Theater backed by DDA delays opening after convoluted city loan process

Blair Russell and Steve Wargo kicked off their LoDo theater with a song and a dance.

It wasn’t their first production, but rather, the overly elaborate and frustrating process of getting money from the Denver Downtown Development Authority.

“By the end, it was like CC’ing just 10 people on emails, just hoping that one of the people was the right one,” Russell said.

The duo were awarded a $400,000 loan from the city affiliate last July to help them launch the Denver Immersive Repertory Theater at the corner of 15th and Blake streets. They said what ensued was months of back and forth, with redundant questioning and confusion from city staff.

“Some of them, it didn’t feel like they even knew who we were or what we were asking for,” Russell said.

The men finally got their loan last month. But they said the ordeal pushed back the theater’s opening date by at least two months.

“How do we plan to open a business when we have no idea how many more steps this is going to take, what the process is and what they really, truly expect the timeline is?” Wargo said.

DDA tasked with revitalizing downtown

The DDA has existed since 2008, when it was formed to redevelop Union Station. In the wake of the pandemic and years of construction along the 16th Street Mall, a small group of voters extended the organization’s mandate to the whole of downtown, approving $570 million in bond funding.

That money will be used for a variety of things intended to revitalize the area, from helping launch retailers to renovating parks and partially financing the conversion of offices into apartments. The money is generally expected to be repaid from the increase in taxes created by the new investments.

About $155 million has been awarded so far.

When Russell and Wargo applied for DDA funding in early 2025, their business plan was largely ironed out. The two were looking to open an “immersive” theater, where people come to participate in the play, not just watch. Its first production, “Midnight’s Dream,” will feature 11 rooms with scenes happening simultaneously — 18 hours of acting in each show.

The pair hoped to put DDA money toward the $750,000 build-out of their location at 1431 15th St. When they applied, they were under the impression that the award would be a grant.

“I think everybody went into this not knowing how the funds were going to be delivered,” Russell said. “So you just make some assumptions. And we heard that there were grant funds, we heard that there were loans — that they had different ways of implementing this.”

Ultimately, a loan is what they got. The terms: 10 years at 3% interest, better than they’d be able to get elsewhere. Mayor Mike Johnston announced July 30 that Russell and Wargo’s theater, along with nine other projects, would be awarded a combined $100 million.

“Today launches downtown Denver’s economic recovery into overdrive,” Johnston said at a news conference.

First recipients just now getting money

But as the mayor was speaking, the DDA had yet to even source the money it was awarding.

Among the funding recipients announced in July was Green Spaces, a recently shuttered RiNo coworking, event and retail space that’s opening at 16th and Welton streets.

“It wasn’t smooth, but it wasn’t a terrible, strenuous process,” Green Spaces CEO Jevon Taylor said of working with the city and DDA.

The 30-year-old entrepreneur said his opening date for Green Spaces was pushed back from spring to this summer. But he doesn’t attribute that to one party, instead saying that he faced difficulty getting everyone — the city, his landlord, his subtenants — on the same page.

“I was just playing middleman,” Taylor said.

The city approved DDA for its own loan in November, giving it the first tranche of funds to dole out. PNC Bank provided the authority with a $160 million loan expiring in July 2038 and a short-term, $50 million line of credit.

“When [the award] was announced, and when we applied, we went into it with the idea that we would use it to finish the core and shell construction on our space,” Russell said. “Because we didn’t get the money in September or October, we had to just move with our own funds to do that work.”

That’s when the conversation shifted from Russell and Wargo being asked by city officials how the business would operate and use the funds to how they wanted to receive the money. That stage of the process also took months.

“We couldn’t have done that before?” Russell recalls thinking.

Now, with the loan in hand and the build-out well underway, they plan to use the funds to pay actors and for other ancillary expenses.

Mosher: Process ‘was too cumbersome’

Bill Mosher, Denver’s chief projects officer and a primary architect of the DDA, told BusinessDen in an interview that the process could have been better.

“I cannot refute, disagree, or say anything they said is not true,” he said of Russell and Wargo.

The hang-up, Mosher said, was that the DDA put the recipients of the awards through a city program that distributes loans to small businesses. But that process was far more complex and intensive than needed, he said.

“It was too cumbersome, and we need to be more flexible,” he added.

Going forward, Mosher said, the DDA will play a larger role in administering its loans to businesses directly. That means having a primary point of contact and establishing guidelines on how the funds ought to be distributed.

Mosher pointed to the DDA’s process for office-to-residential conversion loans, which are outlined in a simple, one-page document on its website.

Despite their frustrations, Russell and Wargo said they’re grateful for the DDA funding. They said the involvement of the city affiliate even helped them pick up investors. The two had previously been self-funding the entire endeavor.

“It’s so rare to get that type of support for a project of this nature that [it] was actually a plus to investors,” Russell said.

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