Look around the parking lot of Boulder’s venerable BDT Stage dinner theater. What do you see? Nothing much. Only Anatevka.

A huge red brick box of a building that’s been condemned to demolition. An asphalt parking lot that until recent months was rarely filled. Exterior walls that are no longer covered with banners promoting upcoming shows.

Enter the lobby and you’ll see a little bit of this, a little bit of that. A glassed wall display that contains more than 200 show programs dating back to 1977. A large poster that simply spells “BDT” – short for the company’s original name, “Boulder’s Dinner Theatre.” But if you look closely, it’s a mosaic of tiny photos spanning 46 years of shows, backstage frivolity, and actors serving audiences their dinner and desserts.

Inside the theater, dozens are already hustling and bustling to serve 275 people before performing the most requested title in the theater’s storied history: “Fiddler on the Roof,”  the beloved melancholy masterpiece about a fragile rural village and the impending end of its way of life.

Sort of like BDT Stage.

The theater will remain open until Jan. 13. But for these 275 visitors and all others who come until then, the sad and slow emigration has already begun. Because for just about every “Fiddler” audience member, this will be their final visit to the last major dinner theater in the Denver metro area.

Overfed, overworked Anatevka.

Owners Gene and Judy Bolles have sold the 12,000-square-foot property at 5501 Arapahoe Ave. for $5.5 million to Quad Capital Partners, a real-estate company that builds upscale housing in university towns. Which means Jan. 13 will be the end of one of the longest-standing traditions in the Colorado theater community – and another of our creative villages will be wiped off the map.

That it’s all ending with “Fiddler on the Roof” could not be more fitting. Perhaps the most famous musical of them all tells of a peasant community in 1905 Imperial Russia that celebrates life, mourns death, rejoices in marriage and always cares for one another. Until they are forced to make difficult decisions in the face of political oppression, religious intolerance and new ideas coming from a rapidly changing outside world.

BDT Stage has presented this musical seven times – at least once in every decade of its existence.

There’s almost a sacred pall that hangs over this evening’s storytelling ritual, all wrapped in a warm and wonderful nostalgia. It certainly feels that way for longtime BDT favorites Wayne Kennedy and Alicia K. Meyers, who are once again playing the dairyman, Tevye, and his no-nonsense wife, Golde – parents of five willful daughters whose modern sensibilities threaten to sever the family into pieces.

This is Kennedy’s fourth turn here as Tevye and Meyers’ third as Golde. They’re part of a tribe of actors who have remained uncommonly connected and consistently employed here at BDT since they arrived here as babies – Kennedy in 1991; Meyers in 1995. They have now been part of each other’s daily lives for 28 years – like neighbors in a village.

Under artistic directors Ross Haley, Michael J. Duran and now Seamus McDonough, who started working here as a 14-year-old janitor, the BDT ensemble is one that has helped each other through births and deaths, marriages, divorces, parenthood and even grandparenthood.

Tevye is a man who freely banters with God, as Kennedy surely must have done in 2001, when his now grown and healthy son, Joey, was diagnosed with children’s leukemia at age 2. He was supported not only by his friends at BDT. Neighboring villages at the Heritage Square Music Hall, Town Hall Arts Center and elsewhere collected more than $15,000 to help his family with medical expenses.

“Nobody comes here looking to make their career at BDT –  but that’s the reason people stay,” he told me at the time. “There’s nothing else like it.”

And there’s nothing else like “Fiddler,” which is landing upon the hearts of audiences and actors alike with greater significance this time around – and not only because of the obvious closing parallels.

Kennedy and Meyers’ characters are newly informed by their own hard life – and near-death – experiences. In August 2020, just four months after she and all her co-workers were thrown out of work by the pandemic shutdown, Meyers was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. In the final days of 2022, Kennedy had a serious heart attack.

Watching the show anew last week, Kennedy seemed to put even more of a finer point on each word he’s been given to say, like a miner digging for golden truth nuggets. Meyers seemed more wizened in going about her daily business.

