“Side Show” 2022-23

The first live theater production Michael Greenwald saw was a student preview of Harrisburg Community Theatre’s “Witness for the Prosecution” in 1957. He was 16, and he was “transported.”

“It transformed my life, and I’ve never stopped being involved,” he says now. “The role of the Harrisburg Community Theatre, as well as for other theaters that came later, was an opportunity for people who wanted to engage their creative side to do that.”

Whether people worked onstage, backstage or saw shows at reasonable prices without having to travel out of town, “it was opportunity all around.”

Theatre Harrisburg, once known as Harrisburg Community Theatre (HCT), launches its 100th season this month. Founded in 1926, the theater was part of a national movement for hyperlocal productions, made by the community, for the community.

The theater’s history is Harrisburg’s history, said Executive Director Lorien Reese Mahay.

She remembers reading a news story about a smallpox outbreak at HCT, “but they went out, and they burned all of the costumes, and the show went on,” she said. “Whatever was happening outside these walls was happening in the walls, and they were just doing theater through all of it. Through the wars. Through the health crises.”

Try Out

“Sex plays.” My goodness. Couldn’t Broadway and Hollywood produce anything wholesome?

The Little Theatre Movement began around World War I, when Americans, tired of racy theatrical fare and sad-sack touring companies, decided they could do better. It was also an era of college-educated women, blocked from careers, who channeled their considerable talents and organizational skills into civic betterment and creating impactful institutions.

The Women’s University Club of Harrisburg announced in 1925 that it would focus on “the drama,” bringing the Little Theatre Movement to a city that was thriving economically and equally thriving with wayward youth, speakeasies and corrupt political machines.

On Jan. 19, 1926, 18 performers, educators and civic leaders met to launch the Community Players. Their first play would be “The Dover Road,” staged the coming May.

“A try-out for the play will be held next Tuesday evening at 7:30 in the Conservatory of Music,” said a newspaper announcement. “Everyone is invited to ‘try.’”

With confidence built from the success of “The Dover Road,” the Community Players changed its name to Harrisburg Community Theatre. In 1927, perhaps spooked by movies grabbing entertainment dollars, HCT merged with an upstart rival, the Garret Players. By hiring Adele Eichler as director, the model was created of professional staff supporting volunteer onstage and backstage talent.

Greenwald believes that HCT, the Art Association of Harrisburg and Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra—all products of 1920s Harrisburg—emerged from the earlier City Beautiful movement’s effort to “make cities healthier, more livable.”

“Quality of life was associated with arts and culture in the minds of people who were instrumental in city life and who were the civic leaders,” he said.

After Greenwald’s first HCT encounter, he pitched in “wherever I thought I could be helpful” —usher, concessions salesman, follow spot operator (he and a good friend were “crack follow spot operators—we could find somebody in the dark”), actor and longtime board member.

For all the magic onstage, theater production can bring tempers to a boil. Greenwald will never forget when something went wrong in that “Witness for the Prosecution” dress rehearsal, and the director screamed from the back of the house, “What happened to the damn lights?”

Audiences have equated some shows with Broadway quality, but there have been stereotypical community theater moments. Old-timers used to recall Peter Pan “flying” in on a wire unspooling so slowly over the audience that it creaked.

Still, said Greenwald, although a reliance on volunteers can create up-and-down moments, “it was the professional consistency that established the reputation that Theatre Harrisburg has had these 100 years.”

In 1999, the theater split its performance venues into straight shows at the circa-1951 Hurlock Street facility—now the Jay and Nancy Krevsky Production Center—and musicals at the new Whitaker Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Harrisburg.

While Whitaker Center “remains an asset,” said Greenwald, consequences linger. Aging audiences stayed away from downtown. Many people interpreted the simultaneous name change from HCT to Theatre Harrisburg to mean that the company was folding into Whitaker Center operations.

As recently as the early 2000s, Theatre Harrisburg sometimes came close to shuttering, but Reese Mahay, taking her post at the end of the pandemic, saw resilience.

“Here’s this theater that is almost 100 years old, and it is coming back from COVID, and if it could stand that period of time—not to mention depressions, recessions, floods, etc.—and still manage to come back, I thought, ‘I want to be part of it,’” she said.

As arts administrations are eviscerated and nonprofits in every sector compete for dwindling grants and donor dollars, “there’s going to have to be a shift in the way that things are done,” she said. “The museums and libraries and theaters are all going to have to figure out how to do this together.”

Breaking Barriers

Thomas G. Hostetter didn’t get the job of director until his third try, but, once hired in early 1981, he stayed until retiring as artistic director in March 2008. He is “very happy” to return to direct the 100th season’s opening show, the gleefully manic, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.”

“I’m just happy to be at the forefront of the season after all the years I spent there,” he said. “I have an emotional connection to the place.”

Except for a couple of original shows, the theater he joined offered “conventional community-theater fare,” he said.

Hostetter strove “to crack that barrier and do some newer works,” sprinkling seasons with “the safe and the adventurous.” Scheduling musicals from Broadway’s hottest composer, Stephen Sondheim, attracted exceptional talent to auditions “because young people of the time wanted to do Sondheim.”

