CHARLESTON, W.Va. –On Thursday, the Kanawha County Commission approved a funding request of $80,000 from the Children’s Theater of Charleston.
The funding will go towards the downpayment on a new building for the theater, who has never owned one for itself.
“We have been around Charleston for 93 seasons and we have never owned our own building,” said Leigh Anne Rylander, general manager and executive director of the Children’s Theater of Charleston. “We have continually moved from one place, kind of like a nomad, to another place, to another place. Just in the last eight years, we’ve been in three different locations. ”
Rylander says the new space, which will be in Kanawha City, has all the features they need, including all safety measures for children to be able to get out of the building in a safe matter if possible. The current location for the theater, on Charleston’s Bigley Avenue, is no longer suitable.
“Where we’re at at Bigley Avenue, it’s not very well lit, so we have to be very careful. We make every parent come in every time that their child comes to the theater because we don’t want them out there in the dark,” Rylander said.
In addition, the theater is growing, and the current location is split between them and another tennant. Rylander says they need more space.
“We’ve been growing over our years, which is wonderful,” Rylander said. “We’ve instituted a working team group that is very, very involved, we’ve been at competitions for the last two years. We also just recently put in another program for some children who may not make our show, but still want to continue their theater journey.”
For each show the theater puts on, around 65 kids are cast. Despite all the seasonal operations and productions, the theater wants these opportunities to be a financial burden.
“As always, everything we do is at no cost to any of the people that participate and we want to keep it that way, which is part of the reason why we’re trying to find funds to be able to find a place that we can call home,” Rylander said.
While the new building will have all the bells and whistles that this group has been longing for for decades , Rylander says it’s the sense of “home” that will be the best addition.
“We want them to be able to come back in 20 years when they are out of college and employed somewhere, hopefully here, and come back to the same space and say, ‘Hey, this is where I went to rehearsal,’ or ‘This is where I made these memories.’ A lot of them don’t have that opportunity to do that,” Rylander said.