Santa Rosa Junior College opens first full season in renovated Burbank Auditorium

It seems appropriate that the first full season at the newly renovated Burbank Auditorium at Santa Rosa Junior College opens with a salute to a great teacher.

Based on a true story and the Academy Award-nominated 1988 film of the same name, “Stand and Deliver” salutes the work of Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian-American math teacher at an East Los Angeles high school who successfully coached his students, many who had marginal school records, in calculus. The show opens Friday.

As Escalante, the production stars guest artist Daniel Bañales, an alumnus of Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma Valley High School. To prepare for the role, Bañales said, he relied not on the movie but on history.

“I saw the movie in middle school and high school two or three times,” he said. “I haven’t watched the movie since I got cast to do this role. This was an actual person, so I read articles about Jaime Escalante and watched recorded interviews with him, even before we started the rehearsal process.”

Director Elizabeth Dale of Santa Rosa, a former theater director at Santa Clara University, saw in this show a chance to showcase diversity and inclusion in the Burbank Auditorium’s studio theater space. Originally built by the Works Progress Administration in 1939, the auditorium has a long history as both a theater and teaching facility.

“I asked myself, how do I tell a story about underprivileged kids, immigrants and gang members?” Dale said.

The answer was to help her young actors bridge the gap between their lives now and the setting of the play three decades ago.

“The cast needed to be almost 100% Latino,” she added, because that was the ethnic makeup of Escalante’s class. That was essential to the story, but it also was important to understand the lives of his students in their own time.

“This play is set in the reality of the ’80s, and we hope to make connections for people with the reality of the 21st century,” Dale said.

This production is dedicated to Roberto Ramirez of Windsor High School, who has been teaching generations of students in Sonoma County for decades. He is known as a mentor, and several of his students have gone on to earn degrees in applied mathematics or become engineers.

The sustained reopening of the remade Burbank Auditorium has been a long time in coming. Crews broke ground on the renovation project in January 2018.

The original target date for completion of construction, May 2019, was postponed when it was discovered underground power lines and storm drains had to be moved. That August, completion of the project was delayed again to give more time to make, deliver and install the ropes, pulleys and counterweights used to raise and lower curtains and support lighting equipment.

The new Burbank Auditorium building, after the renovation, only staged one studio theater production in March 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The public did get a glimpse of the newly redone structure during an opening celebration March 6 that year, and the Irish play “The Cripple of Inishmaan” ran briefly in the building’s new 200-seat studio theater.

In early 2020, “The Wedding Singer” was to have been the first public theatrical production in the newly redone 400-seat main auditorium when COVID-19 precautions forced an indefinite postponement. Last April, the production finally went on at last.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.