The Sondheim shows of the 1980s became the theater’s drawing cards—“Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Sweeney Todd.” For the massive undertaking of “Sweeney Todd,” Hostetter knew days before opening night “that the show was going to reach levels that we had seldom been able to attain, because the cast was ready, the crew was ready. Everybody was devoted to it, committed to it. Everybody was 100% in.”

Challenges materialized in the mid-1990s, as new theater companies opened in the area, entertainment options grew, season-subscription purchases declined nationally, and elaborate Broadway hits, such as “Phantom of the Opera,” were less doable on local stages.

But as Hostetter has kept his hand in directing shows, he sees positive trends. His “Gentleman’s Guide” cast mixes acting veterans and “very gifted” new talent.

“They’re young,” he said. “They’re really solid in the singing department as well as the acting department.”

Theater Hub

Harrisburg’s thriving theater scene today emerged from Theatre Harrisburg, many say.

Donald and Anne Alsedek were HCT veterans—she played Mrs. Lovett for the landmark “Sweeney Todd”—when Don felt called to do more substantial shows than the “just fluff” he was directing there.

Former HCT Director Peter Carnahan, then serving on the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, advised Alsedek to build a board and business plan, and HCT sent students to the theater school of Open Stage, the company that the Alsedeks founded with Marianne Fischer.

This year, Open Stage celebrates its 40th season.

“If HCT wouldn’t have been there, I might be selling pencils now,” Alsedek said. “The fact that they were there and accepting of lots of young talent over the years—I’m glad I was part of the 100 years.”

Open Stage was also instrumental in creation of Sankofa African American Theatre Company in 2017. Sankofa was founded as “a space for Black folks to tell our stories and handle them in the way that we want to and care for them and really understand them,” said Executive Artistic Director Sharia Benn.

For the 2023-24 season, Reese Mahay approached Benn about a Sankofa-Theatre Harrisburg collaboration of “Intimate Apparel,” Lynn Nottage’s exploration of African American and immigrant life in turn-of-the-20th-century America.

“The things that are important to Sankofa, Theatre Harrisburg respected,” Benn said.

Sankofa brought its audience base, its capacity to contribute half of the resources and organizational tasks needed, and—new to Theatre Harrisburg audiences—the post-performance talkbacks for critical dialogue that are core to Sankofa’s purpose.

Both companies needed each other’s resources to stage the intricate “Intimate Apparel,” Reese Mahay said. “It was a true collaboration in the sense that it was two companies acknowledging that we can’t do this unless we band together.”

While Theatre Harrisburg is trying to choose scripts with parts open to people of all backgrounds, it is also cultivating partnerships with diverse organizations, because “it’s short-sighted to think that, if you open up an audition, then everything changes,” she added. “It doesn’t change. It takes years of actually going to the community and saying, ‘we’ve changed, we’ve adapted, we’re listening, and we’re willing to do what we need to do in order to serve the community.’”

Season of Celebration

Immediate past Chair Rebecca Mease is proudest of helping to hire Reese Mahay as executive director.

“I really think she’s taking us to a new level with her dedication to seeing the community, serving the community,” Mease said. “She has grown our patron base so much by being able to connect with different communities that maybe were not even aware that we exist. While we are a community theater that puts on professional productions, community is the whole key. That’s who we are.”

The 100th season features a mix of shows consequential to the theater’s history, including the oft-performed “Guys and Dolls,” and some new to the repertoire, such as “The Last Five Years,” coming by popular demand.

A staged reading on Oct. 4 of “The Dover Road” honors the first HCT production, at McCormick Riverfront Library, where the founders first met. On May 30 and 31, Theatre Harrisburg and Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra will present a concert version of “Follies,” recognizing two legacy institutions from the 1920s and the theater’s achievement in staging two past productions of Sondheim’s complex saga.

Theatre Harrisburg will hold a 100th anniversary gala at The Willows at Ashcombe Mansion on May 31. A Gatsby-themed New Year’s Eve gala will kick off 2026 at the opulent King Mansion, opened in 1926.

“It’s a great way of bringing us into not only our hundredth season but our hundredth year in grand style,” she said.

Mease, a veteran performer, now in her 28th production with “Gentleman’s Guide,” sees a decline in corporate sponsorships nudging the theater toward more service-oriented projects that deliver a community good, such as the Penguin Project, which stages shows performed by children with disabilities.

While the Penguin Project provides an avenue for children to perform, it also provides a conduit for those who “want to be involved,” she said. “They want to help such a program.”

From the vision of a few people in the 1920s, Theatre Harrisburg remains standing in the 2020s, said Greenwald.

“The soul of our community is intrinsic in those things which bring us joy and which move us, and that’s theater, and that’s art, and that’s music,” he said.

Theatre Harrisburg’s 100th season concludes with “Disney’s Dare to Dream JR,” the summer 2026 Penguin Project show. Reese Mahay sees correlations.

“It felt very fun and appropriate when you think that the entire thing began with a bunch of people dreaming about what it might look like to have a theater in Harrisburg,” she said. “It began with a dream, and now here we are, looking into the future. Always looking into the future.”

For more information on Theatre Harrisburg, including their 100th anniversary season and events, visit www.theatreharrisburg.com.

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