Bowery Theatre Finds a Home to Call Its Very Own

The Bowery Theatre, San Diego’s smallest company and the most recent to turn professional, has completed an agreement with the Kingston Hotel to manage the Kingston Playhouse for the next three years.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Bowery will produce its shows in the 76-seat Kingston, at 1055 1st Ave., and provide time for presentations by other theater groups, with an emphasis on multicultural programming. “Teibele and Her Demon,” slated for Feb. 1-March 17, and “Jesse and the Bandit Queen” by David Freeman, scheduled in April, will conclude the Bowery’s 1990-91 season. Directors Jorge Huerta and William Virchis will then step in to produce a Latino theater project.

The Bowery will not move to its previously announced space in the basement of the Onyx Building at 860 5th Ave.

The Bowery, which had been evicted from its original home at 480 Elm St. last year to make way for renovation, reopened at the Kingston Playhouse in June with a successful run of John Patrick Shanley’s “Italian-American Reconciliation,” followed by the still more successful “What the Butler Saw” by Joe Orton, the longest-running show in the Bowery’s history. The Bowery signed a Small Professional Theatre contract with Actor’s Equity Assn. in anticipation of producing “What the Butler Saw,” making it San Diego’s seventh professional theater company and the smallest one in the country.

The Bowery’s management team of artistic director Ralph Elias, managing director Mickey Mullany and development director Allison Brennan built the Kingston Playhouse stage in a space loaned to them, rent-free, by the Kingston Hotel in what at first was to be a temporary arrangement.

“When we first built the space, our ambition was to build the sweetest little theater so they wouldn’t want to let us go,” said Mullany. “And that’s what happened.”

It’s a great holiday gift for a theater that has been living perilously close to the financial edge for the last few years.

The theater, founded in 1982 by Kim McCallum, began to founder in 1985 after McCallum moved to New Mexico. The Bowery’s fortunes fluctuated over the next three years as a series of temporary artistic associates filled in. Then Elias was hired to direct John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” in 1988. The show was the biggest hit the ailing Bowery had in years. During the course of the run, Elias was asked by the board to take on the job of artistic director permanently.

After the Bowery’s eviction later that year, the theater remained dark for several months until Lee Julien, one of the general partners of the Kingston Hotel, offered the Bowery the space that is now the Kingston Playhouse, to help it get on its feet until it could move into the Onyx Building.

But, despite intense fund-raising efforts, the theater failed to meet its December goals towards the $200,000 that would be needed to finance construction of the theater. Julien, who joined the Bowery’s board of directors this year, said he then offered the Bowery the Kingston Playhouse space “because they needed it” and “because it’s been working well for the hotel.”

“I love the Bowery. And we’ve gotten such wonderful feedback from people who enjoyed their evening there and then came back to dine,” said Julien. “We’ve nearly tripled our food and beverage business. In part that’s because of our chef and in part because of the Bowery. I think we sell more rooms because of the Bowery. We just didn’t want to lose a good thing.

“It’s unfortunate that we didn’t raise the money for the Onyx. But that may turn out to be a blessing. Now they can direct their full attention to their art and they don’t have to worry about rent or where they are going to be.”

No one appreciates that more than the Bowery management, which finds the search for a permanent place over at last--at least for the next three years.

“We were really in crisis, and now that crisis has definitely passed,” said Mullany. “We are out of the transition phase we have been in for the last year and a half. We are home. Now that the dust has settled, we can look ahead and finally see what we want to do.”