A play about Five Point’s past offers hopes of a more collaborative future

A sweet and bitter song is haunting the Savoy Ballroom in Denver’s Curtis Park neighborhood.

On stage, Robert Thomas III – that’s Bobby Trombone, to you — the bell captain of the legendary Rossonian Hotel, and a few of his fellow staffers are going about their business and sharing their dreams in the history-recovering play “In the Pocket: The Ballad of Bobby Trombone” (through Feb. 25).

Written by artist-activist Jeff Campbell and directed by Theatre Artibus founders Meghan Frank and Buba Basishvili, the Jazz Age-set play unfolds in the fictional lobby of the legendary Beaux Arts hotel, which sits vacant at 2650 Welton St.

The show fills out a past in ways that will be illuminating to even those who know some of the high points of the Rossonian and Five Points, but also speaks to a current moment in which gentrification continues to local threaten neighborhoods and the livelihoods of the artists who carry on their cultural traditions.

At the Rossonian, Bobby hustles bags and brings along Simon, a new bellman. “Ain’t no bell boys in this organization,” he tells the audience. Played by Campbell, Bobby is an odd and spry bird who schools the audience and Simon (Shane Franklin) in jazz and boasts about impressing guests who come through town with his trombone playing.

Lobby clerk Violet (singer Danette Hollowell) knows that much of what Bobby says is likely more boast than truth. (Is he truly good on that ‘bone or just a lover of the art form?) Although Violet has a fabulous singing voice, she appears content to be right where she is. And why not? During the era of the play, the Rossonian was the premiere (but hardly sole) player in the historically Black neighborhood’s rousing nightlife as well as an artery in the nation’s Black cultural highway.

Denver and the downtown-adjacent neighborhood proved a welcome stop-over for performers headed from venues in the Midwest to Los Angeles’ Central Avenue jazz clubs. Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong came through, performing at white establishments but staying and playing in Five Points.

“In the Pocket” does more than name-check the hotspots and out-of-town luminaries. Coursing through Campbell’s plays is the   “should-I-stay-or-should-I-go?” conundrum that artists often face when the city that fed them creatively makes it harder and harder for them to do the work. For Bobby T. and company, that meant heading to the coasts where there were more opportunities for Black musicians. But there are few artists working in Denver currently who won’t recognize that song-and-dance.

Danette Hollowell, a Denver native and former leader of Danette Hollowell and the Old Souls, came out of the pandemic without her band. “My band is in Austin and New Orleans,” she said, sitting in the Savoy before rehearsal one recent Saturday, with her toddler, Vernon, nearby. “If you didn’t have a stake in the virtual world of music” — which she didn’t — it was especially hard. “I was playing catchup. So, it’s been a slow process just getting my footing back in that world.”

“In the Pocket” presents an opportunity to do the work in the community. “It’s a chance to reintroduce myself,” she said, adding, “because I am a creative to the bone.”

The show’s two other cast members have roots in Denver’s Black community, too. Gifted percussionist and dancer Shane Franklin (so notable in the Aurora Fox musical “Futurity”) and trumpet player Wesley Watkins are natives. A lanky and thoughtful cool cat about town, Watkins plays Quentin Myles, who is gossiped about long before he arrives onstage. Once his character appears, you’ll wonder if he is a troublemaker, a rebel or a trickster. Likely all of the above.

What does it mean to stay for an artist when the coasts, ambition – and maybe ego – call to you from cities with seemingly more opportunities? What does it mean to build a creative community?

As artists with a foothold in the neighborhood — because they own the Savoy — Frank and Basishvili know how fragile the local economy is for artists. Campbell and Artibus collaborated on the early 2020 show “Recipe” a well-received traveling show about food. “As a theater company interested in the idea of theater of place, and also local storytelling, there was a real synergy with Jeff,” Frank said recently. “There is the privilege to be in this space in a neighborhood of such rich history. We’re always looking for opportunities to continue that conversation, and also understand our privilege to hold cultural space and what that means.”

A community’s history

Over the decade, the still dormant Rossonian has become an increasingly vexed symbol of dreams for (and plans deferred in) the historically Black neighborhood. The “Harlem of the West” nickname rings truer than was ever intended. Gentrification and the shrinking of Harlem’s Black population and loss of Black-owned businesses have bedeviled New York City’s cultural landmark, too.

So, when the Five Points Jazz Fest — the neighborhood’s enduring keeper of that cultural history — canceled its in-person festivities in 2021, Denver’s Art and Venues, the municipal steward of the gathering, wanted to “reinvest some of those dollars back into the community in the form of Jazz activation grants,” said Brooke Dilling, manager of cultural affairs for the city agency. Dedicated to partnerships and community support, Arts and Venues handed over those mini-grant decisions to Five Points community members and representatives, among them Candi CdeBaca, City Council member from District Nine. “We said, ‘We want you to be part of the process of what’s happening in your community,’ ” Dilling says.