These three Columbia theaters are at crossroads. Can the live venues keep going?

Three of Columbia’s foundational live theater companies find themselves at crossroads.

Trustus Theatre, founded in 1985, is the city’s lone professional theater company for adults. It heads into the new year staring down the need for $1.5 million to upgrade its downtown home in the Vista neighborhood. Otherwise, it will need to look into moving elsewhere, the company’s Executive Artistic Director Jessica Fichter told The State.

Columbia Children’s Theatre, which has been entertaining families and teaching children about theater since 2005, moved to West Columbia last year. Pushed out of its home in Forest Acres when plans to demolish and replace the nearly deserted Richland Mall moved forward, its new home isn’t equipped to hold shows and can’t store all of its sets and costumes. The costs incurred by the move and the need to host all of its productions at various outside venues left the company asking the community to help it raise $50,000 in November, saying that without the money its future was uncertain.

Town Theatre, the city’s oldest community theater company with more than a century of history behind it, is entrenched and secure in its downtown building, which turns 100 this week. But the anniversary comes as the theater is tearing up seats, beginning the third and final phase of renovations that were paused by COVID.

All three nonprofit institutions are dealing with their own challenges, but they’re united by their importance to Columbia’s theater scene and the need to adapt to a world that is increasingly full of distractions that discourage people from going out to see a show. The State caught up with leaders from each company to talk about the hurdles they face and how they hope to overcome.

Will Trustus have to move?

Trustus Theatre is marked by its ambition, creating bold experiences for its audiences as well as its company members. It’s Columbia’s only professional theater company, meaning it pays the people mounting its productions, unlike community theaters.

In its current 40th anniversary season, the theater keeps on swinging, having smartly run the probing 2017 play “What the Constitution Means to Me” around the November election and gearing up to present the Elton John/Tim Rice musical “Aida” in June and July. And it continues its Playwrights’ Festival, picking a winner from various submissions each summer to mount a full main-stage production at the theater.

“We produce the things that you are not going to see on tour at the Koger center, for the most part,” said Fichter, the theater’s artistic executive director. “We are producing the things that are cutting-edge, that you might see off Broadway, that are a little bit more avant-garde. So, we’re filling a niche in the artistic world of South Carolina and Columbia.”

But maintaining a home that can support these ambitions presents challenges. Which is why Trustus will need to mount a $1.5 million capital campaign in the near future or look for a new home, Fichter said. According to county property records, the building was completed in 1936 and has a market value of about $752,000.

“This would allow us to upgrade our lighting grid system, as well as deal with some structural issues, add some seats, put sprinklers in, deal with our electrical and our plumbing,” she said. “It’s not fancy. It’s more to get the building to a place where it is usable year-over-year.”

The need for donations doesn’t end with the need to improve the space. Trustus operates on a tight budget, with only about 50% of income coming from ticket sales, and grants and contributions going a long way to bridge the gap. Fichter notes that this 50% mark is better than most small theaters, but it still means that Trustus relies heavily on individuals and institutions giving it money. The theater receives city funding, having been allocated $292,000 in Columbia hospitality tax funds since 2018, according to city documents.According to the nonprofit finance tracker Cause IQ, Trustus’ 2023 expenses exceeded its revenues by about $61,000.

These precarious finances could make Trustus move from a building it owns should it be forced to leave.

Getting back to business after COVID has made balancing the finances more difficult. Coming out of the pandemic, the theater didn’t see sold-out houses again until it mounted a production of “The Rocky Horror Show” in September and October of 2022, Fichter offered. And luring people who have gotten used to getting their entertainment through other means back for some of the theater’s more adventurous programming has proven difficult.

“We did ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ and ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Trailer Park Christmas,’ all of the musicals bring people out,” she said. “What we’re still working on is some of our more cutting-edge things, getting folks back into the audiences In the numbers that we would like to see.”

Can Columbia Children’s Theatre keep going?

As its name indicates, Columbia Children’s Theatre looks to foster interest in the stage among the next generation.

“We’re South Carolina’s only theater that just does both main-stage performances for families and young people and youth theater performances,” said William Mitchell, the company’s director of marketing and development, adding that the value of its camps and classes was highlighted when they went away during COVID.

