The Flagler Playhouse, for 46 years a mainstay of the performing arts in the county, lost the rustic theater it has occupied and packed with audiences since 2006 in Bunnell as a fire destroyed it Sunday night into early Monday. Flagler County Fire Chief Michael Tucker said the building was irreparable.
The nearly half-century old building and its white steeple, once the home of First Baptist Church until the playhouse bought it in 2006, had been a landmark in the heart of Bunnell, across the street from the old courthouse (now a private school). The cause of the fire is not known at the moment, though a state fire marshal was expected at the scene overnight.
No one was hurt as firefighters from Flagler County Fire Rescue, the Palm Coast Fire Department and the Flagler Beach Fire Department surrounded the old building with ladder trucks and doused it from a battery of water canons, but only to contain the flames and keep them from spreading to the theater’s annex, lounge and offices, which appear to have been spared. That mean the theater’s documents, its costumes and its props may have been saved, as has JJ Graham’s art studio and his own large collection of art works, which he had just moved into a portion of the theater a few weeks ago.
A devastated Jerri Berry, the Flagler Playhouse president, stood with a fellow board member across the street from the theater, watching, as flames, black smoke and torrents of water engulfed the white roof and the steeple nearing midnight. Berry had been at the theater earlier that day, as had its technical crew for a tech rehearsal, in preparation for what was to be its season opener Friday–“The Play That Goes Wrong.”
“I was here earlier in the annex, looking at furniture and things like that, I was at the football field, I was here most of the afternoon,” Berry said. “I’m just shocked.” She said the organization had recently invested in updating its air conditioning system and other improvements over the years. The theater was exploring launching a capital campaign to improve parking and to invest in a new sound system. “This comes as a complete shock.”
A passerby alerted authorities of seeing smoke rising from the back of the building just before 10 p.m. “We got on scene and the crews encountered heavy smoke conditions coming from the building,” Tucker said. “We made a quick attack from the front side of the building and from the side of the building. Once we got inside the conditions deteriorated that fast that we actually had to evacuate.” The crews were in the theater and the proscenium before they were forced out by the deteriorating conditions, for their safety, at which point they took the more defensive approach of containing the fire to keep it from spreading to the annex and other portions of the building.
“The offices are in the very back. That’s been saved,” Tucker said.
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Created in 1977 as the Little Theatre of Palm Coast, the Flagler Playhouse led a nomadic existence for 30 years until the 2006 purchase of the old church in Bunnell for $865,000. At the time, Diane Ellertsen was the president, and had led the fundraising drive and the purchase.
It’s just a blessing that nobody was hurt and nobody was on campus,” Berry said. This afternoon’s tech rehearsal had ended in mid-afternoon. The building is insured, Berry said.
“It is devastating. It is devastating,” the Playhouse president, who took over during Covid, said. “It’s really our second home. I invest more time here than I do at my full time paid job.”
For culture and the arts in Flagler County, it is yet another blow in a crushing year that has seen the disappearance of four–now five–of the county’s long-standing cultural pillars for different reasons–the Flagler County Art League, the Palm Coast Arts Foundation, Gargiulo Art Foundation, JJ Graham’s Salvo Art project, an now the Playhouse’s theater.
The Playhouse itself is not over as an organization, of course. It had net assets of nearly $1 million, according to its 2021 tax filing, though the lion’s share of that is the building’s value. Berry said the organization may look for alternative venues to still put on its 2023-24 season.
[This is a developing story.]
