SLO theater’s dream to build new downtown home just got a big boost — but it needs your help
The San Luis Obispo Repertory Theatre has provided live theatrical entertainment to thousands of audiences from its home in San Luis Obispo for nearly 80 years.
Now, the nonprofit is poised to start its next act in a massive new downtown theater complex — and it’s getting the financial support to help it do so.
The Harold J. Miossi Charitable Trust — which donated $ 1 million to the theater group’s $21.5 million fundraising goal for its new home in 2023 — has committed up to $500,000 to the group in the form of a challenge grant, according to a SLO Rep news release.
The grant promises up to $500,000 in matching funds for donations made to SLO Rep between Thursday and June 30, according to the release.
The news was expected to be announced during the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce’s monthly coffee klatch, Good Morning SLO, on Thursday.
“Everything I do is in Harold’s memory,” Howard Carroll, Miossi’s longtime friend and trustee of the charity told The Tribune. “It’s his gift, and all I’m trying to do is administer it. I’m trying to allocate the funds in a manner he would if he had been given the opportunity to do it.
“Harold loved San Luis Obispo. He was born here, lived here and practiced his love by making it better for every generation. This theater, with its live entertainment, brings balance to the community we love.”
If fully matched, the grant would provide about 37% of how much more SLO Rep needs to raise by the end of 2025 to meet the terms of its 99-year lease contract with the city of San Luis Obispo for the new space on the corner of Monterey and Nipomo streets.
The 12,000-square-foot theater is part of the city’s plans to transform that stretch of downtown San Luis Obispo into a Cultural Arts District that would include Mission Plaza and the city’s art, history and children’s museums.
The plan also includes the city’s new $52 million parking structure that is currently under construction.
After its new theater is up and running, SLO Rep officials expect to attract 50,000 patrons annually into downtown, generating as much as $4 million yearly in new economic activity, not including ticket sales.
If successful in its fundraising, SLO Rep hopes to start construction as soon as next year.
“Live theater is intrinsically valuable, probably the oldest tradition we have — people acting out stories as a way of communicating basic emotions,” City Council member Jan Marx told The Tribune on Wednesday. “The city has wanted to create a Cultural Arts District. Now, with the SLO Rep Theatre, it will be complete, a real asset to the city.”
Local theater group has outgrown current downtown SLO home
Besides helping to bolster San Luis Obispo’s vision for a bustling arts district, SLO Rep has a somewhat simpler reason for building a new home.
Its current building on 880 Morro St. is just way too small.
“SLO Rep has evolved into an organization of professional actors,” Marx said. “They raised the bar, and their present facility is really too small for their operation.”
The 100-seat venue wasn’t designed originally to be a theater. It was previously the city’s library.
Now the nonprofit is “bursting at the seams,” and as the group notes wryly in materials for the capital-project campaign, “the line for the restroom is still way too long.”
Despite the limited seating, nearly 20,000 patrons buy tickets a year to SLO Rep’s performances, according to Kevin Harris, managing artistic director since 2008.
During the past decade, SLO Rep has consistently operated in the black, he said, even during COVID years.
Even so, the group has had to make a few hard transitions over the years before arriving at its current form.
Nonprofit started as roving SLO Little Theatre
It was 1947 when an amorphous group decided the town that’s the hub of San Luis Obispo County needed live plays, giving birth to what would ultimately become one of the longest-running nonprofit theaters in the country.
That original group became the San Luis Obispo Little Theatre, a slightly itinerant corps that put on shows wherever, whenever they could after raising the necessary funding for each show and finding a spot in which to perform it.
They performed at various Elks Lodges, the old San Luis Obispo High School auditorium and the Elmo Theater on Monterey Street. At one point, the Little Theatre group even leased an empty band room on the San Luis Obispo Junior High School campus on Lizzie Street.
Without a permanent home, the group of dedicated thespians kept on producing plays, always seeking an anchor location from which it could entertain the public and inspire future actors and crew members.
SLO Rep performers have been walking the boards of its current home since 1991.
Besides its ever-changing scenery over those early years, the Little Theatre has also made other drastic changes throughout its nearly eight decades in operation.
The Little Theatre became an official nonprofit in 1952, which meant it could accept donations as the group presented one or two plays a year.
“It’s been a remarkably enduring enterprise since then, producing about 14,000 plays in 27 venues from Cambria to Nipomo,” SLO Rep board member Chip Visci told The Tribune.
Why did group rebrand as SLO Rep?
Perhaps SLO Rep’s biggest change, however, came about in some ways at the behest of the city.
In the early 1990s, SLO leaders told then-City Manager John Dunn to “figure out the future of downtown,” Visci said.
Five visionary volunteers — Pierre Rademaker, Rod Levine, Ken Schwartz, Chuck Crotzer and Andrew Merriam — met weekly for two years and presented their plan for the western side of downtown.
The city adopted the plan in 1993.
