After 20 years and more than 70 productions, Santa Cruz’s Jewel Theatre prepares for one last curtain call

Like everything else under the sun, theater companies are born and theater companies die. That arts organizations have a finite lifespan is surprising to no one. Still, when Santa Cruz’s Jewel Theatre Company announced more than a year ago that it was going dark for good in the spring of 2024, many in the theater community were stunned, cushioned from the shock at the time perhaps by the many Jewel productions still to come.

Now, here we are, approaching Jewel’s final production. It’s a revival of “Always … Patsy Cline,” the biographical stage musical that Jewel first brought to life in 2017. In the rehearsals leading up to the production’s first preview performance Wednesday (in advance of its official opening night Friday), the emotions have been understandably powerful for a close-knit team of performers and technicians who are doing what they love for the last time.

“It’s going to be very hard,” said Diana Torres Koss, a longtime actor at Jewel, about the final show, which runs through May 26. “But it’s also bringing together so many people who have worked for Julie over the years. People are calling and saying, ‘We just want to be there.’”

“Julie” is Julie James, the woman who founded Jewel back in 2005 and has been running the company ever since, with stalwart support from her mother, Mary James, and a core staff — whether that means managing the Colligan, keeping the company solvent through fundraising and audience development, programming the season, hiring actors and directors, and even taking a prominent role on stage. She is also the person who made the call to bring the Jewel era to a close, choosing the leaving-’em-wanting-more over what she saw as a long decline of ever-diminishing quality. She said she wanted Jewel’s final year to be “dignified and responsible. Just make it a celebration of what a wonderful and amazing thing that we’ve been able to do, and give thanks to everyone who supported us.”

In fact, “Always” marks a kind of curtain call for the root-stock personalities that have defined Jewel for almost 20 years. It’s a two-person play, a hit when Jewel produced it seven years ago, which features years-long friends and frequent cast mates Julie James and Koss in the lead roles, and directed by another longtime Jewel-er, Shaun Carroll.

For the dozens of actors, directors, playwrights and technicians who have worked at Jewel over the years, as well as for its audience, this month is a time for reflection and appreciation. 

This second production of “Always” will mark Jewel’s 72nd show, a number all the more astounding considering that the COVID pandemic wiped out an entire season. In that time, Jewel has maintained top-flight standards of performance and presentation as one of only two independent Equity theater companies in Santa Cruz (Jewel’s history overlaps with both the demise of Shakespeare Santa Cruz and its rebirth as the next-generation Santa Cruz Shakespeare). 

Jewel’s production history stands as a monument to its leader’s commitment to eclecticism and adventure. As a programmer, James found a balance between charming her audiences with famous crowd-pleasers (“A Streetcar Named Desire”) and challenging them with tough-sell but satisfying surprises (the intimidatingly titled clash-of-cultures dramedy “Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle”). She has delivered to her audience musicals, comedies, family tragedies, film noir suspense, historical dramas, literary classics, and even a “rock ’n’ roll soap opera.” She’s even championed playwrights that local audiences might consider their own, from John Steinbeck to Santa Cruz’s own Kate Hawley. 

Among the several roles that Santa Cruz actor Patty Gallagher played at Jewel was in a one-person production of “An Iliad” in 2022, in which she retold the story of the Trojan War based on the Homeric classic. She said that James developed a kind of symbiosis with Santa Cruz audiences that allowed her the freedom to exercise such eclecticism.

“It’s a kind of feedback loop between Julie and her audience,” said Gallagher. “The audience would trust Julie to show them something interesting even if they had never heard of it, or even if it was a weird one-person show about war. And the more they trusted her, the more she could take risks in programming.”

James doesn’t just go for the easy lay-ups, said director and dramaturge Susan Myer Silton, “she goes for the 3-pointers too.” Among the plays that Silton directed at Jewel was Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” in 2013. “It’s really dense,” said Silton of “Arcadia.” “It’s full of scientific issues, mathematical issues, the history of landscaping and English country manners, the history of architecture.” To help the audience absorb the power of “Arcadia,” Silton and James, who had an acting role in the play, published a glossary of terms in the play, and staged a talk/presentation with a mathematician. “She’s got a million things whirling around her,” said Silton, “but she’s always fully engaged.”

