About Encore Theatre Company — Tulare, CA

A Stage of Our Own

Encore Theatre Company was born in 1978 out of a very Tulare kind of problem: the city's summer school theater program had just been cut. A group of parents and teachers, on a band trip to Canada of all places, decided they weren't going to let that stand. They came home with a plan. Encore came home with them.

Our first production — Bye Bye Birdie, summer 1979 — went well enough to file for nonprofit status and keep going. We've been going ever since.

For years, we performed wherever we could find the space. In 1983, the City of Tulare offered us an abandoned house at $1 per year. It was small, it had fire damage, and we took it. The facility at 324 South N Street is now four additions beyond that original house, plus a storage building alongside — built piece by piece by the same community that fills the seats every season.

Today, Encore is an intimate black box theater with cabaret-style seating for up to 120, a wait staff, and five mainstage productions per year. We specialize in musicals and what we lovingly call quirky fourth-wall-defying comedies. Our summer productions are large-scale family shows with kids in the cast — a tradition that goes back to the very beginning, when we were trying to replace a program built for young people.

We are run by volunteers. We are supported by the community. We have been on stage every year since 1979 — with one notable exception that shall not be named. We don't plan on stopping.