It’s like a scene from an old Western, where one cowboy shuffles into the dusty lane and tells the other, “Don’t know if this town’s big enough for both of us.”
In the movie, the cowboy might spit, but this spat involves two accomplished community theater companies who’ve been comfortably separated by more than 8 miles of highway for decades. Instead, a palpably panicked missive from San Clemente’s little Cabrillo Playhouse went out warning its patrons that the San Clemente City Council might bring another theater company to town — San Juan Capistrano’s Camino Real Playhouse, a bigger theatrical gorilla that’s losing its long-time home near the historic mission to a redevelopment project.
“While we support expansion of the San Clemente arts scene, we feel this proposal would be a direct threat to our operation, especially since we are in the midst of our largest fundraising program in recent years,” said an unsigned email from the folks who run San Clemente’s Cabrillo that landed in my inbox.
“Since neither the Camino Real Playhouse nor the Cabrillo playhouse sells out every seat for every production, we believe such a move would endanger the future of both playhouses.”
The San Clemente City Council is slated to discuss negotiations over “price and terms” for space at 1030 Calle Negocio, in a rather industrial part of town, with the soon-to-be-homeless San Juan Cap Camino Real Playhouse in closed session on Tuesday, Jan. 16.
Less threatening
Now, this is a big change from what the city council was considering in December, which set off the panic — a space for the San Juan Cap theater smack dab in the San Clemente Community Center on Calle Seville, just a stone’s throw from the resident Cabrillo Playhouse.
Under this new proposal, though, the two companies would be separated by more than 3 miles, rather than a few hundred feet. Folks from the San Clemente group said that’s better, but they’re still a bit nervous….
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