Grief, Grace, & Gratitude • Pit & Balcony's 94th Season of Community Enrichment

During its remarkable history Pit & Balcony Community Theatre has managed to establish a strong reputation for presenting a divergent blend of traditional, contemporary, and experimental plays appealing to a wide range of tastes, backgrounds, age groups, and ethnicities, which when one thinks about it, is precisely the role a community theatre should perform.

For their upcoming 2025-26 roster, however, the focus is on adding creative crowd-pleasers into the mix for their uniquely designed and thematic ‘Good Grief!’ series of plays comprising their 94^th Season of theatrical performances.

“This season is an exploration, a reckoning, and a celebration,” explains Managing Director Amy Spadafore. “ Our 94^th season is a journey through the subject of Grief and all that it encompasses. While grief can be depressing, in actuality it’s much more than that. Grief is exasperating and enlightening. It is commemoration and community. It is memory and hope. Grief is fortifying. Grief is gratitude. Grief is a reckoning and a celebration. Grief reminds us to be grateful and invites us to be open to new experiences and ways of thinking.”

“Our thoughts going into this season specifically were crowd pleasers and small casts, because I think the culture around community theater has changed a bit,” she reflects. We had a good season last year with amazing performances and strong attendance for shows like Carrie: The Musical, but were expecting The Wedding Singer to sell out and go gangbusters. With our After Dark production of Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche, people were knocking down the doors at each performance, which we weren’t anticipating, so shows we expect to sell out haven’t and shows that we don’t expect to sell out do,” she confesses. “That’s why this season we’re diving headfirst into stories embracing the full emotional spectrum - from the silly to the sorrowful, the poetic to the provocative.”.

“We’re building a relationship with the SVSU Theatre Department and have a good relationship with SASA and the high schools, and there’s definitely a strong selection of adult actors still around and active throughout the entire region, so we’re not wanting for talent,” she continues, “but I would like to see more fresh faces showing up for auditions. I think we also have to realize  it’s a big commitment to be in a show - especially with the complexity involved with some of these roles -  and I think people are kind of doing different things with their free time, so we need to get a little creative on our side to make sure we’re offering something to engage new talent into our productions.”

“This season you’ll see characters struggling to make sense of their losses, finding joy in unlikely places, and growing through what they grieve.  From the familiar to the unknown, we’re very excited to bring seven extraordinary productions to our community, including a world premiere production.”

So without further ado, let’s take a peek at what’s behind the curtain.

Grief, Grandeur, and Free Second Saturdays

Falling in line with this thematic journey, Pit & Balcony is kicking off their 94^th Season with the lovable character who found enlightenment and solace from ‘Grief’ in all its permutations in their opening performances of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, which will run from September 26-28 and October 3-5^th.

This six-person theatrical classic is based upon the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schultz, with book music and lyrics by Clark Gesner and additional dialogue by Michael Mayer and dditional music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa.   With charm, wit, and heart, this production explores life through the eyes of Charlie Brown and his friends the ‘Peanuts’ gang through a series of songs and vignettes exploring life’s great questions as they play baseball, struggle with homework, sing songs, swoon over their crushes, and celebrate the joy of friendship.

While the original production of this play dates back to the 1960s, this updated version is from the early 2000’s.  “Linus is my favorite character from The Peanuts gang,” notes Amy, “and he will be played by Dale Peters, who has been one of our main lighting designers over the past few years. This is his first show ever and he was incredible in the audition, so I’m excited to be able to see one of our technicians switch over to the stage. That’s the beautiful thing about community theatre - you don’t have to stay in one lane and can try it all.”

Next on the agenda for the Holidays is the Regional Premiere of A Wicked Christmas Carol, which is set to run November 28-30 and December 5-7^th. Written by Bobby Keniston, in essence this production is a synthesis of two classics:  Charles Dicken’s  A Christmas Carol and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.

“Basically, this production is the tale of A Christmas Carol, only it’s set in the land of Oz,” explains Amy. “The Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t always that way and when a ghostly figure whisks her away on a journey through her past, present, and future, she may find a second chance on Christmas Eve. It’s based on the book more than the movie, but of course the Wicked Witch is Scrooge and a lot of parallels between the two stories which they cleverly splice together. There’s also lots of kids acting as little munchkins in this one, so this show will feature our biggest cast of the season.”

Without doubt, one of the standout productions included in this Season 94 line-up is the World  Premiere of STONE POINT, which is written by playwright Alex Burkart and will be staged right here in Saginaw, Michigan for its debut performances before a live audience from January 9-11 & 16-18^th.

