Dear CRT Patron,

We thank you for once again showing your support by helping CRT achieve another record-breaking season in 2007. Nearly 20,000 of you witnessed a CRT production or musical event this year—a remarkable achievement in a town of less than 400 people in one of the more remote areas of Colorado. We are also quite proud of the awards that have been bestowed on the theatre in 2007. This October our theatre received the National Theatre Conference’s Award of Outstanding Achievement. It is given to a single company once a year and recognizes 42 years of theatrical programming. Past company members, Board members, staff, volunteers and contributors all have a stake in this award. CRT is also a finalist in El Pomar’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities. The National Theatre Conference award places CRT amongst other notable, previous NTC award winners like The Public, Steppenwolf, and American Repertory Theatre.

The future for CRT looks very promising. We are in the midst of planning and designing for a New Black Box Theatre to replace the Black Box on the third floor of the theatre building on 124 North Main. This new theatre will be constructed within the building occupied temporarily by the Miners and Merchants Bank within the Bob Ford Mini-Mall.

The new theatre will provide a variety of wonderful benefits to the community and to CRT. For CRT the new theatre will address three major challenges we faced in our old black box—accessibility, capacity and year-round availability. Patrons will no longer have to make the trek up two flights of stairs or try to squeeze into our little elevator to see a production. The new theatre will be ground level and will be capable of holding about twice as many people as our old space with the same degree of intimacy. We will also create a warm, cozy space for “off-season” programming, eliminating the bone-chilling experience of dressing rooms, restrooms and lobby spaces that typically sustain temperatures comparable to those found when dog-sledding across the Arctic Circle. We believe this site will have the positive benefit of creating a vital business that will provide an anchor to this central part of Main Street.

It is our hope to open this new space in 2009, probably in the latter part of the year. We welcome your questions and invite your feedback about this exciting new endeavor. And, of course, we can only successfully accomplish this project with the assistance and contributions of you—our dedicated supporters. We invite you to find out more about our plan, and, if you like what you see, then help us realize the two-fold dream the Jaycees had 42 years ago to create a theatre that brings music and laughter and magic to a small mountain town while being a major attraction for an economy based upon tourism.

Cheers,

Maurice LaMee
Executive/Artistic Director