GIve now and double your Impact!
Donations up to $50,000 through June 15 will be Fully Matched by the ellis Fund
Click HEre to See the MAtch Campaign’s Progress to Date!
Help us mount a dynamite summer season at Cohoes Music Hall, and a Very Special Fully-Free Production for Kids & Families at Albany’s Park PlayhousE!
It’s Time for our Annual Setting the Stage Appeal!
Your gift to our Setting the Stage Appeal will Be Matched through June 15!
Friends,
This is a summer like no other for Playhouse Stage Company — and your support has never mattered more.
You may have heard: the City of Albany cut our funding contract after just one year of reinstatement, and corporate sponsorship for the arts continues to decline across the region. These are real challenges, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But we're responding the way this organization always has — by adapting, by protecting our mission, and by showing up for our community.
This summer, we're presenting four productions across two venues. At Cohoes Music Hall, our year-round home in one of the oldest operating theaters in the country, we're staging Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Footloose: The Musical, and 13: The Musical. And at Park Playhouse in Albany's Washington Park, we're doing something we've never done before: making every single seat completely free for a professionally produced children's musical, Elephant & Piggie's We Are in a Play!, a joyful, family-focused festival event in late August designed to introduce a new generation of kids to live theater.
Every performer, musician, and crew member on our stages is a paid professional. Every student in our education programs receives instruction from working artists. And every family in Washington Park this August will experience world-class theater without spending a dime. That's who we are — and your generosity is what makes it possible.
Right now, thanks to the extraordinary support of the Ellis Family Fund (who you can learn more about below), every dollar you give through June 15 will be matched dollar for dollar, up to $50,000. That means your $50 gift becomes $100. Your $500 becomes $1,000. This is a rare opportunity to truly double the impact of your support at the moment we need it most.
Your gift to our Annual Setting the Stage Appeal helps us:
Keep Park Playhouse admission entirely free for all audiences
Produce professional musical theater year-round at Cohoes Music Hall
Provide young performers with life-changing opportunities through Playhouse Stage Academy
Pay the professional performers, teachers, musicians, and technicians who make our work happen
Bridge a critical funding gap as we build the next chapter of this 38-year-old organization
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today. Through June 15, every dollar goes twice as far.
With gratitude,
The Playhouse Team
Click here to see the Match Campaign Progress To Date!
Hats off to the Ellis Family for their immeasUREABLE support!
Over nearly 40 years, the Ellis family have been the single largest contributors to the Playhouse, helping to advance the organization’s mission of making the theatre arts accessible to EVERYONE in our region. Herb Ellis was the first and longest-serving Board President in Playhouse history, and Annmarie Ellis, herself, served as a Board Member for four years and chaired so many Gala events over the years. They are pictured here with our original “Excalibur,” a sword used across 25 years of Playhouse productions, including Camelot and Spamalot. They won the prop in a Playhouse charity auction in 1999, only to donate it back to the Playhouse for its continued use. It now hangs on the wall of Cohoes Music Hall with a plauqe in their honor. In an effort to support the Playhouse, tap into this community’s generosity, and inspire the next generartion of support for our mission, the Ellis Fund will match all donations through June 15, and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their continued leadership!