When Russell Lewis and Howard Young brought Music Circus to Sacramento in 1951, they did not imagine that they were founding an institution. The maker of their striped canvas tent warned them that it probably had only about five years of life in it. They thought that was a perfectly reasonable time span.

Seventy-five years later, the tent is gone, but the company it housed remains. 

I set out to celebrate that improbable longevity when I began writing ”Broadway Sacramento: 75 Years of Theater Magic.” I had known Music Circus since moving to Sacramento in 1984 and later served for nearly a decade on the organization’s board, including two years as chair. I expected to preserve its productions, artists, traditions and people. What I did not expect was how much the research would change my understanding of why Broadway Sacramento survived when so many comparable theaters disappeared. 

For more than two years, I worked through company archives and decades of newspaper coverage and interviewed the artists, administrators and civic leaders who had made the history themselves. Gradually, another story emerged alongside the theatrical one: a story of entrepreneurship and financial discipline, of a company repeatedly changing its business model as audiences and economics changed and of civic leaders stepping forward when its future depended on more than philanthropy and ticket sales alone. 

What emerged was a case study in how a nonprofit cultural organization survives for three-quarters of a century — and what happens when a city decides, generation after generation, that an institution is worth sustaining.

A five-year experiment

Lewis and Young were experienced theatrical producers who had mounted eight Broadway productions and 17 national tours after World War II. But Broadway was an unforgiving business. By 1950, a recent failure had bruised their finances and confidence, and they began looking for a more durable model.

They found one in Lambertville, New Jersey, where producer John Terrell was staging summer musicals in the round beneath a tent. Arena staging required less scenery than a proscenium production; a tent cost far less than a permanent theater; and at summer’s end everything could be packed away. Lewis and Young began looking for a Western location.

Then Eleanor McClatchy heard about their plans.

The publisher of The Sacramento Bee was also an ardent theater lover who had studied playwriting at Columbia University and helped create the Sacramento Civic Theater (later Sacramento Theatre Company). In late 1950, she met Lewis and Young at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel and asked what it would take to bring Music Circus to Sacramento.

Young’s answer: money.

McClatchy and her associates assembled an offer other cities could not match: a site adjacent to the Civic Theater, free Bee advertising and a startup loan and financial support for five years. Lewis and Young agreed to produce ten musicals each summer, a new show every week. 

The first green-and-yellow-striped tent rose at 15th and H streets in 1951. With just 13 rows around the stage, audiences sat unusually close to the performers. Singers and actors came from New York and Los Angeles because Lewis and Young could attract them. Sacramento wholeheartedly embraced theater-in-the-round and the new summertime experience.

But box-office success did not make the economics easy. By the end of the first two seasons, expenses outpaced income. Raising ticket prices seemed the obvious answer. Young found another.

In 1953, Music Circus became the nonprofit Sacramento Light Opera Association. Nonprofit status brought formal governance and accounting, but it also qualified the company for exemption from the 20 percent federal admission tax, allowing ticket prices to remain static while the company retained 20 percent more revenue. It also carried an obligation to operate for the “public benefit.” 

Balancing artistry and the bottom line

Lewis and Young — and every leader who followed — understood that artistic ambition and financial discipline were not opposing values. The discipline was what made the ambition possible.

Their original producing model was industrial in its intensity: one show played at night while the next rehearsed by day. Yet they surrounded themselves with first-rate professionals and refused to treat summer theater as second-rate theater.

They were especially cautious about fixed costs. For decades, Music Circus shared the H Street property with Sacramento Civic Theater, using it during the summer rather than carrying a large year-round facility. Elsewhere, successful summer theaters built permanent houses only to discover that neither programming nor audience demand could support them 50 weeks a year. Most eventually disappeared. Sacramento avoided that trap.

The artistic model evolved as well. By the 1980s and 1990s, producing director Leland Ball was moving the company away from heavy reliance on celebrity casting and toward excellence across the entire production — acting, choreography, design and music.

At the same time, Ball diversified the business. In 1989, the organization launched what became the Broadway Series, presenting national tours at the city-owned Community Center Theater while continuing to produce Music Circus in the round at the H Street site. Over time, touring became the larger economic engine, typically generating more than 60 percent of annual revenue and providing a financial cushion for the producing side of the company. Artistic ambition and fiscal restraint were not competing priorities; they were parts of the same strategy.

From canvas to a permanent home

By the late 1990s, the old tent had become increasingly difficult to defend as the home of a major professional theater. The chairs sagged, the summer heat was punishing and technical possibilities were limited.

What began as an effort to improve the seating became something larger. City and county leaders initially committed $66,000 each annually for five years. Board members and management began asking whether those funds could help support a permanent pavilion that preserved the intimacy of theater in the round while adding modern comfort and technology.

Financing it required creativity. A conventional bank loan was not realistic because the nonprofit lacked sufficient assets to secure one. The eventual model combined projected ticket and concession revenue, naming rights, facility fees, municipal financing and philanthropic commitments. The numbers worked only if the city and county extended their annual contributions from five years to 25. They did.

The pavilion opened in 2003. Its larger lighting grid, flying capability and automated stage systems changed what artists could create and demanded a more sophisticated staff to support them. Broadway performers increasingly sought out Sacramento; by the mid-2000s, the company spent many weeks a year in New York auditioning more than 2,000 actors for about 125 Music Circus roles. Today, over 30,000 actors submit resumes to gain an opportunity to audition in New York, Los Angeles and Sacramento. 

