Santa Rosa Junior College suspends Summer Repertory Theatre

Summer Repertory Theatre, a local performing arts favorite for half a century, is going on hiatus and faces major changes in the future as its sponsor, Santa Rosa Junior College, struggles with the program’s costs.

“SRJC will be transitioning our summer theater program to a more sustainable model and to feature local talent. As such, SRT will not be held this summer,” Frank Chong, the college’s president and superintendent, said in a Friday statement.

Producing a summer season of five or six plays each year, featuring student actors and technicians from all over the U.S., Summer Repertory Theatre drew as many as 30,000 playgoers yearly.

“The theater company has faced rising costs of housing, impacts of inflation, and a lack of long-term sustainable funding sources,” Chong added in the statement.

The junior college has been struggling with multimillion dollar deficits largely driven by declining student enrollment, a statewide trend.

In an interview Friday afternoon, Chong added, “This is part of our ongoing look at what we can continue to do.”

He compared the cost of the summer theater program for the junior college — $483,000 a year — to the cost of subsidizing campus child care, at $443,000 a year.

Child care, Chong concluded, was the higher priority.

Chong, who is retiring this year, took the helm of SRJC in January 2012. Faced at one point with a budget gap of at least $6.5 million in spring 2018, Chong incited a furor when his administration slashed class offerings for the coming summer session by more than half, a move aimed to save the school about $2 million. Amid campus uproar, he reversed course the next day.

James Newman, 51, who has been director of the summer theater program since 2006, will remain at the junior college as theater arts and fashion department chair and will be the new artistic director for the regular fall and spring theater season.

“SRT has been a tremendous training program for students, both performers and technicians,” Newman said in an interview. “We have trained tens of thousands of students, many of whom have gone on to careers in entertainment. In 2020, we had five of our former students on Broadway.”

Newman succeeded Frank Zwolinski, who not only founded the popular summer theater program in 1972, but served as its only artistic director its first 34 years.

In 2019, SRT performed in an outdoor pavilion on campus, while renovations continued longer than anticipated at the college’s Burbank Auditorium building. The season was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to construction delays and coronavirus concerns.

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