Published November 1, 2024

The San Miguel Playhouse must survive.
And you can help us with your donations

On October 10, 2024, “Cal Shakes” – the venerable California Shakespeare Theater in San Francisco – went permanently out of business after a half century of operation. The Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, lost the home it had had since 1965. Since the pandemic, we have bid farewell to the Atlanta Lyric Theatre, the Triad Stage in North Carolina, the Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, the San Diego REP (which helped launch a young Whoopi Goldberg), and dozens more regional companies. And that’s just in the United States.

Here at home, in the spring of 2023, the San Miguel Playhouse building was put up for sale, and the theater that had been a staple of San Miguel cultural life for a decade was facing extinction. A small but doggedly determined committee was formed with the mission of keeping the theater alive. The most crucial challenge was promptly met: finding a new building to house the theater, and securing it with a long-term lease. The interior of the original playhouse was disassembled and moved to the new building for storage, until the process of remodeling and reconstruction could begin.

That time is finally at hand.

Many people have asked us why the process of reviving the San Miguel Playhouse has been taking so long. The answer is simple: we need money to accomplish our goal, and before launching a capital campaign, we first had to resolve a number of legal and compliance issues, some of them unforeseen.

The San Miguel Playhouse is the name of our theater and theatrical company. It is also the name of our A.C. – that is, nonprofit asociación civil. In July 2022, Jim Newell, our sorely missed founder and the A.C.’s board president, died at the age of 81. This required us to draft a new Acta De Asamblea Ordinaria, with new bylaws, naming Marcela Brondo as the new president; then to register the acta with the Public Registry of Commerce (RPC) and the Tax Administration Service (SAT). We had a thorny matter of back taxes to sort out. It has been a long process.

The expenses of rebuilding our theater are not inconsiderable. Our website will soon feature a line-item budget, and all our expenditures will be reported, with full transparency. The foreseen expenses include construction materials for the theater space, restrooms and dressing room; labor; lighting and sound equipment; fees for permits; fees for the architect and acoustic engineer; etc. You will know exactly how your donations are being spent.

The contributions we have received to date, beginning in 2019, when the owner of the theater building first disclosed his intention to sell, have kept us alive to this point.

But there is still much to do. While we can reuse some fixtures of the original theater – seats, curtains, lumber, metal scaffolding, and so forth – there is much to purchase and construct. For starters, the new building is longer but narrower than the previous one, and will have a proscenium stage rather than a thrust stage. We have old-fashioned Fresnel lighting that was generously handed down to us by a theater company in Ajijic, but we need to upgrade our lighting system to LED, both for its many theatrical advantages and to reduce our electricity consumption. We also need to upgrade our sound system.

Of even greater importance, the building faces a main thoroughfare, and must be soundproofed to the greatest extent possible. Merely blocking outside noise is not sufficient. We want the theater to be acoustically pristine for unamplified live theater and for chamber music. To that end, in addition to working with a skilled architect, our team includes an experienced acoustic engineer who is also a concert pianist.

The new building is conveniently located in Col. La Luz, around the corner from the Luciérnaga shopping mall, across the street from the entrance to the Tuesday market, at Boulevard de la Conspiración 13-D. The building is owned by a cultured and artistically talented Mexican family. A bid for the building from Oxxo was turned down in favor of it being used by us as a theater. The landlord has approved our intention to do some outward remodeling. There is insufficient lobby space, so we plan to expand the front as a covered patio.

Below are two photos showing the unmarked white building as it now exists, and an artist rendering of how the theater might look when completed.