Celebrating a 20th anniversary as a small theater company is not a minor accomplishment. To get there, you have to sustain a core group of supporters while growing new audiences. You have to weather the uncertainties surrounding performance space and funding sources. You have to be nimble, particularly when a global pandemic arrives just at a crucial moment in your expansion.
“20 years is a heck of a long time,” said Teresa Thuman, who’s commemorating the Sound Theatre Company milestone this year, kicking off with a concert-version reprise of one of its most beloved productions, “The Wild Party,” running Jan. 30 through Feb. 8 at the Center Theatre in the Seattle Center Armory.
Thuman, now co-artistic director with Shermona Mitchell, founded Sound in 2006 primarily as a way to produce work she found meaningful, beginning with a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” on the shores of Lake Sammamish. The first five years were about pushing herself artistically, but Sound was becoming something bigger.
“I was kind of resistant to consider myself an artistic director, and then came to the conclusion that was exactly what was happening,” Thuman said. “We just started finding more and more people to work with, and it grew in people’s relationship to the work. Around 2010, there was a group of people who really wanted to make this a company.”
Soon, Sound was producing full seasons, and achieved a “real breakthrough” with Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party” in 2013, Thuman said. The jazz-age musical about seduction and vice at a raucous apartment soiree was a hit for Sound, dazzling critics and winning the Gregory Award for outstanding musical.
“It was this wonderful coming together of ‘Let’s do a musical’ and ‘Let’s do one that the other theaters either won’t or can’t do,’” Thuman said.
Corey McDaniel, who directed the original production, is returning to direct this year’s concert staging, and he said the excitement was palpable among the theatrical community, with a large talent pool of hopeful auditioning actors.
“So many people walked in the room and said, ‘This is a dream role for me,’” McDaniel said.
13 years ago, the show was a culmination of some dreams and a springboard for more.
“‘Wild Party’ was so pivotal for so many of us,” McDaniel said. “It really put Sound Theatre on the map. It put me on the map in a way I hadn’t anticipated. It really launched a lot of us forward, creatively and professionally.”
While producing a concert version with minimal choreography and blocking is simpler in some ways, there are still nearly 40 musical numbers for the cast of 14 to learn in “Wild Party.” Helping guide that process is music director Nathan Young, well-equipped as the producing artistic director of Showtunes, the long-running company dedicated to staging concert versions of musicals.
“It’s incredibly exciting to dive back into such a deep, rich, complex script and score after 13 more years of education in my field,” McDaniel said.
In 2026, the theme of free expression exemplified by “The Wild Party” feels very relevant, Thuman said. Reports show that newly implemented state laws are increasing the rate of book bans across the country. The source material for “The Wild Party,” a 1928 narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March, was banned and largely forgotten for decades due to its sexual content.
Along with “The Wild Party,” other shows in Sound’s season will continue to embrace poetic imagery and align with the theater’s social-justice mission, Thuman said. And the company plans to revisit more past shows in a reading format.
“(We’ll) try them on, see if they still feel like the right play for us,” she said. “Maybe we have evolved into a very different aesthetic, which could very well be, but we don’t want to let go of the history.”
Evolution has been part of Sound’s story throughout its lifespan, moving from personal passion projects to community-rooted work that highlights underrepresented voices, including deaf and disabled artists. The pandemic necessitated another evolution into online streaming right at a time when Sound was reaching new heights: A January 2020 world premiere staging of Darren Canady’s sci-fi-inflected “Reparations,” co-produced with LANGSTON.
“It basically sold out the entire run,” Thuman said. “Definitely more people saw that than any other Sound Theatre show. And then everything closed down the next day. It would be so great to achieve that again, but we have to let go of that and just keep doing the work that we really believe in and find is really true.”
McDaniel is well acquainted with the challenges to a small company’s survival. After successfully navigating the pandemic, he had to abruptly shutter his own company, Theatre22, in 2022 after nearly a decade of existence.
“It is impossible to keep a theater company afloat … It takes a very large community of support and buy-in. It takes an ability to pick up and continue through good terms and bad terms,” he said.
“The fact that Sound Theatre Company has survived 20 years is a testament to Teresa’s dedication to the community,” McDaniel continued. “Her love of the community and everyone in it, how deeply she wants to effect change in all of our lives — this is the blessing of Teresa Thuman.”
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