On Jan. 7 as brush fires began spreading in the Pacific Palisades east of Malibu, Scott Klier was in Los Angeles holding auditions for the pending Broadway at Music Circus season opening in March.
“Our last day of Los Angeles auditions, the power went out,” Klier told me. “We ended up having to audition in a supply room at Actors’ Equity Association. It was the only room with the window where we could actually see the talent and the accompanist could read the sheet music.”
That Klier, Broadway Sacramento’s president and CEO (and de facto artistic director), was spending the winter casting for the upcoming slate of new productions was not news — that the season will open in the spring, and not the summer, is historically unprecedented. Klier didn’t really have a choice.
“With the departure of Sacramento Theatre Company we have a contractual obligation to program the site that we shared with them year-round, which created a dilemma for us because we’re not only the producers of Broadway at Music Circus, as you know, we’re also the presenters of Broadway on Tour,” Klier said.
BAMC has had a three-month summer-only schedule since its inception under Eleanor McClatchy’s sponsorship in 1951. STC operated out of the Main Stage across the small courtyard from the theater in the round, now called the UC Davis Health Pavilion. Since Music Circus used the Main Stage building for dressing rooms, costume storage and rehearsals, both companies couldn’t operate at the same time — legally or logistically. That left the Pavillion vacant nine months out of the year — a creatively frustrating, financially wasteful situation. BAMC typically produced five or six shows during their summer seasons since returning from a 2020 COVID pause.
This year, Klier will oversee eight new original productions, each lasting a week, beginning with “Footloose: The Musical” opening on March 21 and closing with “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas” in December. The company’s Broadway touring season remains the same. (The current touring season ends in May with “Parade.” A 2025/26 season likely running September through May will be announced March 17).
“Finding a recipe for the year where we didn’t cannibalize ourselves was my challenge. That’s how we arrived at the schedule that we did,” Klier said.
The BAMC additions fly in the face of the significant theater trends of the last three years — contraction and closure. Professional companies large and small across the country have stopped producing or are producing less because of unsustainable financial models magnified by the pandemic and now codified by current audience behavior: Subscriptions are mostly down, single ticket buyers are up.
Time of transitions
Professional theater in Sacramento finds itself in transition in 2025. The slow motion demise of Sacramento Theatre Company caused anguish and frustration for theater patrons and artists across the region. (In August 2023, the company announced a pause in its main stage performances for the upcoming season to reassess its operations. In November of 2024 STC officially announced its closure. )
“What if it was actually just a contracting marketplace that was over-saturated?” Bill Blake, West Coast director of AMS Planning and Research, a comprehensive national arts, culture and entertainment consulting firm said. Blake advises arts organizations on business models, scale and viability in cities such as Tempe, Portland and San Francisco. “Maybe we’re now the right size in this town with one fewer professional theater,” Blake said.
STC was not only a legacy arts organization with deep historical roots but also theoretically represented the idea of a regional theater where classics could receive consistent productions and the occasional Shakespeare might hit the boards. Those types of productions may no longer be professionally viable here due to cast size requirements and, more crucially, audience interest.
“Sacramento is a market that’s always been way more dependent on ticket sales than donations compared to other comparable markets,” Blake said. “That impacts artistic choice, what goes on, what scale the productions are.”
Lyndsay Burch, executive artistic director and CEO of the Sofia: Home of B Street Theatre, wonders if there is an audience for American classics by playwrights like Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. “I love ‘Glass Menagerie.’ It’s one of my favorite plays,” Burch said. “But I don’t really know if that kind of work is really going to appeal to a larger audience or bring in new theatergoers.”
Recognition for Sacramento theater groups
It was an early morning in January, the B Street administrative offices were still empty. We settled in a large conference room with windows opening out on a row of workstation cubicles. Burch was in what could be called “Stevie Nicks light” wearing a colorful flowing dress underneath a thick coat with a feathery boa neck line. In less than 24 hours she’d be taking a pre-dawn flight to New York with B St. Executive Producer Jerry Montoya to receive the 2024 Outstanding Theatre Award by the National Theatre Conference (NTC). The honor is presented annually to a “theatre demonstrating artistic innovation and organizational excellence.”
