By Sands Hall

In the mid 1800s, when miners flocked to California to pan in cold rivers and swing heavy picks into the earth in a feverish search for gold, they sought entertainment after their hard work and often found it in saloons and taverns—no place for respectable folk or the ladies. So when Nevada City’s Bailey Hotel burned down in 1863, local citizens saw an opportunity. With the help of a fundraiser and a ball, they raised money to revamp the building as a theatre. Opening in 1865, the Nevada Theatre, on Broad Street in Nevada City, is now the oldest operating theatre west of the Mississippi. 

When I arrived here, in 1994, and was cast as Gertrude in The Foothill Theatre Company’s Hamlet, I reveled in imagining some of those who’d trodden those same boards: Mark Twain, Emma Nevada, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and, later, Motley Crue and Joanna Newson (who, long before her spectacular rise to fame, played Amy in my adaptation of Little Women in that same theatre). Many companies continue to use the Nevada Theatre, including Community Asian Theatre of the Sierra, Sierra Stages, Legacy Presents, and the newly formed Lyric Rose Theatre Company. 

While Foothill Theatre Company produced a dozen seasons in the Nevada Theatre, the company began its work in the large oddly-shaped granite building just down the street. Now known as the Miners Foundry, the stone structure on Spring Street began as a machine shop, supplying equipment to the mines. But as the rush for gold stalled, so did the need for smelting iron, and the building fell into disuse. When artists David Osborn and Charles Woods arrived from the Bay Area, they saw its potential. In the early 1970s they purchased the building and created the American Victorian Museum, which housed their extensive Victoriana collection (and from which our local independent radio station, KVMR, whose first offices were in the Foundry, takes its call letters). 

Osborn and Woods established a restaurant in what is still known as the Stone Hall, where a young Allan Haley played the piano during memorable brunches. When Haley returned from Yale and early success as a lawyer, he leased the “garage” of the building to found the Nevada City Winery. A few years later, in 1989, when, due to tax issues, the IRS locked the doors of the larger building, Haley, along with Wyn and Steve Spiller, paid off the mortgage and established the building as a community trust. Envisioning an arts center, they hired Marty Dimmock to put that idea into action. Four years later, seeing that the building was successfully operating as they’d intended, they burned the mortgage. The trust holds the building in perpetuity as a community arts space. 

By the late 1990s, the building needed serious renovation. I once participated in a fundraiser as rain from the leaky roof plonked into nearby buckets. A few years later, the roof repaired, I had the blessing of performing a one-woman show, Martha, about modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, in what was then known as the Great Hall, but is now, after significant updates to lights and sound, renamed, most appropriately, Osborn Woods Hall.

Over in Grass Valley, what is now the Grass Valley Museum and Cultural Center (but known by locals as St. Joseph’s Cultural Center) began life as a convent in the late 1800s. The lovely hall at “St Joe’s” hosts every kind of event—dramatic, literary, cultural, and musical—and its many rooms provide studios for artists of all stripes. When in 1995 Paul Emery launched his first production of Marat/Sade, Kate (Kika) Kane served as both director and producer; realizing she could not do both she tapped me to direct. Many of her good ideas were already in place, including using the various nooks and crannies on either side of the entrance as places where “lunatics” could scream at the arriving audience, an early dance into immersive theatre. 

A much less charming building stood for decades on Main Street in Grass Valley. It started as a Chevrolet Dealership, then sold Subarus, then motorcycles, and for a number of years housed the Metropolitan Beauty College (the co-editor of this magazine tells me it’s where she got her first mullet). Eventually bands began to perform on a small stage. Funky and rundown as it was, a local visionary, Dave Iorns, imagined it as an arts center. And little by little, with the essential support of Jon Blinder, Anita and Marci Wolfe, Bill Snell, Paul Emery, and others, the building was purchased and became The Center for the Arts. Emery, in his early days as artistic director there, asked me what I’d like to direct. The result was a production of Giradoux’s Madwoman of Challiot, one of many memorable community theatre productions in that space, including Diane Fetterly’s Grapes of Wrath, and—in one of its first efforts—Sierra Stages’ dazzling production of Into the Woods.

A further renovation to The Center of the Arts was finished in 2020, completing its transformation from a car dealership into a state-of-the art performance space, which hosts local artists as well some of the world’s most famous touring comedians and musicians.

No discussion of venues would be complete without the Stone House, another building that, in spite of many incarnations, has been used successfully as a performance venue. Recently, the local company House of Fates ingeniously employed its eclectic and historic architecture, and—inviting audiences to dress in period clothing—produced an original musical, set during the Gold Rush, called Gold Can’t Love You Back.

The latest iteration of our community’s ability to reuse existing buildings for creative purposes is Crown Point Venues. This project, led by InConcert Sierra, transforms the former corporate headquarters of a technology company into an astounding arts venue. Its 500-seat acoustic concert hall can host touring Broadway shows, musical artists and lecturers. With a 150-seat fully configurable black box theater and a large conference center, the complex will offer artists new opportunities to explore and present their work, high on a hill between the two cities.

Citizens in 1865 held a ball to finish construction of the Nevada Theatre. Osborn and Woods, Haley, Iorns, and, more recently, Ken and Julie Hardin of InConcert Sierra, envisioned arts centers in, respectively, a foundry, a car dealership, and a corporate building. None of this happens without artists, and above all, without those who support the arts, those who understand the vital connection between arts and culture, those who contribute time, energy, and resources. And that includes every person who’s ever responded to a plea to support such work—and all of these marvelous venues can always use support.