Its cornerstone, an anchor theater, would be on property leased to SLO Rep for a buck a year for at least 99 years.
In turn, the nonprofit would raise the money to build the theater, the odd shape of which is designed to protect some legacy oak trees.
The new theater will have a 215-seat main stage for musicals, comedies and dramas, plus a 100-seat black box theater for new works, staged readings, late-night cabaret entertainment and performances by SLO Rep’s Academy of Creative Theater (ACT) program.
To raise the funds, estimated then at about $8 million, more people had to learn about and value what the nonprofit was doing and what the new theater could do for downtown.
It’s been challenging.
“They don’t know us as SLO Rep even yet,” Harris said, noting that many people “still think of us as SLO Little Theatre.”
The group’s intense self-improvement journey began at the end of 2012 with an annual budget of not quite $400,000.
In 2016, SLO Rep went fully professional, meaning every actor and crew member would be paid a decent wage, Harris said, rather than just the key players.
“That meant everybody had to show up for every rehearsal,” he said with a laugh. Before, many of the volunteers had other jobs that prevented full attendance.
The change also opened the door for the nonprofit to present productions other than plays and musicals.
In 2017, the group’s 71st season, the Little Theatre officially rebranded as San Luis Obispo Repertory Theatre to reflect its transition to a more professional, regional destination theater.
“We intend to become one of the premier destination regional theaters in the nation, and without question, one of the largest cultural economic drivers of the region,” Harris said.
With an annual budget of $1.1 million, the organization today produces about 200 performances a year.
This year, it will also offer 42 separate classes, camps or productions through its ACT program to help make the theatrical arts available to nearly 800 students.
“With five different classrooms at Empleo, we’re offering twice as many classes as had been available before,” Education Director Kerry DiMaggio said. “All our classes are open to anybody who wants to register.”
Tuition can range from $85 for classes to $650 or more for production classes several months long.
“We’re most proud of our really robust scholarship program,” she said. “We’ve never turned a student away for lack of tuition.”
Donations come in for new downtown SLO theater, operations
Creatives don’t usually fundraise, but SLO Rep officials and enthusiasts have and continue to do so.
That was especially important given that after several waves of inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic and delays in building the parking garage that’s crucial to the theater design, SLO Rep’s projected costs for the new theater ballooned to a daunting $21.5 million.
That was after the group even scaled back some of its initial plans, moving its operations and educational programs to a space at 3533 Empleo St. instead.
Meanwhile, grants and donations from the city and Miossi trust, monetary gifts large and small — including from mega donors like Catherine and Richard Luckett and Bette Kulp, whose $500,000 challenge grant brought in $800,000, Harris said — have brought the capital campaign to build the new theater to within $2.7 million of its goal.
Once completed, SLO Rep’s new home will be the largest cultural project in SLO County since Cal Poly’s Performing Arts Center was finished in 1996, Harris said.
Now, organizers want to expand SLO Rep’s supporter base beyond current donors who are already dedicated theater attendees, people anxious to draw more visitors into downtown, and those who want to elevate the city’s cultural vitality.
For about a year, the theater group has been holding informational sessions about its plans.
The response to a recent briefing at SLO Rep’s Empleo Street headquarters was inspiringly enthusiastic, Harris said.
“We were overwhelmed with gratitude,” he said.
Attendees donated or pledged about $60,000 during and following the event, including one young couple who promised a hard pledge of $30,000. It was reportedly the largest donation they’d ever made to any cause.
Some people, even some previous supporters, told organizers at the briefing they’d “never before heard the whole story, the whole vision in such a compelling manner,” Visci said.
“The vision for a regional destination theater is bold, and it’s doable because the county is already a tourism destination,” he said.
Among those at the most recent briefing were Maggie and Dave Cox, recently retired from the Barnett Cox & Associates firm they’d founded in 1989.
The Coxes “have known and loved SLO Rep since its early days as Little Theater,” Maggie Cox said.
“We’ve been attending for almost 45 years,” she told The Tribune on Sunday. “We love this organization. SLO Rep has been down a long hard road, but never lost sight of its goal.”
Cox described the plan for the new theater as “stunning,” saying it “truly reflects the community.”
”It will be fabulous for local people and visitors, and will bring new energy and business into downtown,” she said. “It’s about much more than stage performances.”
For more information on SLO Rep, how to donate
SLO Rep’s current production, “Million Dollar Quartet,” is already sold out.
It will be followed this year by staged readings of “17 Raccoons,” then productions of “The Cake” from March 28 through April 13, “I Hate Hamlet” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”
For tickets, order online, email anytime or call 805-786-2440, from 3 to 6 p.m., Wednesday through Friday.
To donate to the capital campaign, go to the website’s fundraising page, or contact Patty Thayer, development and capital campaign director, by phone at 805-592-3190 or email.
The deadline to donate to have your funds matched is June 30.