“I think the cancer has absolutely affected my performance,” Meyers said. “I mean, when you go through your own real-world crap, you do tend to look at things very, very differently.

“After being in a place where you’re extremely vulnerable in life, a lot of things become very black and white. I look at just about everything now as either bull (bleep) or no bull (bleep), OK? So I am not trying to play Golde like she’s worried about whether she’s liked or not. She has things to do. She has a house to run. Her life is hard. But we all have our parts to play, we all have our work to do, and we do it. So stop worrying about who you’re pleasing and who you’re not pleasing. Take care of yourself. Take care of your world. Take care of your family. It’s all black and white.”

For Kennedy, the physical recovery from his heart surgery was much easier than the mind games that mortality has played on him since.

“You live your whole life as an actor with the mindset that you never miss a performance. You are invincible. You never stop, and it’s always go, go, go,” he said. “And then here comes this thing, and all of a sudden something’s broken, and it changes your self-image.

“I haven’t really thought about how that might have affected my performance, but I do know that everything felt much different to me afterward – especially given the age of my kids now, which is 29 and 25.”

While Meyers’ Golde comes off as sharp as a butcher’s knife, the actor feels more maternally connected to her five daughters, like a mamma bear. That, she said, is a completely organic character evolution.

“I am a mother myself now, whereas the last time I played Golde, I wasn’t yet,” she said. “Even though Golde is the force behind keeping everything going in the household, I am giving myself permission to really love my children … and I don’t think that was there the last time.”

The other elephant on the world map is the catastrophic war that has broken out between Israel and Gaza, which has sent tens of thousands fleeing their homes in a desperate and uncertain search for safety, as they say in “Fiddler” … “somewhere else.”

The first act ends with a wedding celebration that is disrupted by Russian soldiers, forecasting the coming purge of all Jews. Often, at this point in the story, you’ll see some benches overturned, perhaps a pillow’s feathers ruffled. Nothing that ever comes close to communicating the true horror and violence that comes when a town is emptied as an act of ethnic or religious cleansing. But the sound designer for this show also happens to be Kennedy, and he’s infused this powerful moment with gunfire, screams and other audio chaos that more accurately conveys what has since taken place in Germany, Yugoslavia and dozens of other hot spots – including, now, in Palestine.

“Last week, it was really fresh when we got to that part,” Kennedy said, “particularly when the sound effect started. Boy, you really can feel it. It’s palpable. There have been several shows when the audience doesn’t applaud the end of the act at all. It’s just silent.”

Just as the people of Anatevka are only just starting to realize that all of this is real, Meyers said, “I think now the audience is feeling that same thing. It grabs them. Hopefully they realize, ‘Oh, this is what is actually happening right now.’”

Director Kenny Moten believes the show is landing harder in part because of the company’s concerted efforts to involve members of the local Jewish community in the making of the show – particularly input from actor Joel Silverman, who is also Kennedy’s understudy. “I’d like to think that, as a whole, the production just has a lot more layers to it,” Moten said.

Tickets to this final production are being snatched up by theatergoers wanting their own final visit to BDT Stage. As of this writing, for example, there are only nine remaining tickets for the next four performances. But there is some remaining availability through the end of the run, and the company has just added a New Year’s Eve performance for Sunday, Dec. 31.

And while it is only October, the cast and crew are already feeling an urgency as January approaches.

“But it’s not about us,” Meyers said. “It’s about the audience. We keep telling ourselves: ‘At every performance, it’s their last time. So I get emotional every single night. There’s no way around it. There are some days when I am totally ripped apart. I think every moment that we are on stage, we are in it a hundred percent.”

Added Kennedy: “We’ll certainly be a train wreck for those last couple of weeks.”

Back in the parking lot, take a last look at that nondescript red brick box standing in the darkening Boulder night. What do you see? Perhaps nothing much. But if you look hard enough, you just might see, if only in your own head, that rascally fiddler up there, strumming his mournful strings while standing precariously too close to roof’s edge.

Tumble-down, work-a-day Anatevka.

Dear little village, little town of mine.