By O’Connor Daniel | Reporter
The Waco Civic Theatre celebrated its 100th birthday Tuesday with a public party that thanked volunteers and staff and previewed what’s next for the nonprofit theater.
Executive Director Kelly MacGregor said the theater will pursue a building expansion to improve crowd flow at sold-out shows and increase accessibility for patrons and performers. The plans also include more scholarships for the children’s program and more off-site shows and classes to reach residents who lack transportation.
The theater also announced two summer musicals — “Mean Girls” and “Dear Evan Hansen” — positioning Waco Civic among the first community theaters to stage the titles and among the few in Texas with performance rights.
MacGregor, who began performing at Waco Civic in 2016 and later taught voice in Baylor’s department of theatre arts, said the organization’s mission remains central.
“If it isn’t fun, we shouldn’t be doing it,” MacGregor said. “We teach people to step into someone else’s shoes and tell stories from different perspectives.”
Founded as the Waco Little Theatre and later revived by Paul Baker, then-chair of Baylor’s department of theatre arts, Waco Civic’s history is closely tied to Baylor. Baker later founded the Dallas Theater Center and drew national attention at Baylor with an experimental production of “Othello.” Baker’s experimental approach and audience-centric design shaped the current space.
“You have to have the audience in order for a performance art to have a finished piece, and he understood that and infused it into all his productions,” MacGregor said.
Early seasons in the Lake Air Drive building featured classic plays, including “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” with musicals becoming a larger part of programming in the 1980s after “Annie.” A landmark production came with “Sironia, Texas,” adapted from Madison Cooper’s novel by Baylor graduate student John Dennis Anderson. MacGregor called it the theater’s most popular run, noting that local audiences “showed up for Waco.”
The Baylor pipeline continued. Several alumni are on staff or have directed at Waco Civic, and several current Baylor students are in rehearsal for “Frozen.”
Joey Dumas, a Baylor alumnus and Waco Civic Theatre’s technical director, said the company helped him move from classroom work to professional roles. As an undergraduate, a Baylor music directing class partnered with Waco Civic, where he met collaborators he still works with. He later assisted as music director on “James and the Giant Peach” and picked up technical and music contracts that led to full-time work.
“My involvement in undergrad beyond the classroom is what gave me my job here,” Dumas said.
He added that those partnerships let students earn community credits and learn how professional teams operate.
“It gives a genuine opportunity to show people the real world … We’re two different creative institutions, but we can start working on things together,” Dumas said.
As the centennial party wrapped, the community’s affection for MacGregor was visible. Attendees greeted her with hugs, congratulations and bouquets of flowers — a scene evident of her imprint on Waco Civic Theatre as it steps into its next century.
