Hale Centre Theatre: HCTCelebrates 25 Years of Patron Enjoyment

1985: "Back to the Future" is in the movie theaters, Ronald Reagan is in the Oval Office, a tank of gas costs $1.20 and a ticket to Hale Centre Theatre's first show, "I Came to Your Wedding," is $4.50.

"Yes, it's been 25 years, and I've got all the gray hairs to prove it," said vice president and executive director Sally Dietlein in a phone interview.

Dietlein, who has celebrated the theater's anniversary all week with the scratchy voice to prove it, talked about how far Hale has come.

"Suddenly, they're 25 and you think, 'What happened?' You know you sent them to kindergarten, you know there were braces in there somewhere, it just all blends in. And now they're 25. It's pretty amazing."

Dietlein and her husband, executive producer Mark Dietlein, received a call while living in Idaho. "We were living in Pocatello and Grandma and Grandpa called."

Grandma and Grandpa, otherwise known as Ruth and Nathan Hale, who together ran a successful theater in Glendale, Calif., one of the longest-running theaters in the country, had retired and moved to Utah.

"But they hated retirement," Sally Dietlein said. "They could not sit still. They started to set up like cement. Grandma said, 'My arthritis is going to kick in and we're going to be dead if we don't do something.'"

So, Ruth and Nathan, Sally and Mark and Ruth and Nathan's daughter, Sally Hale Swenson Rice, and her husband, Bob, opened the first Hale Center Theater at 2801 S. Main. The old lingerie-factory-turned-arena-theater seated about 225.

"We would use Grandma and Grandpa's plays a lot of the time. They had a wonderful charm that people liked," Sally Dietlein said. "We were proud that we once did a show for $30. Literally, we worked on not spending money."

"It was quite a beginning." Dietlein remembered that before Hale offered reserved seating, "People would start lining up an hour and a half before the show, lining the street and the building," she said.

"People would bring their card tables and have dinner or bring cards to play while they were waiting."

The Hales implemented reserved seating a few years later, a departure from what they'd done in Glendale. "We broke other rules," Dietlein said. "Double-casting was not a concept, and we were the first in Utah to let people eat in their seats; the patrons love it."

"Storage was a challenge," she said. "We never had the same things in our living rooms," she said. "We would rotate things in and out of hour houses; we'd use the furniture on stage."

The family also purchased a couple of small homes near the theater for storage, costume building and rehearsal space. "It was quite a beginning."

Today, Hale Centre Theatre is now housed in a sprawling, state-of-the-art venue in West Valley City that seats more than 600 patrons. It boasts season subscriptions numbers pushing 21,000. It just purchased a 40,000-square-foot warehouse for storage of props, costumes and sets, At its most expensive production yet, the theater produced a musical for $850,000.

"I think it was 'Ragtime' that cost that much," Dietlein said. "But the average musical generally cost $300,000 to $400,000. People are always surprised at how much it cost, because it's (our tickets) so affordable. We will not raise our tickets prices."

Dietlein repeated a lesson taught by Grandma and Grandpa Hale: "Theater cannot be elitist, and expensive tickets class people out of enjoying theater."

Looking back at 25 years of involvement with theater, Dietlein is most proud of being able to give talented local performers and technicians a place to work and pursue their passions.

"They're amazingly good. I don't know how we're so lucky to have them, but I'm so glad we do."

"And one of our favorite things is to stand at the bottom of the stairs and just look at the faces of patrons as they exit," she said. "Sometimes it's laughter or chatter or a tear. But it's the look of satisfaction. We just hope we keep pleasing them."

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HCT Celebrates 25 Years in Utah