“The critical work that we do to help kids build skills, build confidence, when we’re not there, I think they really suffer for it.”

The company has been faced with a difficult and complicated path to keeping that mission going since exiting its longtime home at Richland Mall last year. While the move had been anticipated for some time due to plans to tear down and replace the shopping center, the final notice came suddenly.

“We knew the mall had been sold but didn’t know the timeline for our departure,” Mitchell said. “Ultimately, we were given 30 days’ notice to leave the mall.”

That left the Children’s Theatre scrambling. Talks had been ongoing with West Columbia’s Brookland-Lakeview Empowerment Center about the company taking up residence there, and while that’s where it landed, there hadn’t been time to prepare the space. As of now, the theater has nowhere to perform at the center, meaning it must pay to rent different venues. And it must pay to store many of its thousands of sets and costumes.

These costs have put the theater behind on its finances, which is why, Mitchell said, it must raise $50,000 by the end of the year to offset a significant portion of its debts. Otherwise, it may need to curtail some of its offerings. According to Cause IQ, the company’s total expenses for 2023 exceeded total revenues by nearly $30,000.

“We’d be having a very serious conversation about the future of the theater,” Mitchell said of what happens if they don’t reach the fundraising goal. “At this stage, all we can say is that it would be uncertain. We’re committed to fulfilling all of our programming through the end of this season. All the shows, the classes, the camps, everything that we’ve already outlined, we would complete. But I think we would be having a serious conversation about the future of the theater, if we’re not successful by January.”

As of Tuesday, the theater said it was 47% of the way to its goal.

How will Town Theatre build on 100 years?

For the second time in five years, Town Theatre is celebrating hitting a century mark. The company, Columbia’s oldest community theater, was founded in 1919, but its building was completed in 1924.

Like all theaters, it incurred pauses and disruptions due to COVID, but for Town, this also meant pausing an ongoing renovation effort. The final phase of that overhaul is now kicking back into gear, as photos recently posted online showing its seats being ripped up make quite clear. The work will see the theater redoing its auditorium and lobby, which Scruggs said is welcome, as it’s “a very old [that] facility has a lot of wear and tear, with a lot of people in and out of the doors.”

Scruggs declined to say how much the upgrades are costing. Leading into its 100th season in 2018, the theater announced a “one-time capital campaign” seeking $1 million to renovate the aging facility. Scruggs also mentioned that they’ve received some support from the city. Since 2018, the theater has been allotted nearly $165,000 in Columbia hospitality tax funds, according to city documents.

According to Cause IQ, Town’s 2022 revenues, the most recent available, exceeded its expenses by about $679,000.

Being secure in its space has been key as the theater weathered the pandemic and the slow return of audiences that followed.

“We have multiple areas in our theater where we can have rehearsals and classes,” she said. “We can rehearse multiple shows at the same time, and then, of course, have our shows on our stage. So we’re really, really fortunate. The back of our theater is our scene shop, where we actually build our sets here. And that’s another fortunate thing. I’ve been a part of different theaters where they had to build off-site and travel it to the theater.”

But ensuring that the audiences it needs to sustain itself will show up means putting some constraints on the kinds of productions it can mount.

“We are a pretty conservative theater in terms of what we do put on our stage,” Scruggs said. “So a lot of the newer things, if there’s a lot of language, or there’s nudity or stuff like that, that’s not going to be something that our patrons would come to see. So it’s a balance in that because we’re so old, we’ve done a whole lot. So we’re always trying to find new things that still fall in line with what our members would expect us to do, so that we have a little bit of the new, but then they also want the classic thing.”

All local theaters have limitations in what they can present, which is the main reason Scruggs is happy Columbia has a selection, including the various productions put on by the University of South Carolina and another longstanding community company in Workshop Theatre.

“I think that’s the only reason that it works,” she said, “because everybody has their own little specialty.”

This story was originally published December 19, 2024 at 5:00 AM.

Jordan Lawrence

The State

Jordan Lawrence serves as metro editor for The State. He has worked for newspapers in the Columbia area for more than a decade, having previously served as the lead editor for Free Times and the Lexington County Chronicle. He has won several South Carolina Press Association Awards, including recognition for breaking news reporting, business reporting and arts and entertainment writing. Support my work with a digital subscription