Previous winners include the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and The Public Theatre (New York, and Steppenwolf Theatre).
“B Street is a local gem in Sacramento and a treasure to the American theater as a feeder of material, talent and administrative health,” said Jack Rueler, founder of Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, their sponsor for the honor. “Its business model, with its diversified earned and contributed revenue streams, is a beacon to not only the regional theaters but to the nonprofit sector.”
Blake suggested this deserves a “Sacramento wins!” beam lighting type of local recognition. It is an acknowledgement decades in the making for B Street and its founding Busfield brothers who balanced passion for young people’s theater with accessible adult entertainment and a sprinkling of darker themed dramas built around a talented versatile acting company.
The Sofia has become a multi-use performance and gathering space which Blake references as a model to his clients. He was a major factor in the building’s development, financing and construction work as managing director of B Street Theatre for 11 years during the building process.
“They’re getting better and better at using the building to drive programming in a way that they were not able to do with the old place,” Blake said, referring to the original B Street building, which is now occupied by Celebration Arts. “Diversify the programming through rentals, through presenting, through things that keep the building full.”
He mentioned a sold-out comedy pop up he saw in an upstairs gallery where saxophonist Jacam Manricks also curates popular themed jazz nights. There are a couple B St. based improv groups, an adult storytelling series and a modern dance company also performing in the comfy 85 and 106 seat spaces.
Burch is in her 11th year with B Street and her third year as artistic director. She’s ambitious for the company but realistic about her audience. “One of the challenges as the artistic director is, of course, play selection,” Burch said. Last year she balanced predictable hits such as “Pickleball” with headier productions like “What the Constitution Means to Me” and the exhilarating gut punch “Blood of the Lamb.” The latter was a searing examination of current abortion politics and the resulting personal consequences. B Street commissioned the work from playwright Arlene Hutton.
Burch only ran it for a week here as a special engagement even though it has had strong positive responses at international showcases. “It’s a tough sell because you have to sell it as what it is — a contemporary drama about current societal and sociopolitical issues.” Burch said it overperformed her expectations in terms of attendance. Those who saw it were riveted with many asking her to bring it back. Burch takes a measured approach.
“I think a lot of people say, ‘When I want my entertainment, I want to escape,’” Burch said.
This year’s subscription schedule falls well within the expected B Street range with one outlier: Jerry Montoya’s original family drama “Nosotros La Gente (We the People).”
“If you want to change that expectation even slightly, how do you slowly pivot that ship of what people might expect to see on the main stage?” Burch said. “I think putting things like ‘Constitution’ and having a ‘Blood of the Lamb’ special engagement is sort of slowly doing that.”
In August, B Street added Elizabeth Baidoo as associate executive director to share the Sofia’s workload. “I think my biggest role right now is to help run interference for Lindsay, take care of things that can be taken care of on an administrative basis,” Baidoo said. She noted they had over 600 individual events at the Sofia last year, which pushed staff to their limits.
“I wanted somebody I could really trust and empower,” Burch said. “I just really felt like the organization was going to be stuck if there wasn’t additional leadership, specifically on the administrative side. She’s been an absolutely invaluable addition to the team.”
Baidoo will spearhead a capital campaign to help pay down the debt incurred in building the Sofia and to keep it afloat during the COVID shut down. There has been cost cutting put in place with MainStage production runs cut from six weeks to four and the lauded intern program put on hiatus.
‘Is there more?’
