part of the theatre community has been a wonderful experience alongside the great privilege of getting to see a great many productions.

While this effort started out with just me, OnStage Colorado’s growth wouldn’t have been possible without some others who’ve joined along the way. Special appreciation goes out to Lane Ware in Golden, who helps input calendar listings (she’s got A-H; I do I-Z). Lane will tell you that tracking down all the show information is a big, mixed bag that often requires a lot of detective work and challenging production schedules we do our best to get right. So thanks Lane, for hanging in there!

I also have a special shout-out to Toni Tresca, who approached me right around this time last year about doing some theatre reviews and who has, in a short time, become one of the theatre community’s biggest champions as he also writes for Westword, Boulder Weekly and some others. Toni is also often the co-host on our podcast, and he fits this all in while working on dual master’s degrees at CU-Boulder (MBA and theatre administration).

In addition to myself, OSC also has a cadre of volunteer reviewers. Active right now are Eric Fitzgerald and Susan Harper in the metro area, Kari Redmond in Fort Collins and Karen Mason in Summit County. April Tooke is an occasional contributor from Colorado Springs, but we’d very much like to have another writer in that area. In fact, we’re always looking for more volunteer reviewers anywhere in Colorado, so if you’re interested, get in touch! We could also use help with the calendar and if you’re interested in helping with ad sales on a commission basis, let me know. Here’s our email.

Another way to help support OSC is to subscribe to our newsletter and our podcast wherever you get your audio stuff.

Just two more shout-outs here: One to WordPress developer extraordinaire Karie Farr, who’s helped tow this thing out of the ditch on many occasions. The other is to Glen Hobbs, a graphic designer who created the distinctive logo and color scheme for the site.

Thanks for reading and listening and we look forward to the next five years and beyond serving the Colorado theatre community and its patrons!