Forest Theater - Renovations

Renovations

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, facility maintenance and play production remained constant. In 1988, the City spent $200,000 for much-needed renovations, which included replacing the seating, rebuilding the stage, and addressing necessary safety issues. CET/Staff Players continued its twofold mission, and in the process, educated thousands of area youth while staging hundreds of productions featuring children and adults from the local region. With the Guild’s production of Canterbury Tales, one of the first musicals staged at the Forest Theater since the 1950s, annual large-scale musicals began to be produced on the outdoor stage, with great success.

Pacific Repertory Theatre’s annual family musicals have included “high-flying” technology for productions of Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. In 1990, PacRep reinstated the Carmel Shake-speare Festival (the hyphen denoting exploration of the Shakespeare authorship question), hearkening to the early days at the theater, and when Herbert Heron inaugurated the original Carmel Shakespeare Festival in 1940. The Films in the Forest, a program showing classic and newer films during the summer months, became a popular program for the Forest Theater Guild in 1994. Among the many successful productions at the Forest Theater over the years, 1990’s Disney’s Beauty and the Beast proved to be a benchmark for attendance records. Directed by Walt DeFaria and produced by PacRep, the musical sold over 10,000 tickets.