After four years, city drops curtain on theater group’s fundraising fireworks stand

The struggling Paradise Theatre suffered another blow last week when the city of Gig Harbor unexpectedly denied the performance group a permit for a fireworks stand on the vacant lot it has used for the last four years.

“They’ve basically killed the theater,” said Paradise director Jeff Richards last week.

The fireworks stand at the corner of Rosedale Street and Stinson Avenue has been a major source of income for the the 20-year-old semiprofessional theater group.

The Paradise is an institution in Gig Harbor, and its shows — musicals and community theater standards — have been well-attended. But recently it has suffered a run of bad luck.

Last year, the Paradise lost the lease to its performance space next to the Gig Harbor Post Office. It moved to an old movie theater in Port Orchard, but in March, the coronavirus pandemic forced the shutdown of its remaining activities, including an acting school.

“We’ve been left with no income,” Richards said. “None.”

The fireworks stand usually brings in around $6,000 in the week before the Fourth of July holiday, Richards said.

“Our plan was to take that money and use it in early Autumn to kick off at least our classes, and maybe a production or two,” he said. “Now that’s gone.”

He said it is now too late to find another location, because the fireworks wholesaler has run out of time to arrange for permits, insurance and other details before the fireworks season opens next week.

Zoning no one noticed

Richards said the city’s explanation was that the vacant lot was not zoned for fireworks sales — something the city said no one had noticed until there were complaints and planning staff looked it up. The Paradise applied for a one-week zoning variance, but that was refused without explanation, Richards said.

Mayor Kit Kuhn said there had been complaints from neighbors last year about loud talking and a noisy generator. That led planning staff to look at the zoning.

“The city doesn’t go around looking for code violations,” Mayor Kit Kuhn told The Gateway last weekend, “But when they are brought to our attention, we have to respond.”

The site is parking lot next to a disused building that used to be a truck depot for Spadoni construction.

“We’ve been there for four years and there’s never been a problem,” said Richards. “We’ve never had a complaint about noise or anything else.” The generator, he said, is shut off at night.

Richard said he thinks the complaint came from someone influental in the city’s “old boy network.”

Changing neighborhood

Kuhn said the neighborhood has changed since the stand began operating four years ago. There has been a large residential development added to the south.

Kuhn said the complaints — and the zoning problem — were made known to the Paradise a year ago, but the group waited until the last minute to apply for a variance.

“If this was a make-or-break thing, as Richards says, I would have thought they would have started working on it six months ago,” Kuhn said. “And I would have thought they would have had a Plan B.”

Richards and his wife, Vicki, are actors who once ran an Equity-waiver theater on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. They came to Gig Harbor looking for a more affordable place to live, he said, and had a 10-year run producing drama at Chapel Hill Church before taking over the old Performance Circle in 2000.

The Paradise Theatre has produced more than 140 shows in the last 20 years, alternating new works with standards like West Side Story, Beauty and the Beast, The Producers, To Kill a Mockingbird and others.

When the Performance Circle was torn down, the Paradise moved to a property on Burnham Drive for a while, but that too was developed for housing. The theater group then moved to the old Rexall drug store next to the Post Office, and operated successfully there for two years, but lost the lease last October.

The property manager said the ownership group wanted to put a more profitable tenant in the space, Richards said, but it is still sitting empty.

This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 12:00 AM.