James was already an accomplished actor when she decided to direct and stage “The Love Match,” at the Broadway Playhouse in Santa Cruz in the summer of 2005. A couple of years later, she reconnected with Diana Torres Koss, a fellow actor and old friend from their days together at Santa Clara University. “We just hit it off,” said Koss, “like we hadn’t ever even been apart all those years.”

James directed Koss in the musical “I Do! I Do!” in 2007. Since then, Koss has been involved in about 30 productions at Jewel, despite the fact that she lives in Santa Clara. 

James and her mother, Mary, took the next step in establishing Jewel as the resident company at Center Stage, formerly Actors’ Theatre, in the Art Center in downtown Santa Cruz. Then, in 2015, Jewel graduated to the brand-new, 182-seat Colligan Theater on the campus of the Tannery Arts Center, where it has produced four or five shows a year for the past decade. James developed her core group of support, which included Mary James, her sister, Jacque James, and staffers Shaun Carroll and Steve Gerlach, alongside a broad confederacy of actors and directors.

“She feels an immense responsibility to what she’s created,” said Koss, “and what people depend upon, and the reputation that she’s earned. Julie does everything, but everybody else pitches in too. Nobody is sitting on the side going, ‘Oh, that’s not my job.’”

The pandemic derailed Jewel’s momentum and threatened to close it for good, but James and her crew kept audiences interested and engaged with online productions. 

“It was a blow,” said Carroll, who moved from San Jose to Santa Cruz after taking on a full-time job at Jewel during the Colligan move. “And Julie said to us, ‘I’m going to do everything possible to keep us going, so we don’t have to shut down.’ And, in that moment, it wasn’t about keeping the theater alive. Her goal, her first priority, was to keep us employed.”

Jewel’s audiences responded strongly when the company opened up again in 2021, but the year after that, Jewel experienced an audience fall-off. Before long, it was subject to the same forces that were buffeting the theater business nationwide, mainly audiences’ reluctance to go back to big gatherings, particularly in indoor settings. Subsequent forecasting of audience trends convinced James that the future was anything but rosy. She decided to stop at the top of her game rather than string along a few more diminished seasons before calling it quits anyway. “I just think it would be too much,” she told me in 2023. “It would kill us, in a different way.”

Some close to Jewel say that it’s almost miraculous that the company has lasted this long, given the enormous challenges in producing high-quality theater under the best of circumstances, the ever-increasing pressures that have made those circumstances difficult, and Santa Cruz’s status as a relatively small city supporting organizations that usually only big cities can support.

“Julie and the company have been in such a rare situation,” said New York director Paul Mullins, who has helmed several productions at Jewel, including the recently closed “Under Ben Bulben.” “It’s just astonishing what she accomplishes, not only with expertise but with good humor and kindness. It’s a loss. I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of people producing theater, and Julie is at the top of her game.”

It was during the Christmas holiday season in 2022, said Carroll, a few months before the public announcement, that James informed him of her decision to shutter Jewel: “She said, ‘I don’t think we can survive this. But we’re going to hang on as long as we can.’ But she also didn’t want to go down sinking. She didn’t want to be in debt. She didn’t want to have to beg for money knowing that even though we may get it this year, we probably won’t next year, so we’re going to have to beg again. That’s not who she is.”

“I am bereft,” said Patty Gallagher who gave an impassioned speech in praise of James and Jewel at the end of the last performance of “Under Ben Bulben” in April. “It’s not just that we’ve lost a theater. But this one was so specifically a Santa Cruz love story. I mean, I stood on that stage at the end of ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ and our hearts were just broken. And we were all standing there in disbelief, [thinking] how can something this beautiful and this strong just go away? But I think that Julie’s also doing something beautiful, going out on her own terms, not waiting until it peters out and withers away, but drawing the end of the circle and saying ‘This moment in time was beautiful, and we achieved something important for the community and for each other.’”

Jewel Theatre Company’s “Always … Patsy Cline” plays May 8-26 at the Colligan Theater. 

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