SHOW BIZ means BIG BIZ.

• Author: BRONIKOWSKI, LYNN

MOVE OVER BROADWAY, DENVER'S A BOOMING THEATER TOWN THESE DAYS.

Broadway mega-manager Alan Wasser looks forward to bringing such Broadway hits as The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and Miss Saigon to the Denver stage.

"Denver is a very strong theater market for two reasons, said Wasser, who has been bringing Broadway to Denver for more than 20 years as founder of Alan Wasser Associates, the general management company for Broadway producer Cameron Mackintosh. "There's the general sophistication of the city itself and the support for the performing arts, plus a staff who has its finger on the pulse of the city."

Wasser recalls the days when Denver was merely a stagecoach stop for shows traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles.

"Today, Denver is a very good theater town with strong attendance and no longer is viewed as a way just to get from Chicago to L.A.," said Wasser from his New York office, a week before the Denver opening of 1999 Tony-Award winning Fosse. "There are six major theater markets in the U.S. and Denver is right up there with them."

Denver's reputation as a Broadway boomtown has evolved over several decades starting with then-Denver Post publisher Donald R. Seawell's vision in 1972 to build the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) on a vacant, 12-acre site at Speer and Arapahoe downtown.

"There was very little in the way of arts then, and in the beginning, a lot of people resented building this," said 88-year-old Seawell, chairman and CEO of the DCPA. "It was a dead area at that time, hut now people say this center saved downtown Denver."

A study nearly three decades ago reported only 3,000 people had ever attended theater productions in Denver, said Seawell. Today, the DCPA bursts with regular sellout crowds, drawing nearly 1 million theatergoers annually, and posting $25.3 million in income for fiscal year 1999-2000. That contrasts with just a decade ago when total attendance was 250,578 and operating income was $7.6 million.

The big business of show business spills out into the Denver community. The total economic impact of Phantom playing Denver for two months in 1991 and 1992 was $40.7 million, according to a study by the Greater Denver Chamber of Commerce. The study went so far as considering the $45,398 parents paid babysitters for their night on the town.

"The Center is second only to New York's Lincoln Center in capacity, but we have more activities going on than anywhere else," said Seawell, pointing to...