Elitch Theatre: America's First Summer Stock

The story of this theater begins with a farm, a marriage, and a woman left to run everything alone.

John and Mary Elitch were running a restaurant in downtown Denver in the late eighteen eighties. They sold it in eighteen eighty-eight and turned their farm in the Highlands neighborhood into a family destination: a small zoo, flower gardens, a bandstand, and the beginnings of a theater. Elitch's Zoological Gardens opened on May first, eighteen ninety. The theater did not have chairs yet. It barely had walls.

By the following winter, John Elitch was ill on a tour in San Francisco. He died in eighteen ninety-one, leaving Mary to run the entire operation, the zoo, the gardens, the theater, and eventually an amusement park, on her own. She was thirty years old. She became one of the first women in the United States to own a theater.

In the summer of eighteen ninety-three, she brought in a professional stock company from New York to perform a full season of plays. That was the first formally organized summer stock season in American history. The concept, professional actors performing a rotating repertory of plays for a summer audience, was new. It worked. The company came back. Others imitated the model across the country.

What followed, over the next six decades, was an extraordinary roster. Douglas Fairbanks got his start here, in summer stock at the Elitch, before Hollywood existed as an industry. Cecil B. DeMille performed here. And in the summer of nineteen fifty-one, a twenty-one-year-old ingénue named Grace Kelly spent the season as a stock player on this stage, a year before she made her first major film and four years before she became Princess of Monaco.

The theater closed as a summer stock venue in nineteen eighty-seven. The building still stands in the North Denver neighborhood, landmarked and slowly being restored. A century and a third of American theater history is buried in its floorboards.