If the past few post-COVID years have been a bit overcast for the Colorado performing-arts community, think of Alex Miller as its sunshine on a cloudy day.

Miller founded and runs a robust, 6-year-old website called OnStage Colorado that has become a virtual town hall – an essential online resource where local theatermakers and theatergoers alike gather to engage with all things Colorado theater.

Miller is not so much the local theater community’s town crier as its town champion.

Miller and his team of 10 volunteer editorial contributors are on pace to produce 200 generally encouraging reviews of Colorado theater productions in 2024 – which, he accurately states, “is about a bazillion more than anybody else does.”

Mostly because, for the most part, there is no one else. At least no one else covering the local live theater community with such full-time fervor.

OnStage also offers a weekly podcast that is nearing its 100th episode, an email newsletter with 900 subscribers, a comprehensive calendar of theater performances and occasional breaking news. The still fully free service is presently drawing about 9,400 visitors a month. Miller puts in about 30 hours a week keeping it going.

Miller not only has done all of this as his own public service to a performing community he has considered himself a member of since he landed a tiny role in a high-school play in Frisco back in 1981 – he’s also kicked in about $7,000 of his own money to cover costs along the way.

(And, not for nothing: He’s done it all since October without a paying job after his most recent gig as a writer for a tech company was eliminated.)

Why does he do it? Think of it, he says, as a kind of self-care. 

“I know what it’s like to put in a ton of hours to create a play – whether your role is as an actor or on the crew or the board of directors,” Miller said. “And to see any play be ignored by the media hurts me. It actually hurts my heart. And so I wanted, in my own little way, to figure out how to help theaters get the word out about their shows.”

Miller, a 60-year-old, married father of five and grad of CU Boulder, is a multifaceted guy whose wild and crazy career path has included a stint at the SyFy Channel, where he took pitches for proposed shows like “The Galaxy’s Wackiest Home Videos.” (One time, the pitcher was William Shatner!) He also developed a huge online news site for Viasat, a satellite company that provides internet service for the U.S. military in the farthest reaches of the globe. Seriously, Miller has had more jobs than some actors have had roles.

No surprise, then, that Miller is coming at OnStage Colorado from a nontraditional way that rewrites all the old rules about the separation of church and state … and stage.

Miller is a veteran journalist, but not a detached one. He’s a marketer, and a savvy one. He’s a theater artist, and a passionate one. At a time when both journalism and the performing arts are having trouble being seen and heard through all of the competing content noise, Miller is a hybrid who believes he not only can be all three of those things at once and still produce a credible news site – he almost has to be all three.

As a journalist, Miller has done everything from reporting to podcasting to serving as editor of the Vail Daily and Summit Daily News – twice. (His pals called Miller “the undertaker editor” of The Summit Sentinel, because he was its very last.) As a marketer, Miller has done everything from public relations to corporate communications. And as an artist, he has done everything from acting to directing to playwriting to theater administration – mostly at small theaters in Breckenridge and Dillon.

All three roles come into evident play on his site.

Miller freely admits that OnStage Colorado blurs the line between advocacy and true journalism – and he’s well aware of the landmines and the opportunities that come with both.

“I definitely want to support theaters,” said Miller. “That is my main reason for doing this.”

And he is doing just that – emphatically, said Missy Moore. She’s the artistic director of the Thunder River Theatre Company in Carbondale. And the daughter of the late legendary theater director Wendy Moore – the teacher who gave Miller his first role in “Teahouse of the August Moon” all those years ago at Summit High School.

“First and foremost, Alex Miller has always been an advocate for theater in the state of Colorado,” Moore said. “OnStage Colorado is incredibly important to our community because, right now, theaters need all the help we can get.”

Especially as they struggle in the largely vain pursuit of building attendance figures back up to pre-COVID levels. 

“Word-of-mouth is still a somewhat viable marketing force,” Moore said. “But our donor bases are literally dying off. So it matters that Alex is raising awareness about the art form throughout  our state.”

Miller has assembled a team of mostly tenderfoots with varying degrees of writing experience. His primary creative partner is Toni Tresca, a prolific young writer who freelances for multiple legit local news outlets and co-hosts the OnStage Colorado Podcast. Miller also has contributors based in Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, Summit County and elsewhere. One of his writers is expanding OnStage’s coverage into dance, opera and classical music. He plans to move into live music and comedy next.

But the spine of OnStage Colorado remains its multitudinous stage reviews, which is, where Miller admits, things get a bit squishy. It’s been 12 years since there was a salaried journalist dedicated solely to covering the Colorado theater community and – most importantly – holding it to a high and consistent critical bar. I know this because that journalist was me, at The Denver Post.

OnStage’s collective reviews are almost always reliably positive. A random sampling of recent write-ups demonstrates that its generous commentaries, like a beautiful sunflower, tend to grow toward the light:

“A stellar production that satisfies on all fronts.”

“A production that blows the roof off.”

“A heart-wrenching, profoundly moving must-see.”

“It’s true that we cover shows in a generally favorable light,” Miller said.

And that generally favorable light has helped make Miller and his team welcome and deeply appreciated in nearly every theater in the state. And well-clicked. It also has helped him to start to monetize his website, which is the ultimate sign of credibility and potential staying power. But those advertisers are largely the very same companies he covers, including the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Aurora Fox and Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company.

It’s, again … tricky.

“As someone who grew up in a newsroom culture where we called the advertising department ‘the ad slime,’ I get it,” Miller said. “But I definitely make it clear that just because you are buying an ad doesn’t mean you’re going to get a review – or a good review.

“But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more inclined to make sure that I covered the theaters that are also buying ads. And then again – I probably would be covering them anyway.”

If you are the type who gets caught up in the whole, “Is this journalism or is this marketing?” question, Miller gets that, too. The question that matters most is whether what’s clearly good for the theater company is also good for the everyday theatergoer who has traditionally relied on criticism to both steer them toward what they should see – and away from what they might fairly miss.

As I type this, the words of my mother are echoing through my brain from when I first became The Denver Post’s theater critic. “Always remember there is an audience for everything,” she told me. Which is the kind of talk that makes you the best kind of mother, but maybe not the most reliable of critics. 

The most haunting phone call during my time as a critic did not come from an angry artist. It was from a young father who told me he only gets one theater night out with his wife a year – “and why did you send us to that crappy play?” I had to confess – I had gone soft on that one. And it ruined his night. It’s our ongoing, warped struggle with the conflict between kindness and honesty. 

At one time, we had 550,000 subscribers, and I did them no favors by going soft. But Miller knows all too well that any startup website in 2024 is measured by its clicks.

“I have noticed that if one of us writes a review that’s negative, it gets way less traffic than others,” Miller said. “Nobody shares a negative review. So, yes, there is a perverse incentive to be positive in that respect.

“But the bigger thing, I think, is that when you become part of this community, and you respect all these people, you really just don’t want to go negative.”

Which leaves the reliant theatergoer in a kind of limbo.

It’s also important for Miller to say, as a keen observer of the Colorado theater scene since the 1990s, he believes we’re experiencing a bit of a golden age on stage – if not at the box office.

“I would say that our local theater is a lot better now than it used to be,” he said. “I used to see a lot of dogs. I used to walk out at a lot of intermissions. Obviously, some theaters are hurting right now, and others have closed. But I think overall, Colorado’s got a great theater scene right now, and I enjoy getting to tell folks about it.”