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Ballyhoo Theatre

Budget Size: Below 50k

Region: Northwest

County: Snohomish

Population Centered: LGBTQ+

Mission Statement: Ballyhoo Theatre’s purpose is to enrich, educate, and entertain our community by providing a superior theatre experience, to provide education in the theatre arts to children and young adults, and to create a safe and inclusive environment.

Community Accelerator Grant Award: $17,500

Primary Impact Category: The Future

Website: https://ballyhootheatre.org/

Around 10-15 performers arranged in a central location on a theater stage spoke outwards with their arms stretch outward and away from the center.

In a dark theater with a purple, glowing backdrop, stands one person in a yellow t-shirt, a blue and white plaid button up top, and light blue jeans gesturing towards the audience as they sing. Surrounding them on a lower level of the stage are a group of about 10-15 actors with their arms all reaching out towards the person standing above them.

“Our motto has always been to do a lot with a little,” says Shileah Corey, Artistic & Managing Director of Ballyhoo Theatre in Edmonds. A scrappy organization that opened its doors in 1999 as a summer camp and has evolved into a yearlong theatre company offering both educational and mainstage programming, Ballyhoo is an enthusiastic home for what theatre practitioners call cheap magic – simple sets, inventive lighting rigs, and expansive staging that invites audiences to use their imaginations. Ballyhoo is also a haven for queer artists and artistry – while Shileah acknowledges that the vast majority of Washington’s theatres are implicitly queer-inclusive, her mission with Ballyhoo has always been to provide an explicitly safe space for queer youth and young adults.

Though that mission has sustained Shileah through much of her professional life, she freely admits that the pandemic posed unprecedented challenges for both her and Ballyhoo. “A company like ours always operates on a shoestring budget, but especially since COVID, you just feel like you’re always on the verge of not being able to do what you know is good for your community,” she says. “Our numbers were way down last year, and I went to my youth advisory board and asked them if I should be stepping down.” Her youth board told her no in no uncertain terms, and they found a few months later that they had received a Community Accelerator Grant – a monumental grant for a company of Ballyhoo’s size.

[The Community Accelerator Grant] made us feel appreciated, like there are good reasons for us to be here and like the work we’re doing is still relevant.

Shileah Corey, Artistic & Managing Director of Ballyhoo Theatre in Edmonds, WA

Ballyhoo set four goals for itself as it began to imagine its post-pandemic future: to produce several tuition-free shows, allowing students of all socioeconomic backgrounds to participate; to create a wider audience base for mainstage shows, which would mean putting time and money into promotion and marketing for the first time; to partner with new musical theatre writers and be part of the development of new works; and to produce a free yearly children’s musical. The Community Accelerator Grant has been instrumental in helping the company move towards fulfilling three of those four goals by supporting its August production of Shapeshifters, A Queer Comic Book Musical. Shapeshifters, a new musical by nonbinary playwright Truth Future Bachman, uses the lens of superhero science fiction to celebrate LGBTQIA2S+ (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Two-Spirit, and other sexual identities) experiences. “We live in a society that others us,” says Shileah, “but this show asks, ‘What about your queerness is a superpower? How are you powerful because of, not in spite of, who you are?’” The production was tuition-free and offered inclusive sliding-scale ticket pricing, and Ballyhoo heard from several of the approximately 350 audience members that Shapeshifters was the first time they’d ever seen themselves and their lived experiences represented onstage.

Watch the The Making of Shapeshifters: A Queer Comic Book Musical documentary here.

Two people are on stage in a theater. There are 2 purple boxes, one yellow box and a hard shell, black suite case lined horizontally on the stage. One character in a black and white plaid shirt, light blue jeans, and short dark blonde hair hugs a gray backpack while next to them sits the other character. The second character is wearing a black graphic T, a purple plaid skirt, and fishnet stockings. The second character has short brown hair and looks off into the distance with a slight smile on their face.

As a community theatre rooted and deeply invested in equity work, Ballyhoo has carved out an important niche in the North End’s theatre ecosystem, and Shileah hopes it will continue to grow, though she freely admits there will have to be wider systemic changes to the theatre producing model for Ballyhoo to succeed in everything it wants to do: “If we keep doing tuition-free shows and offering inclusive ticket pricing… the money to make that happen has gotta come from somewhere.” Still, she’ll show up every day for as long as the company she founded will have her. “This is quite literally life-saving work. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told that Ballyhoo saved someone’s life.”

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