Starlight Theatre
(815) 921-2160
In 1967, a group of Rock Valley College students wanted to bring their community to the Main Campus. They hoped to encourage the public to appreciate the beauty of their college’s farm setting, and the students decided that the best way to accomplish this goal was to perform a musical nestled beside the beautiful farm pond. People from the community came out with their lawn chairs and watched the amazing production. That first show on Thursday, August 3, 1967 at 8:30 pm, Finian’s Rainbow, was staged on the college lawn and was billed as Rockford’s “first all-community musical.”
Since the fall of 1967, RVC has brought affordable, outdoor, summer musical theatre to residents of the community.
Times have changed a bit since 1967. Now, audiences no longer bring their own chairs and blankets, but sit in its comfortable 1,041-seat bowl. But it’s not just the venue that’s grown. The past 54 summers, Starlight has become an integral part of the college’s Community Outreach initiatives, not to mention a cornerstone of Rockford’s summer community.
Today, the performance space is no longer a makeshift stage, but a genuine, state-of-the-art theatre, which a Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic called “an engineering wonder.” Bengt Sjostrom Theatre (BST) has since been built, remodeled, and remodeled again, most recently in 2002/2003 – designed by leading female architect and MacArthur fellowship recipient Jeanne Gang (from Belvidere, Illinois, who founded Studio Gang Architects – an architecture, interiors, and urbanism practice in Chicago and New York). An important enhancement for an outdoor summer theatre, Gang designed a one-of-a-kind articulated, 70-foot star-shaped roof that can be opened as audiences look up at the night sky, and closed during inclement weather. A constellation- themed ticket and control booth, and versatile stage house, makes BST truly unique, and the construction/design of the BST resulted in international recognition, as well as moved Rock Valley College into the forefront of leadership for community arts and entertainment.
Starlight Theatre is one of the nation’s largest professionally-produced community theatres. This oldest, continuously operating theatre in Rockford, offers amateur actors, singers, and dancers an opportunity to work under the direction of professional artistic and technical directors. It attracts hundreds of volunteer performers and crew members (totaling over 24,546 people), where they have each given of themselves for our community’s enrichment, and in the process have shared their joy of performing with audiences of nearly 40,000 each season and a total of more than 1,267,000 attendees over the years.
Starlight produces large-scale musicals with casts sometimes reaching into the hundreds! More than 140 shows have taken the Starlight stage, including: Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a new production of Boublil and Schönberg’s Les Misérables, Disney’s Geppetto & Son, Beauty & the Beast, Jesus Christ Superstar, and many more!
Starlight also boasts a distinguished roster of alums including some of the nation’s most gifted performers and technicians: Rockford’s New American Theatre founder J. R. Sullivan; Broadway star and voice of Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Jodi Mazorrati Benson; the late, great Marin Mazzie; Art Director of Hollywood’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Dan Webster; Chairman of NBC Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt; and Broadway Director and Star, Joe Mantello; among many others.
In the future Starlight will be expanding their season beyond four summer musical productions. In the summer of 2018 Starlight launched its new “Starlittle” series. Every year, at the end of the regular Starlight season, Starlight puts on a family production for children and adults of all ages to enjoy together. Starlittle shows feature adult actors preforming for children, something that is unique in the Rockford theatre community. Starlittle’s first show, Cinderella After the Ball, was a smash hit, and hundreds of young children came and experienced their first live theatre performance.
In the fall of 2018, Starlight launched two more theatre series. The first of these, “Starlight Shakes,” is an outdoor Shakespeare production that takes place on the lawn of the Rock Valley College campus. The Taming of the Shrew was Starlight Shakes’ first production, and students and community members from all over brought their lawn chairs and blankets to watch a show on the Ray Castle Stage, a stage designed to be set up and torn down anywhere on campus.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was the launch of the “Starlight Tradition” series, productions for families to experience together during the holidays. The Starlight crew constructed a cabin on the Bengt Sjostrom Stage which housed an audience of 250 people. Each performance sold out, and was a massive success. Families from all over enjoyed this new tradition.”
For additional info, please visit: RockValleyCollege.edu/Starlight.