A public-private investment in infrastructure had become an investment in artistic capacity. 

Knowing when to get smaller 

Growth, however, was never treated as an end in itself.

During the Great Recession, the touring production of ”In the Heights” lost approximately $300,000 in Sacramento. Then CEO Richard Lewis, son of founder Russell Lewis, concluded that even a subscription base of nearly 12,000 could no longer support the two-week engagements that had become standard. He cut most tours back to one week. Controlling inventory reduced risk and helped restore financial stability; genuine blockbusters could still expand, as ”Wicked” did with a four-week run in 2012.

Music Circus contracted too. At its peak it produced as many as 13 musicals in a summer. By the mid-2010s, a season typically contained five or six, with dark weeks that gave audiences a break and creative teams more rehearsal time. Fewer productions meant fuller houses and better work.

That same caution remains visible under current President and CEO Scott Klier. As new opportunities for year-round programming have emerged, Klier has resisted adding permanent payroll faster than the organization can sustain it.

After 75 years, the lesson remains consistent: The objective is not maximum size. It is sufficient financial strength to keep doing ambitious work. 

The ultimate stress test

That philosophy could protect the company from bad bets and changing audience demand. It could not protect it from a world in which theaters simply stopped operating.

COVID-19 canceled Music Circus for the first time in its history and kept it dark for two summers. Touring stopped as well. For nearly two years, ticket revenue — the economic engine on which Broadway Sacramento had always depended — largely disappeared.

What replaced it revealed another reason the company had survived for so long: it had never survived alone. Broadway Sacramento received $861,400 through two Paycheck Protection Program loans, a game-changing Federal Shuttered Venue Operators Grant and more than $680,000 in City CARES Act allocations. Board members intensified private fundraising even as the company reduced staff and expenses.

The combination ensured survival. Financial discipline mattered, but so did public policy, private philanthropy and a civic conviction that the institution was worth preserving.

Survive for what?

Financial survival, however, is not the purpose of a nonprofit theater.

Music Circus’s 1953 obligation to operate for the “public benefit” gradually took on broader meaning. Programs that began with college interns grew into school outreach, accessibility initiatives and training for young artists. Today the Broadway Sacramento Conservatory provides professional musical theater training while community night opens final dress rehearsals to nonprofit and educational groups. In 2025, more than 3,000 people from 84 organizations attended community night, many experiencing professional theater for the first time. 

A financially sound nonprofit can do more than keep its doors open. It can help create the artists and audiences that will keep the art form alive.

The next generation

That may be the central challenge of Broadway Sacramento’s next chapter.

The company entered its 75th year by experimenting again. The six-show Music Circus season stretched beyond the traditional summer, and Broadway On Tour offered a robust eight-show 2026–27 season with recent Broadway Hits including ”Water for Elephants,” ”The Outsiders,” ”Buena Vista Social Club,” ”Shucked,” “Maybe Happy Ending,” “The Notebook,” “A Beautiful Noise” and ”Death Becomes Her.” 

More performances, however, require more patrons. And one challenge is simply explaining what Music Circus is.

For generations of Sacramentans, no explanation was necessary: Music Circus was part of summer. Younger residents and newcomers may not know that these productions are neither community theater nor tours arriving ready-made on trucks. Broadway At Music Circus is a professional Actors’ Equity producing theater, producing work on par with what one finds on The Great White Way. Actors are cast in New York, Los Angeles and Sacramento, and each production is created specifically for the intimate theater-in-the-round. Broadway Sacramento describes itself as the largest continually operating musical theater-in-the-round in the country. 

Telling that story has become harder as the local media ecosystem that once chronicled each season has thinned. An arts organization now must tell much more of its own story while competing for attention across a fragmented digital landscape.

Broadway Sacramento is attacking the audience question from several directions, including the Conservatory, Community Night and its $35 Under 35 ticket program. But Klier recently framed the larger challenge in Comstock’s: the company cannot simply repeat what it has always done and expect a new generation to show up. It must understand that audience, find ways to excite it and at the same time, retain the patrons who built the institution. 

But the problem is not only who sits in the seats. Sacramento is not a corporate headquarters town in the way many metropolitan areas are, and that shapes the philanthropic landscape. Klier has pointed out that without a strong base of major companies headquartered here and invested in local institutions, arts organizations have fewer natural sources of corporate sponsorship and rely more heavily on individual patrons — people already being asked to buy tickets and then dig deeper to give.

That makes the next chapter a two-part challenge: cultivating the next audience and the next generation of civic partners. Broadway Sacramento’s history is full of moments when people and institutions decided the theater was worth sustaining — from Eleanor McClatchy’s original backing to the city and county’s support for the pavilion and the public and private response to COVID.

In that sense, neither challenge is entirely new. Lewis and Young also had to persuade Sacramentans to try an unfamiliar theatrical experience while building the relationships that made it possible. They changed the product, the promotion and eventually the business model when circumstances demanded it.

Seventy-five years later, the channels are different, but the essential questions remain: How do you persuade the next person to come — and the next partner to help sustain what they find there?

Broadway Sacramento’s history suggests that longevity does not come from protecting a successful formula. It comes from knowing what must be preserved and what must be allowed to change.

A five-year experiment reached 75 by continuing to experiment.

Margaret L. Kane is the author of ”Broadway Sacramento: 75 Years of Theater Magic,” an illustrated history of the company and the artists who built it. 

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