Photo by Erin Nelson.
Homewood Theatre's new space is at the corner of 19th Street South and 28th Avenue South in downtown Homewood.
After five years of hosting shows at Brookwood Village Mall and temporary locations, the Homewood Theatre has found a new home in Ensley Mattress Firm’s old space in SoHo Square.
The theater opened its new space Feb. 10 with a performance of “The Odd Couple,” its fourth play of the season, Executive Director Kyle Bass said.
“We’re tickled to be there in beautiful downtown Homewood,” Bass said.
Bass said, five years ago, he performed with several Homewood residents for theaters in downtown Birmingham. Each time they came back to Homewood, he said, they would always ask themselves why Homewood didn’t have its own community theater.
“Finally, five years ago, I started pushing through the nonprofit paperwork,” Bass said. “I got together with a director fellow who was kind of a mentor, and he said that was my first step. So I pushed the paperwork through. We became a nonprofit theater and then had our first production in August 2016 just as a gauge to see if there was enough interest. Seemed like there was, so we started up from there.”
Homewood Theatre performed its first three shows of its six-show season at Brookwood Village Mall, in the middle of construction work for the mall, Bass said.
He said the mall accommodated the theater to the best of its ability but wasn’t able to due to the mall's current construction work, he said.
“They’re good guys,” Bass said. “They worked hard to try to make it where they could work around us and let us stay. They even tried to move us to some other locations in the mall so we could maybe keep going there and the construction to go on around us.”
The theater began looking for permanent and temporary spots at the end of last year after it became apparent they would have to move, Bass said.
“We became aware of this location late in the year, and the deal fell together fairly quickly,” Bass said. “Instead of trying to do the temporary spots, because there’s always a lot of confusion with that, we’re planning to have our next production in the new spot.”
He said SoHo Square is the perfect spot for the theater because of its convenience and the surrounding restaurants and retail stores make going to the theater more of an experience.
“You won’t have to move your car all night,” Bass said. “We have some parameters that we always try to use, it’s kind of our philosophy for what makes a food experience for your audience. If you have good parking, good restaurants around and then you put on a good show, that makes for a pretty good evening.”
The new space might also give Homewood Theatre the opportunity to experiment with other types of plays in between the six primary shows it does a season because of centrality and visibility of the theater, he said.
“We’ve experimented with a music series,” Bass said. “We had a little singer-songwriter music series last summer so we’re hoping to maybe bring some more music acts in the theater and maybe bring in some movies. They’ll probably be small though. We’ll probably do some independent stuff.”
