A two-century-old courthouse, shown in a rendering, in Saint John, N.B., bought by the Saint John Theatre Company in 2020 will become home to the Atlantic Repertory Company. The company has raised $19-million in funding, including $12-million from Ottawa, to transform the building into a professional theatre space.Saint John Theatre/Supplied
Stephen Tobias has spent his career taking careful, incremental steps to make Saint John a home for increasingly professional theatre. The latest step might be closer to a leap.
After the Saint John Theatre Company bought a two-century-old courthouse on the city’s central square for $1 in 2020, Tobias’s grin was wide in late October as he announced that Ottawa would contribute $12-million to refurbish and expand the building as a theatre space.
The federal money brings the total funding raised for the facility to $19-million, including other governmental support and private philanthropy. Up next will be a capital campaign to raise between $10-million and $12.5-million to get the refurbishment over the finish line – in time, Tobias hopes, for the 2027-28 season.
It would become home to the Atlantic Repertory Company (ARC), the relatively new professional wing of what Tobias calls the longtime “high-end community theatre” output of the Saint John Theatre Company. And the building’s centrepiece would be a 200- to 270-capacity theatre in the building’s former second-floor courtroom, which would give the southern New Brunswick city greater flexibility in the shows it can host.
Between this and the training programs he has planned for the new space, Tobias hopes the courthouse can bring more theatre to Saint John and more artistic opportunities for Saint Johners. “Even 10 years ago, it was not really possible to live in New Brunswick and be a working actor – not in the anglophone sector – and we were really the only province that had that issue,” Tobias said in an interview in the former courtroom in the fall.
Once completed, the courthouse theatre would be one of the first new professional theatre spaces in Atlantic Canada since the opening of the Nurse Myra Bennett Centre for the Performing Arts in Cow Head, N.L., in 2021.
It would also bridge the local gap between the Saint John Theatre Company’s 100-capacity BMO Studio Theatre and the 900-seat Imperial Theatre, the multipurpose National Historic Site around the corner from the courthouse. The company has spent about $1-million on the courthouse already, including for hazardous material abatement. The original neoclassical building, adorned with marble features and spiral staircases, will be fully refurbished.
The EXP Architects-designed space, meanwhile, will see its square footage tripled with a new extension. Beyond the new, flexible performance hall, it’ll be home to a new rehearsal hall, bar-café, administrative offices and flexible spaces that could be used for training. Tobias hopes to pay respect to features and furniture from the original courthouse throughout – such as, perhaps, incorporating the judge’s bench into the bar or box office.
The Saint John Theatre Company was established in 1990, with Tobias as one of the founding members; he became executive director in 2006. The organization opened the BMO Studio Theatre in 2008, and manages programs such as Loyalist City Shakespeare and the Fundy Fringe Festival – making it a kind of “octopus,” he said, with tentacles winding throughout the region’s theatre scene.
The project's centrepiece would be a 200- to 270-capacity theatre in the building’s former second-floor courtroom to provide greater flexibility in the types of shows that can be hosted in the city.Saint John Theatre/Supplied
By 2015, Tobias convinced the Saint John Theatre Company’s board that they needed to expand to keep pace with their growing ambitions while building out the local talent base. They conducted a feasibility study, which found that there was a local audience and funding opportunities to support a professional resident theatre company.
The study led to the creation, in 2019, of ARC – a professional-grade program added to the Saint John Theatre Company’s sprawling southern New Brunswick theatre empire, for which Tobias serves as artistic director.
And around 2016, Tobias heard local lawyer John Barry on the radio, talking about the hunt to find a new owner to save the King’s Square courthouse. The three-storey building had been built in 1825, renovated after being gutted by fire in 1919 and finally closed about a dozen years ago. Barry’s father and grandfather had both sat as judges in the old building, and he’d worked on trials there, too. But personal connections aside, he simply felt the building was too historic to lose.
He and Tobias began working together to make it the theatre company’s home. They were met with a change in provincial government and a pesky legal trust restricting the building’s uses. “It took more than a bit of lobbying, pushing and public support” to get the building in the theatre company’s hands, Barry said.
Tobias’s team got possession in March, 2020. Managing a theatre company during the COVID-19 pandemic quickly took precedent over fundraising. But ARC began growing, drawing in actors R.H. Thomson and Eric Peterson to perform in Waiting for Godot and touring a production of Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding through Germany and France. “The nice thing for the local theatre makers is I feel like it’s giving another step for them to aspire to,” Tobias said.
One of those is the locally raised actor Caroline Bell, who returned to Saint John during the pandemic after a stint in Toronto. It had been her dream to work in New York, London or Toronto, but after six years in Toronto, paying for the cost of living while trying to break out as an emerging actor was a struggle.
“I couldn’t offer my best self or leave room for growth within a process,” Bell said.
The formation of ARC, which brought in both seasoned professionals and up-and-coming Atlantic artists, gave her a chance to perform professionally at home, and eventually move back to work professionally. “It cracked open this whole world of different theatre companies across the province,” she said. The addition of the courthouse stage, she added, “reaffirms why someone like me can stay.”