“This was a script that a member of our play selection committee found on this website called The New Play Exchange, explains Amy. “It’s a website for aspiring published or unpublished playwrights and she found this script, we read it, and found it to be an amazing piece of work. This is the first time it’s going to be produced as a fully staged play and it’s about a character who is wasting away due to a rare form of bone cancer, which has spread to his brain. He sits alone on his beautiful family hunting property at Stone Point in Wisconsin, struggling with the sirens of his past, the fears of his present, and the truths of the future as his final days of life burn before our very eyes. Inspired by the ideas of sirens and pretas (hungry ghosts), the play also features songs by singer/songwriter Jllian Secor”

“While he’s living out the last part of his life, we’re introduced to and see his life through most of the women in his life, who are actually ghosts kind of haunting him, so they call it a ghost story but it’s not scary or spooky. It’s actually a really lovely and heartfelt piece about coming to terms with your life,” notes Amy. “It will make you laugh and it will make you cry.”

“The cool thing about the playwright that we didn’t know when we programmed this show is that Laura & Dexter Brigham from Midland had a theatre company years ago called Festival 56. It still exists in Princeton, Illinois, but back in earlier days Alex Burkart - the playwright - was a regular performer in Festival 56 productions, so he’s got kind of a ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ thing going on with the Great Lakes Bay region and lives in New York now.  I’m hoping we can get him here for a talk back when we stage this show.”

Next up, the misty showery Spring skies of April 10-17 & 17-19^th are the perfect setting for  playwright Ken Ludwig’s BASKERVILLE: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, which is also another regional premier. Ludwig is a comedic genius and theatrical crowd-pleaser who wrote Moon Over Buffalo and Lend Me a Tenor and who transforms Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles into a murderously funny adventure.

”“The Director of this one is Dominque Eisengruber, who also directed The Play That Goes Wrong for us two years ago and POTUS this last season,” relates Amy. “She’s a great director and people loved working with her, so I’m excited to see what she does with this one.”

Concluding their regular season on May 7-9 & 15-17^th is an emotionally powerful and intimate musical about two New Yorkers in their twenties who fall in and out of love over the course of five years.  Aptly titled The Last Five Years and written and composed by Jason Robert Brown, this  show’s unconventional structure consists of Cathy, the woman, telling her story backwards while Jamie, the man, tells his story chronologically, with the two characters only meeting once at their wedding in the middle of the show.

“This one’s going to be really unique for the stage because we only have two people on stage at once; plus, I think the director’s plan right now is to double-cast it so each night there’s a different couple on stage.”

Closing out Pit’s 2025-25 season are two new productions for their popular After Dark Series, beginning with ‘For  Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf’, written by Niozake Shange. Set for performance on February 20 & 21, this unique play captures the brutal, tender, and dramatic lives of contemporary black women  through a transformative, riveting evening of provocative dance, music and poetry in the form of a groundbreaking ‘choreopoem’, which is. spellbinding collection of vivid prose and free verse narratives about and performed by Black women.

“This one was written originally in the 1970s and has been adapted since, but it’s done very rhythmically between these seven women, who dance and take turns telling their story,” explains Amy. “I’m also really excited about this one because we have a first time director doing it and we also have a costume designer who goes to Africa every year and gets fabrics and clothing created by women in Africa, so we’ll be able to feature authentic African fabrics and patterns onstage.”

Last but certainly not least, the second After Dark production closing out their 94^th season is In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) set for June 25-27^th. This fictional comedy is set in the 1880s and based on the bizarre historical fact that doctors once used vibrators to treat ‘hysterical’ women (and some men!)   Set in a seemingly perfect well-to-do Victorian home, this is the tale of Dr. Givings - the doctor who has innocently invented this extraordinary new device for treating ‘hysteria’. Adjacent to the doctor’s laboratory, his wife tries to tend to their newborn while wondering exactly what is going on in the next room.

Second Saturdays

Another significant and admirable element Pit & Balcony is introducing for their 94^th Season is that for two of their productions they will also stage the second Saturday of performances free to the public.

“Basically, for the second Saturday performances of Stone Point and Baskerville we will not be selling tickets so that the community has an opportunity to come to the theatre without cost serving as a barrier,” explains Amy.

“We’re a community theater and not really doing our job if we’re not serving the community, right? Some version of lowering price barriers - from "pay what you can" nights   to completely free admission - has been happening in modern theatre for decades.  So yes, we’re taking a little bit of a risk, but we’re going to do that for the community.”

“We're also hoping to partner with some other nonprofits and invite them to bring their residents or clients  to the shows, because that's another part of the community that is not really able to get out and experience art.”

Season Flex Pass Tickets are currently available for Pit & Balcony Community Theatre’s 94^th 2025-26 performance season. With Flex Pass you have the freedom to choose how you want to use your tickets - come see all the shows or just one - whichever option works best.  3 tickets @ 55.00; 4 tickets @$70.00 or 5 tickets for $80.00 ($20.00 savings).

For more information or to purchase Flex Pass or individual tickets phone 989-754-6587 or visit PitAndBalconyTheatre.com