Sen. Klobuchar Visits GREAT Theatre in Waite Park

(KNSI) – Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar made a stop in Waite Park on Monday afternoon to see GREAT Theatre, which was one of more than 220 Minnesota recipients of Shuttered Venue Operators Grant funding this year. That grant program was created by Klobuchar and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas’s Save Our Stages Act, which was passed into law late last year.

At GREAT Theatre’s offices, staff showed Klobuchar the scene shop and Learning Lab Theatre, currently in use as a rehearsal space for the cast of Little Shop of Horrors, which will run September 10th through the 19th at the Paramount Center for the Arts.

Both the Paramount and GREAT Theatre received Shuttered Venue Operators Grant funding.

“From the Save Our Stages, we received just over $460,000,” said Lacey Schirmer, GREAT Theatre managing director. “That’s in addition to the $270,000 we received from a PPP loan, which will be forgiven, and nearly $600,000 we raised from our community through a challenge match, which was also really critical to helping us survive and thrive.”

Klobuchar discussed the importance of getting the Save Our Stages Act funding out to venues in smaller cities in towns across the nation.

“A lot of my interest in [the bill] was because of places like this, because I just believe that if you want people who grow up in St. Cloud, Waite Park to be able to live here, you need to have theatre, you need to have bars, you need to have coffee shops, daycare, everything,” Klobuchar said. “If you have everything just in the biggest cities, it’s not going to work.

“It’s beyond even just the art,” Klobuchar continued. “People want to be able to live in areas — we were just in Willmar at the Barn Theatre, you know — and they can then live in places and have a lower cost of living, they start businesses which they might not be able to do other places, and it’s just been a real virtue to our country that we have had midsize and small towns. So, to me, it’s way beyond the theater itself; it’s just about how we want to run our country and how we want to foster ideas and entrepreneurship.”

Klobuchar says the Save Our Stages Act was the biggest arts funding bill passed in the nation’s history at $15 billion. An additional $1.25 billion for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant was tacked on as part of the American Rescue Plan passed in March.

With some uncertainty this fall and winter caused by the spreading Delta strain of COVID-19, Schirmer says safety is top of mind of GREAT Theatre going forward.

“As we’ve shown over the last 18 months, we’ll do whatever we have to to survive and continue,” Schirmer said. “It’s so important to our community to have a thriving arts culture.”