Support our local community
Join us for two great fundraising events to kick off the 2024 season
Earth Spirit Benefit Concert
Savor the Tabor
A National Treasure
Tabor’s Storied History
Mining magnate Horace (H.A.W.) Tabor built the opera house in 1879 in just 100 days in one of the West’s rowdiest silver boomtowns. Today, in a town with no community center, no movie theater, and no formal performance spaces, the Tabor Opera House remains a much-needed cultural and community center. This elegant building, deemed a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has been endangered by nearly a century and a half of long winters in North America’s highest-elevation city and is now being saved!
“Walking around the opera house is like being teleported back to its glory days, when you might have settled down for a melodrama, a circus show, an Oscar Wilde lecture or the musical “Out of Bondage,” by the African American Hyers Sisters…”
Elisabeth Vincentelli
The New York Times
Historic Stage Scenery
In 2020, historic stage scenery expert Wendy Waszut-Barrett, Ph.D., of Historic Stage Services explored the Tabor’s upstairs. Much to her surprise, and ours, she found hand-painted curtains and drops dating as far back as 1879—the largest collection of historic stage scenery in North America.
The Tabor Now and Then
Today, the Tabor Opera House exudes a special character. Decorative radiators, an old-style ticket box, and a museum filled with bygone treasures whisper the elegance of the past, even as they display the wear of 140 years.
A ballroom stained by moisture fills with light from expansive windows that look onto Colorado’s two highest peaks. The theater’s original red velvet seats may be faded, but their shabby chic aura lends a timeless feel to any performance or tour at the Tabor.
Over the years, luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, John Philip Sousa, and Buffalo Bill graced the stage. Real live tigers padded past the curtains as part of a circus act. Legend has it the trap door at center stage was cut for famous magician Harry Houdini—although evidence of his presence at the Tabor has, fittingly, disappeared.