CEO to CEO: Getting in the Mood for Dinner and Theater at the Candlelight in Colorado

For nearly half a century, Colorado’s Candlelight has been offering a full evening out built around theater, food, and community. Founded in the late 1970s and firmly rooted in northern Colorado, Candlelight has long been a destination where audiences arrive early, share a meal at candlelit tables, and settle in for a night of performance without ever leaving their seats. It’s a model that predates today’s obsession with “experiences,” yet feels perfectly aligned with it.

Candlelight has carved out its own lane, one shaped as much by audience feedback as by artistic ambition. With a loyal following and an evolving lineup, the venue continues to balance accessibility with production values that regularly surprise first-time visitors.

We spoke Executive Producer Dave Clark about what a night at Candlelight really looks like, how they choose their shows, and why their long-term vision extends well beyond the main stage.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

A lot of our readers may not have experienced going to a dinner theater. Tell us what a night at Candlelight is like.
It’s an all-inclusive evening out, including dinner and show. On a full house night, we’ll have 300 people come for dinner. The menu changes show to show, so every production we do, we theme the menu to the current show, so it kind of matches. People are able to sit at tables with their friends and family, whoever they come with, enjoy dinner first, and then the show starts.  They don’t have to move seats and they’ll watch the first act. Then we have an intermission and the desserts come out. When I first started in here, it was interesting to see a lot of grumpy old husbands get dragged into the theater with their wives and they leave with a smile on their face.

There are a lot of theaters in Colorado, but not a lot of dinner theater. What is the community like, in general?
I think it’s very supportive. I was just at a meeting with several theaters in northern Colorado that wanted to get together and see what we can do to work together to support each other. We know the theater business. The theater world is something that everybody likes. The actors themselves go from theater to theater. We encourage that. We certainly don’t want to build walls between us.

How do you program a season?
I think it’s doing what the audience wants. When I took over at Candlelight, one of the things that I changed was the show selection. A lot of theaters pick shows that the actors want to do. And I said, wait a minute, why don’t we do shows that the audience wants to see? So, we do shows that the audience likes. We have comment cards and send surveys out to try and get some ideas what they’re looking for. We have an internal audience and an external audience. We have to kind of make sure both are satisfied.

So, in terms of a season that pleases both the internal and external audience, what do you have planned?
We’re very excited because we’re getting the chance to do Les Misèrables. They called me and said, “If we can get this for you, how soon can you do it?” I said, “We’ll do it right way.” We’re going to be doing Holiday Inn, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Finding Neverland, which is very moving. And our summer show we can’t formally announce yet. So, we have a phenomenal season coming up, and we’re really looking forward to that.

Another thing I put a lot of emphasis on is [making sure] we have a good quality production. People come and say to us that they’ve seen shows on Broadway, and that this is comparable to that. That’s music to my ears. We want to make sure it’s a good quality product that people want to come to and enjoy, and they’ll keep coming back.

What’s next for you and your team?
We want to build another theater on the same complex, like the Denver Center. They’ve got multiple theaters, and we think we can do something similar to that up here. We want a campus-style [space] to incorporate a learning center with classes. We want to maybe incorporate some event space, because people are clamoring for event spaces up here in northern Colorado. We’ve got visions of an outdoor amphitheater eventually, and maybe even a smaller café-style space, in addition to a big main stage that will not be a big dinner theater. We want to put a lot of bells and whistles into that one, like a full fly system, maybe some LED walls, some new technology, just to give a different experience and be able to move to more of a regional draw. That’d be amazing.

Did you do that because you found that there were new things that people wanted?
The initial thought was, we’re successful here, can we be successful somewhere else? That’s why we pursued those other areas. I’m not looking at this as a short-term project. This can grow. We’ve got 20 acres of land that we can expand as the market allows. People come on bus tours, and we think we can get on those kinds of circuits and be a bigger attraction if we’ve got a lot of experiences here.