New Found Man: Booher Eyes Final Season with PCPA

It took more than a decade for Mark Booher, Pacific Conservatory Theatre (PCPA) artistic director and dean, to get the rights to mount a production of Come from Away. That isthe long-running, Tony Award-winning musical about the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander during the week following the September 11 attacks, when 38 planes carrying more than 6,700 passengers were ordered to land at the local airport. The planes’ collective grounding swelled Gander’s population by almost 40 percent, and the touching story of how the residents cared for and eventually became close with the stranded passengers became a critical and box office success. 

“We knew about it long before it went to Broadway, and we immediately found the story very moving, a perfect kind of show for PCPA to produce,” Booher recalled. “But it just became available to regional theaters now.” 

Just in time, as Come from Away kicks off the final PCPA season at Solvang Festival Theater before Booher retires from his leadership role at the end of a year, bringing to a close his 27-year tenure with the organization.

“It’s a story that portrays the humanity between people in the midst of a historically tragic circumstance; something I think everybody’s really hungry for right now,” he said. “It’s about human kindness and empathy and selflessness and goodness – which we could all really use a big dose of.” 

The show is based on interviews the writers did with actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers some 10 years after the events. An easily accessible folk-pop soundtrack maps to the narrative’s portrayal of strangers, forced together by sudden, extreme circumstances, transcending clashes of culture and language. The townsfolk of Gander ultimately throw open their homes, their bars – and their hearts – to the grounded passengers; a true story with a timely keynote. The cast of a dozen portray both townsfolk and marooned passengers, alternating between them in a clever bit of playwriting. 

The appeal of the musical – it played on Broadway for more than five years – also meant that Booher was able to attract some of PCPA’s best, past and present, to work on the show. 

“Everybody I know wanted to be involved, from the actors to the resident artists,” Booher said. “It was an opportunity to get Roger DeLaurier, our past associate artistic director, back to direct it, and actors including Karole Foreman, Karin Hendricks-Bolen, Mike Fiore, and Molly Stilliens joining basically our entire resident company in the show. So we are definitely putting our best foot forward with it and that’s really special.”

The booking arrangement that garnered Come from Away, which runs June 11-27, also resulted in the company snagging its second show of the summer in Disney’s Frozen – The Broadway Musical, which will also be making its regional theater debut in the area when it runs in Solvang from July 5-August 2. Concern about the company’s capacity to handle the ambitious technical aspects of the big Broadway hit convinced Booher to take on directing the production himself, a role he’s taken on but sporadically over his nearly three decades with PCPA.

“I was up for a big challenge, and it’s been a pleasure, because the musical is actually really good with a level of dimensionality in terms of the relationships, psychology, and emotions of the characters, so much so that it surprises people,” he said. “There’s a lot more going on than in the animated feature. Particularly for an adult audience, who find it moving and beautiful.”

Among the technical considerations (as the show moves outdoors under the stars after a winter run in Santa Maria) was figuring out how to have the myriad projections that set the scenes in the snow and ice be visible when the sun hasn’t yet set for part of the opening act. The solution was employing LED screens, which are much brighter than projections. 

“That was easy. What’s great is when you have to make magic on stage, and really have to pull out all the stops,” Booher said. “The multimedia element is something unique and has never been seen done on the Festival Theatre stage to this level. We have snow machines so it will snow outside, which will be lovely. And there are parts of the scenic and costume design that make for magical moments, like having Elsa completely change her costume on stage in front of the audience in less than a second, and in Solvang, where there aren’t trap room mechanisms. It’s been a lot of fun.” 

The PCPA Solvang season finishes with Beehive – The ‘60s Musical, which plays July 23-August 2 at the Festival Theatre. Booher said the vibrant, high-energy tribute to the generation-defining women in pop, from sock hops to soul to social change, is more than a typical jukebox musical song cycle. 

“The ‘60s were an amazing time of change in America, certainly for women, so the musical looks at both the pop music aspect of what was going on and what was happening socially and politically at the time. It shows how pop music was reflective of the change in people’s lives. So it’s got both a great sort of sparkly joy on the surface, and some wonderful substance.”

Looking back as his departure from PCPA looms, Booher said he was proud of all the connections he’s made over more than a quarter-century at the central coast theatrical institution, both with colleagues and students.

“It’s been very exciting to have had a piece of advancing the careers of the students of the conservatory,” he said. “So many have gone on to be very prominent while others have contributed significant work in the theater.” 

Facing forward, Booher said there’s some trepidation that’s outweighed by anticipation of what’s next. 

“The frightening thing about retiring from here without retiring is not knowing. It’s been my job to know what comes next over 18 months for 150 plus people and 50,000 people in the community. I’m excited to open up space to do more creative work, unencumbered by the non-artistic strictures and structures of having to run an institution.”

Booher already knows what’s in his immediate future after December: Directing an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ 1945 novel The Great Divorce for a national tour with Fellowship for the Performing Arts, who produced Lewis’ Screwtape Letters for the theater. 

“We rehearse in New York and then start a tour in North Carolina in early 2027 and run through into the summer of 2028. I’ve been parked here on the Central Coast for most of my directing career over the last 25 years. So this will be a great new adventure.”

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