As I approached The Sofia, home of B Street Theatre in Sacramento on a February morning, swarms of fourth and fifth grade kids from Greer Elementary School and California Montessori Project buzzed around the entrance. The children’s energy spiked by anticipation created its own force field. When the doors opened they loudly spilled into the empty lobby suddenly filling the space. They are here for a morning matinee of the B Street Theatre Family Series.
The young theatergoers about to see “Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad” written and directed by Jerry Montoya, B Street’s longtime executive producer, were creating a full circle moment. Forty years ago, Tim and Buck Busfield founded Fantasy Theatre (later Theatre for Children, Inc.), a traveling troupe of professional theater makers driving around to area schools putting on original 45 minute plays.
“I was in Michigan,” Buck Busfield told me. “I got a phone call from Timmy and he said, ‘I’m gonna start a touring theater for kids. Of course he’d already been fulminating this idea for a while. This is 1986. I said, ‘I’ll come help you for a year or two.’”
The years became decades. Buck never left.
Four decades later years later B Street celebrates this milestone from its $30 million home, a two story 49,000-square-foot facility founded by Buck Busfield that opened in 2018 on Capital Avenue. Buck retired in 2022 and former Associate Artistic Director Lyndsay Burch was appointed Executive Artistic Director of B Street and CEO of The Sofia complex. She oversees an organization with a yearly budget just over $4.6 million, managing 15 full-time employees and 35 part time employees.
In early February, B Street Theatre co-founder Timothy Busfield was indicted in New Mexico, where he directed several episodes of a television show, on four counts of criminal sexual contact with a child. Through his attorney, Busfield denies the allegations. In a statement to patrons and donors, B Street asserted, “Mr. Busfield does not have any current role with B Street Theatre. While he was a co-founder, he has not served in any capacity since 2001.”
I followed the young students into the building where they peeled off into the 385-seat Sutter Theatre where the Family Series performs. I was led down the hall to the next set of doors, the smaller 250-seat Voris Theatre. Inside, Burch paced the floor in front of the stage apron. Above her, a majority of B Street’s extraordinary acting company took turns at a couple of microphones working out choreography for a staged reading they would perform two days later. Burch suggested reversing the order that two actors should approach the microphone and they tried it again that way. The playwrights sitting behind her nodded in approval.
The play, a jukebox musical called “Dream Dream Dream,” follows the careers of song writers Felice and Boudreaux Bryant who wrote late 50’s hits for the Everly Brothers such as “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie” and the iconic anthem “Love Hurts.” It will receive a full world premiere production at B Street in 2027 with hopes it can eventually go to Broadway.
The first B Street Theatre complex was contained in three small metal buildings between Stanford Park baseball field and a levee topped with railroad tracks. It held a theater in one building and administrative offices in another. Across the street was a small set building shop. The theater was remodeled twice to increase audience capacity, finally seating 185, while the second building was eventually built out for a second performing space seating 112 kids and 90 adults. Freight trains passing by occasionally competed with actors for audience attention. Celebration Arts now works out of the second building with their performance space and administrative offices there.
The Sofia has two state-of-the-art theaters: The Sutter, where the Family Series performs, holds 385 patrons, hosts musical concerts and a Sacramento Ballet series among other events;And the smaller Voris Theatre (250 capacity) which hosts B Street’s Main Stage series.
In the two upstairs galleries, jazz performances and sketch comedy are often on tap but they are also configured as rehearsal spaces when needed. Last year, the building housed over 500 performances. “It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around that it happened and that it’s real,” Buck Busfield told me. “I don’t ever walk in that building without a bit of astonishment.”
When I visited Jerry Montoya’s upstairs office he said the building’s activity level was both usual and necessary. He emphasized the organization’s mantra about continually making work. “You just throw it in the river and let it go. That’s the journey of B Street. Don’t look at what we did yesterday. What are we doing tomorrow? How can we grow?”
Montoya has been a do-everything theater maker for nearly 30 years with B Street. Producing, writing, directing, designing, mentoring — whatever Buck and now Burch needed, he has supplied.
Montoya’s closet-sized second floor office is outfitted with a laptop on a stand and an electric guitar plugged into a small amp. There is little else. “I think what’s really made us so strong is that we really focus on the religion of story,” Montoya said. “Not just this play or the story of this play, but knowing how to tell a story and how an audience wants to receive a story.”
Montoya has written and directed numerous shows for the Family Series including the recently staged biography of Harriet Tubman, which more than 15,000 students experienced over its six week run. He’s also written more complex adult plays such as the World War II historical drama “Nosotros La Gente,” an unexpected hit for the company last year. Based on intimate Montoya family memories, the soulful romance was ingenuously directed by Burch. It’s not the type of production B Street has been known for, yet audiences adored the change of pace.
The knock on B Street has been they have thrived on indistinguishable light comedies — the empty calories of theater. Montoya pushed back on the criticism.
“Bringing people in this day and age into a room to listen to a story is a revolutionary act. We are not a ‘take your medicine theater,’ where we’re preaching at people,” Montoya said. The company has produced over 100 new plays most of which were regional, if not national, premieres.
B Street’s product has evolved over the years as the theater and its audience has grown. The first production was “Mass Appeal” a two-person comedy drama which Tim Busfield starred in with his old college friend, the late Ed Claudio, who was brought out from New York. Later another friend, Aaron Sorkin, wrote and starred in the play “Hidden In This Picture.” They found a needed audience friendly niche with the goofy Jeff Daniels comedy “Escanaba In the Moonlight” and haven’t looked back.
There have been darker shows along the way. A production of Sam Shepard’s political black comedy “The God of Hell” received two bricks through the theater’s front window. Last year they staged the dramatic commission “Blood of the Lamb” which dramatized the effects of draconian laws affecting women’s health. The limited engagement was enthusiastically supported.
“There’s importance in taking risks so that you can learn more about your audience. You can move away from thinking of them as a monolith who only wants to see ‘The Play That Goes Wrong,’” Burch said. “You can start to see them in a more nuanced way. At the same time, I need every show to sell this many tickets and inspire this many new subscribers because tomorrow depends upon that.”
Actor Elisabeth Nunziato, one of B Street’s early company members said, “The consistent thing all of these years has been the audience. There are people that have been here literally the entire time, that can remember seasons upon seasons of shows. That relationship with the audience in this community is really the common denominator across the seasons.”
Burch has pushed B Street into the national consciousness through involvement with the National New Play Network which supports the development and production of new works which are shared by theatres around the country. She is the organization’s current president. Under her leadership B Street was named the National Theatre Conference 2025 Outstanding Theatre of the Year.
The company has succeeded by maintaining essential core values of putting the best talent onstage and telling stories in an emotionally direct way. The arts complex they’ve erected to support and enhance that mission demonstrates a commitment to the community and themselves. From Tim Busfield’s inspiration of creating a professional theater in Sacramento, through Buck’s clear-eyed determination and endurance to build the theater, and now Lyndsay Burch’s thoughtful modern stewardship of the organization, the evolution has kept B Street vibrant.
“We are incredibly supported by the community,” Burch said. “It really feels like a wonderful moment to be celebrating the 40th with all these different generations of B Street coming together.”
This story is part of the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative. This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics, the city had no editorial influence over this story. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Hmong Daily News, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.
By Marcus Crowder
