Thorold Community Theatre hopes to find new home in Allanburg

For the past month, Thorold Community Theatre has been trying to find a new home — and now they think they’ve found it in the Allanburg Community Centre. 

As ThoroldToday reported, the future of Trinity United Church on Pine St. S is looking uncertain, which is why the theatre troupe has been searching for a new venue.

To convince others of their proposal, the group gave a presentation to the Parks, Trails, and Recreation Committee on Monday evening.

“We’re very excited about the location,” group member Daniel Willis told committee members. “We think that with bringing it up to code and not much more we would be able to move in and make it our long-term home.”

The Allanburg Community Centre has been sitting empty for quite some time. For the past few years, the building has been used as storage space for the Thorold Museum. 

To be able to invite people back inside the building, there are a few issues that need to be addressed first — such as a leaking roof and an outdated bathroom.

“Those are our immediate needs that would make the venue suitable for us to move into,” said Willis. “Things like lighting grids we can stumble through until we’ve worked on some of the other issues in the building.”

In the long run, the group hopes to make the space completely their own.

“We would like to install our curtains which we recently purchased,” said Willis. “We would like to set up a sound booth of some permanence. We are a good tenant interested in making the space as good as it can be for the audience.”

The theatre troupe would like to move into the community centre as soon as possible.

“We don’t have a deadline for moving out of the church but we are considering our own deadlines,” Willis said. “We need to find a place for our stuff very quickly and we want to move on that.”

According to Willis, several community groups have already reached out to share their interest in also becoming a tenant at the community centre.

“We’ve had a couple of other groups indicate to us that they would be interested in riding on our coattails,” he said. “I would expect — given our long presence in the community — that we will be approached by other organizations that would want to work with us and use the space itself.”

The proposal was met with resounding enthusiasm from committee members.

“I don’t want to lose you in the city of Thorold, that’s for sure,” said Councillor Ken Sentance. “It could be a perfect fit. We had a lot of trouble trying to find what to do with this space. It’s been worse and worse as it goes on so this could be fantastic.”

And with that, the committee unanimously approved a motion to pass the proposal on to City Council for consideration