Smoky Mountain Community Theatre awarded $10,000 grant for repairs

Larry Griffin

lgriffin@thesmokymountaintimes.com

A grant in the amount of $10,000 will go towards refurnishing the front of the Smoky Mountain Community Theatre, in what director Ricky Sanford said will help to show the community that the theater is still there and coming back.

There will be a new awning put in and pressure-washing will be done on the front and lobby of the building to make it look cleaner and more palatable. It comes after the theater sustained heavy water damage during rains in the summer of 2020 while it was closed during the pandemic.

“We’re not closed, we don’t want it to look like it’s closed,” Sanford said. “If people stand outside the building, where their eyes are from the sidewalk, we want them to think, ‘This building is coming back and coming back stronger.’ We want it to scream ‘This building is still alive.’”

Sanford said the front of the building was overdue to be revamped anyway: “It always had that spooky vibe.”

The grant money is coming from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina (CFWNC), which has partnered with Dogwood Health Trust with the intent to “build, rebuild or refresh community spaces that foster connections and economic development,” a press release said.

Sanford said the awning they wanted to put in was a way to call back to the past.

“It’s going to be a perfect mesh of what it would’ve been like in 1950 when it was created and now,” Sanford said. “Things like that are going to start popping up. There are going to be a lot of aesthetically-pleasing additions made. You could see there were awnings on the building. We want to bring that back.”

In addition to the theater renovations, there will be use made of the two office storefronts connected to the building on Main Street, with Sanford and the theater board planning to rent them out to businesses to help add more variety downtown.

They’re not taking applications yet, but Sanford said there had been interest from several parties who’d reached out about the possibility.

Sanford has also been hosting meetings to give out community updates on the progress of the theater, held the second Monday of every month at 6:30 p.m. at the Business and Training Center at 45 East Ridge Drive. He said it had been a good way to keep the community up to date with the renovations and the progress of things overall.

Asked about a proposed timeline, Sanford said they aimed to have the storefronts done by this spring, and then continue working on the inside of the theater itself for the remainder of the year. They are eyeing sometime in 2025 or 2026 to finally reopen the theater. He’d like to have it all done by 2025 but said “it depends on the grant funding.”

He said they’ll continue writing grants and seeking outside funding in the meantime.

Sanford said the added elements would serve to help the theater stay at the forefront of peoples’ minds, saying it would “feed the faith” that the community had in the theater after numerous fundraising events held at last year.

He said he thought the theater’s return would be something of interest to the community.

“People have a hunger for entertainment in general,” he said. “I don’t want to isolate that to the theater. They have a hunger for entertainment, and it will be good for the youth to have something to do outside schooling. Everyone longs for the escape from reality that entertainment brings.”