An added perk of B Street’s Outstanding Theatre Award was they were able to select James Ellison, artistic director at Celebration Arts, as the recipient of the 2024 Emerging Professional Award. Ellison took over artistic leadership of the Black theater company in 2023 and immediately became the beneficiary of a state specified grant for $714,000 for salaries and production at the theater. In response, Ellison has brought in an impressive lineup of first-rate directors for the six show season, including Anthony D’Juan, Melinda Wilson Ramey, and Imani Mitchell. The season’s opening show “Fences,” directed by D’Juan, sold out its entire run.
The windfall has also allowed Celebration Arts to staff up in a way it could not afford before, hiring new Executive Director Erinn Anova last July, and adding Mitchell as marketing and community development manager. Anova came home to Sacramento with an extraordinary record of achievement which will not only benefit the company but the region. Her many local credits include playing opposite the late Ed Claudio in a moving production of the Athol Fugard drama “Valley Song” and an independent Marina in a sleek modernist take on “Pericles” at Sacramento Theatre Company. She recorded and toured as a vocalist with progressive hip hoppers Blackalicious and was a founding member of the genre bending band Papa’s Culture.
With stops in Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta, Anova has continued performing but also wedged in film production and theater management. She worked with early iterations of Celebration Arts and now sees a unique opportunity for the company. “I want to see Celebration Arts —and it sounds so corny — just be all that it can be, realize its fullest potential.” She will concentrate on building the company’s infrastructure while Ellison guides its performances. “I want to support his vision,” Annova said. “I want to have the facility, the funds and the sponsorships, everything in place so that whatever his vision is can be carried out to the fullest.”
A new California Arts Council grant allows Celebration Arts to restart the popular Teen Magic theater program and will help bring over 400 teens to the theater to experience the season opener “Fences.” Ellison has also asked Anova to direct their season-ending holiday play, Langston Hughes’ “Black Nativity.”
The unprecedented resources give Celebration Arts an opportunity to ask and answer a fundamental question. “What do you want Celebration Arts to be known for artistically? Of course we’re a Black theater, but is there more?” Anova said. “I think it’s gonna take some time to figure that out.”
‘This incredible gamble’
“Theater just always exists — I don’t want to say on the margins, but it’s always this incredible gamble,” Michael Stevenson, artistic director of Capital Stage said, looking over a pile of scripts on his desk. “You just take it every friggin season. And then you figure out what to do as life happens and things happen.”
Cap Stage is celebrating its 20th season as a small professional company that does edgy darker tinged material in its intimate Midtown Sacramento theater. Its first production of 2025, the Pulitzer Prize winning “English,” was a surprise hit with sold-out houses and added performances. A five-person cast is the upper limit of actors Cap Stage can employ at one time. Stevenson noted that having a concurrent Broadway New York City production of the soulful drama about four Iranians learning English gave the Cap Stage show a boost.
The company’s next show “Everything Beautiful Happens At Night” directed by Connor Mickiewicz will be a world premiere with no such pedigree; so a much tougher sell. But Cap Stage’s audience expects fresh new work. Stevenson just brought back from a hiatus their Playwright’s Revolution new play reading series, which leads to full productions.
“We had a cap of 350 submissions and blew past that in just three days,” Stevenson said. “So there’s still a thirst and a hunger for this stuff.”
Scripts cushioned the other office chair. Photos of Stevenson’s wife, actress Jamie Jones, dot the wall. The company has lost revenue because of COVID-related performance cancellations so they recently started an understudy program “Which is something we can’t afford really, but we can’t afford not too,” Stevenson said. “I’m glad we’re doing it, but there’s another financial strain. It’s been really challenging this year that way.”
Cap Stage will lose its Managing Director Keith Riedell who is retiring this fall after 19 years with the company. Riedell has been an organizational anchor with his enthusiasm and invaluable institutional knowledge. A national search for a replacement is underway.
“The weirdest thing is I spend too much time in this office,” Stevenson said. “And then I get into the actual theater itself and there’s this lovely production and I just go, ‘Oh, this is what it’s for. This is way worth it.’ I still believe in it absolutely.”
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, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.
Marcus Crowder
