At the Iron Springs Chateau melodrama dinner theater, the good guy always wins and the bad guy always loses, yet something changes every night: the audience, who are often as much a part of the show as the actors on stage.

"Sometimes they can get carried away. You know, throwing fruit from their drinks," said Bob Kelly, one of three co-owners of the theater in Manitou Springs' Ruxton Canyon. "Once, I was playing the villain and I got nailed on the head with the flash cube from a camera."

Such are the job hazards when you own a dinner theater at which guests are encouraged to boo and hiss when the villain appears, ooh and ahh for the beautiful heroine, and madly cheer the hero.

Every April through September, the Chateau offers a family-style dinner of ovenfried chicken and braised beef, followed by a sing-along, cartoonish melodrama, and a vaudeville-like olio.

After Thanksgiving, the Chateau opens again for a holiday revue, featuring skits such as a four-minute version of "A Christmas Story" and a reworking of Lucille Ball's "vitameatavegamin" commercial with a woman getting drunk baking a fruitcake.

This year, Bob Kelly, Vicki Kelly and Bruce Littrell celebrate their 30th anniversary as owners of this nonstop, high-energy world.

Now, Kelly said, it's time to move on, and the partners are looking for buyers for the place, which has been used as an entertainment venue since its construction in 1880 on the site of an old fountain.

"It could be a dance school, or a concert venue, there are all kinds of things," Kelly said.

"It would be nice to see it as an arts space, see the place's history continue."

The Kellys and Littrell first started visiting Colorado Springs in the 1970s from Wichita, Kan., where they worked in a melodrama theater.

Back then, dinner theaters abounded in southern Colorado, Kelly said.

"We would come once a year to steal material and then go back," Kelly said.

Doug and Harriett Jensen, owners of the Chateau, who started its melodrama tradition in 1961, hired the three as actors. A couple years later, they sold the theater to them.

Decades later, dinner theaters around the Pikes Peak region have mostly shut their doors, and the Chateau is now the longest continuous melodrama in the area.

Getting hit in the face with projectiles isn't the only trial the Kellys and Littrell have endured in their long run.

There was a villain's inexplicable and unstoppable nosebleed (Vicki stepped into the piratical role midperformance), a hero who broke his leg moments before curtain call (a bus boy got his first chance on stage), and one New Year's Eve, when an unmanned truck rolled into the theater, smashing and bleeding diesel on everything in its path.

"Oh, there are all kind of stories," Kelly said, many involving customers.

"Once, we had a whole group of British Parliamentarians in here, including Winston Churchill's son."

Another customer, a rich Floridian, loved the show so much he flew the entire cast and crew to Ft. Walton Beach to perform at his company retreat.

The melodrama has also served as a launching pad, or at least a stop along the way for many of the area's performers, like stage and screen actress Lisa Banes, and ragtime pianists Max Morath and Tom O'Boyle.

"I'm glad we did it," Kelly said of buying the Chateau. "It's been an interesting career."