Help Us Build Our New Theater
December 1, 2025 @ 12:00 am - December 31, 2025 @ 11:59 pm
The San Miguel Playhouse must survive. And you can help us with your donations.
Everywhere you look, theaters are closing.
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. This 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.
The San Miguel Playhouse opened its doors at its original location in Col. Independencia on October 15, 2014. A full production history can be found on this website. You are also invited to visit our photo gallery, video gallery or YouTube channel for samples of our past productions.
Jim Newell, the founder, always intended his playhouse to be a community theater – that is, for the entire San Miguel community, Mexican and expat alike – and that is still the goal. The new venue will be available for use not only by San Miguel Playhouse, A.C., but by any number of reputable event providers in San Miguel and elsewhere, for the presentation of live theater, live music, film, dance, conferences, and so on.
We have a history of putting on events by and for children – plays, Christmas pageants, talent shows, and two seasons of the Dreambox Theatre. One of our most joyful days of operation was March 26, 2022, when 350 Mexican students from 10 rural communities came to the San Miguel Playhouse to attend three back-to-back performances of Jomi Delgado’s opera for children, Las luciérnagas no vuelan (Lightning Bugs Can’t Fly). The private event was sponsored by Libros para Todos. For many of the children, it was an introduction to opera – not to mention classical music and live theater. The response was overwhelming.
One year later, winners of the Metropolitan Opera competition for young singers performed a chamber opera at the playhouse, and found it ideal for chamber music. Our city is not only sadly lacking in available venues in general, but there is no space that functions properly as a chamber music recital hall. We intend our new theater to fill that need.
Back when it was founded, the theater’s original mission was to present English-language theatrical productions. A major shift occurred in 2017 when the San Miguel Playhouse company joined forces with La Troupe México, the only purely bilingual theater company in Mexico. A supertitle system, common to opera houses but rare in legitimate theaters, was installed, and the theater made its productions intelligible to Spanish and English speakers alike. The San Miguel Playhouse’s mission ever since has been a social experiment – to use the power of live theater to unite people of different cultural backgrounds.
There have been many theatrical highlights, from full productions such as Las Madres, a play about the victims of the Argentinean dictatorship, to delightful one-person shows by Erando Gonzalez, Pete Searles and Janet Prince, among others. There have been musicals, radio plays, staged readings and even a couple of world premieres, including the smash hit musical Bikers in Camelot. The theater has provided a showcase for talented local playwrights.
Live music has always been a key component of the San Miguel Playhouse. It was at our theater that Lady Zen became a breakout vocal star of the city. (Click here to watch Lady Zen sing “On Revival Day”). We have featured many other musical stars, including Grammy-winning Jesse Harris, Paul Voudouris and Mark Hartman, to name just a few.
How can you help us restore the San Miguel Playhouse as an important cultural center for our community? Right now, the help we need most is financial, and we ask you to donate whatever you can. There may be those of you with useful business, media or fundraising skills, or with connections to suppliers of equipment or materiel we need. If so, we would love to hear from you. Please write us at info@sanmiguelplayhouse.com