Ever wonder how the heads of the Denver Center’s three branches — Broadway, the Theatre Company, and Off-Center — chart their seasons?

When does Artistic Director Chris Coleman, start puzzling out the Theatre Company’s intricate season? What goes into the immersive offerings of Off-Center, helmed by Executive Director and Curator Charlie Miller? When does John Ekeberg, Executive Director of the Broadway division, start scoping out shows from New York’s storied theater district?

“I’m usually working roughly a year and a half to two years out and hope to rap things up about a year and a half out from the beginning of the season,” Ekberg offered, sitting between his counterparts at a table. Adding, with a charming deadpan, “If I’m lucky.”

On a late-summer morning Ekberg, Coleman, and Miller had gathered on the bare stage of the Wolf Theatre to chat about the nuts and bolts of constructing a season, particularly their 2025/26 seasons. The season openers, the musical Shucked (Broadway) and the solo show The Happiest Man on Earth (Theatre Company), were a few weeks out. A couple of days before, Sweet & Lucky: Echo — Off-Center’s bold invitation to gather, to grieve, to recall the lives of a couple — opened. (It runs through Oct. 5.) If a producer could be both relieved and quietly nervous, Miller appeared to be both.

It shouldn’t surprise that the trio thinks long and hard about how a season’s offerings build sustainable relationships with audiences. While their division’s patrons and subscribers may overlap, they can also be quite distinct. So, their strategies are as well.

From the road.

As well-traveled as some Broadway subscribers can be, Ekeberg wants to make sure that all patrons get a sense of what’s going on back East. “I think of a subscriber as being someone who, if they didn’t get a chance to go to New York, still gets a season that represents what’s happening. Since New York really is the home to Broadway theater, they’re seeing sort of an overall picture of what’s happening in the commercial theater space at the time in New York.”

In addition to Shucked, the Broadway-bound patron will be treated to The Notebook and Water for Elephants, Hell’s Kitchen and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and last year’s Tony winner for Best Musical, The Outsiders, among others.

“There’s a ton of work that’s adapted from books and films with large fan bases,” Ekeberg says. “That’s when you’re really hoping that the work enlivens what they’ve already come to know, either through the book or the film.” But don’t discount the shows that seem like they’ll deliver known delights.

“With Hell’s Kitchen, we’ve got, the music of Alicia Keys. So, we bring forward some of that already existing music. And a known bio story,” says Ekeberg. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be incredibly magical and totally its own thing. And then The Outsiders — the big Tony winner for its season — wrapping up. I’d like to think that there’s a bit of a journey that takes people in different places.”

A successful journey requires a teasing of and meeting of expectations. But it also helps if you can juke a bit.

“It’s really fun when a show surprises you. I was going to say exceeds expectations, but what’s fun is when you go into a new show that you really don’t know what it’s about. And then it just was so moving and emotional and powerful. When I experience that myself in the theater, I just want to share that,” John Ekeberg says, a bit wistfully.

“Those shows are fun because folks really don’t exactly know what they’re coming to. But then they leave, that’s usually the language they use: ‘I had no idea what to expect, and I had such a great time.’”

Exploring the unknown.

“Not knowing” pretty much describes Off-Center’s wheelhouse. Under Miller’s guidance and with the heft of the Denver Center behind it, the experimental off-shoot has been a player in the nation’s immersive scene — witness the return of the Brooklyn-based Third Rail Projects with the cousin of its 2015 block buster Sweet & Lucky.

Off-Center doesn’t have a season quite the way Broadway and the Theatre Company do. “We’ve been working to build more of a national network of partners across the country that want to participate and host this work and that think about how audience tastes have shifted.”

David Byrne’s Theater of the Mind — a show the Denver Center was instrumental in developing and proved a big hit in 2022 — will open at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre next March. “The DCPA is collaborating and serving as a consulting producer on the project to help bring our version of it to life in Chicago,” says Miller.

This is an interesting moment for immersive theater, says Miller. The long-running shows in New York that drew so much attention have closed. The traveling immersive productions like Van Gogh have waned. Immersive theater thrives on reinvention.

Immersive encompasses many forms — virtual reality, art installation, live performance, sometimes all the above in one production — and Miller says he’s constantly asking himself, “how is the audience centered in that?”

Brendan Duggan in Sweet & Lucky: Echo. Photo by Jamie Kraus Photography

While waiting for tech check, Coleman recounts an experience at the opening weekend of Sweet & Lucky: Echo. “At first I thought this couple didn’t like the show because they were off by themselves,” he said. The show intends to create a bond between audience members and their actor guides but also between their fellow travelers, so participation is gently required. But Coleman reports, the woman wound up sitting next to him toward the end of Echo. “She just randomly came over and hugged me afterward.”

“That could be the tagline for Echo,” Miller chimed in. “Echo. You might hug a stranger.”

This one’s for the Lornas.

Like Broadway’s Ekeberg, Coleman finds that 18 months is a good kind of timeline of when the planning begins. “We know we’re going to do two world premieres that came out of the Colorado New Play Summit. So which ones?” he says.

“Are there titles that are really exciting that happened in New York or in London that we want to try to bring? Is there something that speaks specifically to the Latinx community? Is there something that would really resonate in the Black community here that’s building on relationships? We’re probably going to do a classic. So, is it a Shakespeare year? Is it a not Shakespeare year?”

Later, Coleman shares this story.

“My favorite subscriber feedback from last season was from a woman named Lorna, who’s been coming since day one. And she said, I was very disappointed with the last three shows of the season. I don’t come to be entertained. I come to be enlightened,’” Coleman recounts grinning. “And I thought, okay, you’re my favorite subscriber ever.”

He’ll be curious what Lorna makes of this season, which begins with the solo show The Happiest Man on Earth, about Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku. The company will also mount the Williams’ hot-house classic Cat on the Hudson Roof. Past Summit readings receiving world premieres when that singular gathering returns in the new year are Godspeed — about a Black gunslinger who returns to Texas after slavery has been abolished — and Cowboys and East Indians.

Over the years the Theatre Company’s patrons have shown an interest in plays that reflect the region. Most recently the company premiered Denver native Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir. The reservoir of the title? Cherry Creek. The play, which was workshopped during the Theatre Company’s singular event — the Colorado New Play Summit — has been making the rounds of regional theaters since its world premiere.

So, when Coleman took a chance and commissioned author Nina McGonigley, and fellow Wyoming writer Matthew Spangler, to turn her short stories about growing up in a South Asian household in Casper, into a play, he was excited. “I thought if we could find a decent script in here, it might have resonance. And then they came up with a really interesting script.” The Colorado New Play Summit alum will get its world premiere in January.

“What I love about Cowboys and East Indians is it’s a surprising chapter of Western history, contemporary history, that none of us have known,” says Coleman. “And it also speaks to gender in the West in a surprising way. I know that our audiences have a particular curiosity, excitement, fondness for stories that come out of this region. So that feels to me like, oh, they’re gonna get this one. Someone offers, “Lorna’s gonna be happy.”

Coleman pauses and grins. “Yeah, I feel like Lorna’s going be happy with that one”