Local theater seeking donations to preserve nearly 100-year-old building

POCATELLO, Idaho (KIFI)– The Westside Players are racing against time this season to raise enough money for much-needed repairs to their 90-year-old theater, the Warehouse.

The historic warehouse-turned-theater has been a home for Pocatello's Westside Players since the dinner theater started out of the building in 1986. Since then, the volunteers that make up the cast and crew have run hundreds of shows, but revenue from years of ticket sales has not been enough to keep up with the mounting repairs needed for the building's infrastructure.

"Unfortunately, things are going awry with some of the stuff in this building," said Karen Suess, vice president of the Westside Players board of directors. "We had already decided we were going to replace this stage as a big project coming up because the stage has been here for 38 years, and there's so many coats of paint and lacquer and wax and who knows what else on the stage that we can hardly even staple anything into it anymore. So we were going to start this big project, then the heaters went out."

Suess said five of their decades-old heating units kicked the bucket last October, plunging the backstage areas into the cold and stretching thin the theater's already limited seasonal funds.

Two months ago, the Westside Players' board decided to take action, and established their 'Spotlight Campaign'–a fundraising drive to collect money to replace the building's heating system and give the players a new stage to continue their popular performances.

Suess and her colleagues set the Spotlight Campaign's goal at $30,000, enough for state-of-the-art industrial heaters and a new stage. But Suess said the fundraising campaign is about more than preserving the building, it is about maintaining a space for people to do what they love and continue a tradition of local entertainment.

"We are the oldest dinner theater in town–people have been coming here for years, and it's a place where people can come together [and] have fun," said Suess. "If you're in the production, you become family. And if you're the audience, you just enjoy good entertainment. We have people who have been coming here forever... we are a fantastic source of community and of entertainment, and we don't want it to die."

Along with the ongoing Spotlight Campaign, the Westside Players are hosting a 'Spotlight Gala' on May 3 featuring local entertainment, food, and drinks, with ticket proceeds going to building repairs.

For more information on the Spotlight Campaign, how to donate, and the upcoming fundraiser gala, you can visit the Westside Players website.