NORTH BEND — A little more than a month before the opening of the 2025 holiday season double feature, director Kristina Seleshanko arrived at The Liberty Theatre for rehearsal, then quickly turned around and left. The place reeked of gas.   

Luckily, there was no leak, but fire officials said the ancient heater in the 101-year-old North Bend theater — home to the Little Theatre on the Bay — was no longer safe. A worried Seleshanko, directing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, in which lots of things go wrong, couldn’t help but think that life was imitating art.

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“It was quite an ordeal,” Seleshanko said. “Fortunately, we did already have the funds in place to put in a new system, so we just pushed that along very quickly. We were able to get it done before opening.”

This year’s double feature, A Charlie Brown Christmas and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, isn’t just any old holiday show, but the first following the completion of the $4 million, 10-year-long restoration of the theater.

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Last year, the restoration effort earned the theater a 2024 Oregon Heritage Excellence Award. The project was noted for “preserving and honoring the theatre’s heritage while transitioning for the next 100 years as the hub of performing arts in Coos County.”

The restoration included repairing and painting the stucco exterior, restoring the rooftop copper domes that had been removed in 1974 because of leaks, and extensive refurbishing inside, including new seating, accessibility features, rehearsal space, dressing rooms, and a green room. The theater, built in 1924, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.  

“Originally, the auditorium was pretty gilded by modern standards,” Seleshanko said. “We’ve restored it true to the era, including stencils and decorative trim.” Workers also uncovered original lattice, light fixtures and the trim that framed the organ pipes from its days as silent-picture house.

This season, three performances, Nov. 28-30, remain of the double feature before the the Little Ole Christmas Opry on the Bay opens Dec. 5 for a three-day run through Dec. 7.

A Christmas tradition in Coos County and beyond since 1993, the Christmas opry grew from a concert that was a last-ditch effort of sorts a decade before, said Seleshanko.

“In 1982, back when the theater was in poor shape — and it was one of those moments in theater history where they weren’t sure if they were going to be able to proceed — somebody had the idea to do the Little Ole Opry on the Bay, basically mimicking the Grand Ole Opry,” Seleshanko said. “It’s been a huge success for our theater. We usually sell out our 300 seats every performance.”

Founded in a Coos Bay home in 1948, the Little Theatre is the second oldest continuously operating community theatre group in the state of Oregon — the title of first belongs to Very Little Theatre of Eugene. The group’s mission is a straightforward one-liner: “The mission of Little Theatre on the Bay is to cultivate the arts in Coos County.”

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Little Theatre of the Bay (LTOB) received nonprofit status in 1951, a decade that saw its performers taking the stage wherever they could find space — the high school, the North Bend airport gym, a bowling alley, and the Coos Bay IOOF Hall, where, according to the Liberty Theatre website history, “they had one of the few revolving stages in the country owned by a little theatre group, and the largest one in Oregon.”

Onto that stage stepped Roy Scheider, stationed then at the nearby Air Force Base and later to become known as Police Chief Martin Brody in the movie Jaws. The group’s website notes that Scheider worked on set construction, participated in every one of the theater group’s productions, and directed three.

In 1959, at about the same time Scheider was to be discharged from the Air Force and return to New York to pursue his acting career, the little theater group faced losing its performing space due to city safety concerns. In an interview with the local newspaper, The World, Scheider said, “It’s been a blessing to me … I don’t know what I would have done here without the Little Theater.”

But he also expressed misgivings: “I’d like to leave here knowing that Little Theater will go on — but I have my doubts. Since we lost our theater, some of the so-called loyalists have abandoned us like a sinking ship….  Many people lack the creative urge … they’re too lazy to leave television and other passive entertainment for something active. But participating is a lot more fun…”

Fortunately for both performers and theater fans, Scheider’s doubts proved to be unfounded.

In 1959, the theater group was offered a home at the Liberty Theatre, which had closed a few years earlier after a modern theater with a wide screen able to show movies in formats such as VistaVision opened nearby.

The Liberty was originally built for movies and vaudeville, said Jeanne Woods, chair of the restoration committee and vice president of the Little Theatre on the Bay board of directors. “So, they remodeled parts along the years, expanding the apron … and then they started doing big musicals.”

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In 1975, the theater group bought the Liberty, and the names since have become almost synonymous, the performing group’s past just as colorful as the physical building’s, if not more so.

Seven years after taking ownership, the Little Theatre debuted its Little Ole Opry. After 11 years of success with that production, in 1993 it added the Little Ole Christmas Opry on the Bay.

Then in 2015, the theater company’s luck took a huge turn when the city of North Bend expanded the urban renewal district to include the Liberty Theatre, awarding it $500,000 seed money.

“Over the course of 10 years, we were able to leverage that seed money with matching grants,” said Woods.

In the 10 years since the restoration committee was formed, the entire committee has stayed together, inviting the community to share in the “excitement of the project,” Woods said. “Our community has been so supportive. We’re a small community; we’re isolated and the arts are very important down here. This is where we get our entertainment.

“They brought their nickels and dimes, bought tickets to the shows.  We’ve had statewide support, as well. The Oregon Cultural Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, private foundations like the James F. and Marion Miller Foundation. It just goes on and on. It really has been a wild ride.”  

Throughout the 10 years of restoration, the theater remained open (except during the pandemic), and every first weekend in December, fans counted on the seeing the Little Ole Christmas Opry.

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“It’s just the most fantastic Christmas concert you’ve ever been to,” Seleshanko said. “There’s traditional songs, there’s pop songs. We have the Tiny Dancers, and they can be as young as 2, and our current band leader is 84. The audience is usually on their feet. I mean, it’s just people having a grand time, and it’s decorated to the hilt. For a lot of people here on the coast, it’s just sort of the beginning event of Christmas.”

Theater lore includes the story of Opry director Shirley Kintner performing a Patsy Cline number in the 1991 Opry while pregnant. Now, she and her daughter, Hannah, co-direct the Christmas opry. “It’s always a different show, and we get people from all around the state and out of state, people of all ages,” Seleshanko said.

And they continue to prove their most famous alumni wrong.

“Scheider was concerned the Little Theatre on the Bay would not last long,” Seleshanko said. “I guess he was wrong. Part of our mission is to bring up the next generation of theatergoers and performers so that the LTOB — in the Liberty Theatre — can continue for decades to come. And who knows? Maybe we’re training the next Scheider. Maybe he or she is even in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”