The 95-year-old theater at San Bernardino High School reopened as a performing arts center Thursday, Dec. 12, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and variety show starring district students.
Built in 1891, the campus is the oldest high school in the county and the district. Its theater was constructed in 1929.
The reopening fell on the 60th anniversary of the San Bernardino City Unified School District.
“We found it fitting to hold our district’s 60-year jubilee in what we consider to be the birthplace of public education in our city and our county,” district spokesperson Maria Garcia said in a Thursday, Dec. 12, email.
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Plans for the project were approved in 2021. The theater was under construction from April 2022 until September. The work was paid for through Measure N, which passed in 2012, state dollars and a special reserve fund, Garcia said.
The building’s structure is unchanged, but the inside was renovated to add a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system and to update electrical, lighting and audio wiring. Analog systems were replaced with digital ones, said Olivia Parker, director of the high school’s theater program.
“It’s going to be a whole new learning game for my kids, because they’ve never worked with that before,” Parker said.
When the theater closed, the program began to use theaters at other schools and changed performances from full plays and musicals to one-act plays, Parker said.
She said many of her students have never been inside a theater and relied on school to bus them to other theaters and venues, which could take up to an hour. Being back in the theater will bring a learning curve for students as they learn to use the new systems.
The program returned to the theater at the beginning of the week. Students immediately jumped into another one-act performance set for Friday, Dec. 13, Parker said.
“The fact that we have a theater back now is really great,” senior Isabelle Azcorra said. “It’s really relieving that we would not have to move all of that anymore.”
Azcorra said that it was important for students to experience being in the theater — even for seniors like herself who will be leaving.
The theme of Thursday’s celebration was SBCUSD SHINES: Celebrating 60 Years of Brilliance. The show featured students from preschool to high school, Garcia said.
Natalie Arciniega, a San Bernardino High junior, performed two pieces: a comedy and a tragedy, which she picked for an international theater festival in which she plans to compete.
“I’ve been going over and over rehearsing, doing my blocking and memorizing my lines, also doing a bunch of other work for my theater troupe,” Arciniega said.
Arciniega said she was excited to perform at the jubilee and be a part of Thursday’s ceremony.
“When I first entered our theater, it really didn’t feel like it was our actual theater, it honestly felt like a dream, because I had never actually been in our theater before,” Arciniega said. “So entering it was like a whole new dimension, in a sense. And I wasn’t really sure that, ‘Hey, I can do what I want now,’ I could, like, reach my full potential, because this is our space.”
Arciniega’s classmate, senior Jubilee Henry, also performed at the celebration, doing a musical theater number “Screw Loose” from the musical “Cry-Baby.”
“I picked this piece because I personally love comedy,” Henry said. “… And it’s also a really fun piece to perform, because anything that you can think while performing, it’s fair game to put your hands on it and try do that thing, because the character is so flexible.”
Henry said the theater opening was special to her.
“Personally, we’ve really been looking forward to getting back into the theater and making it home again, making new memories and reliving old memories and being a person who knew how it was before and knows how it is now,” Henry said.
