Rockford area theater fans have been entertained at the outdoor Starlight Theatre at Rock Valley College for the past 50 years.

For the past 50 years, Starlight Theatre at Rock Valley College has been a summer staple of the Rockford region.

Much of the credit for the outdoor theatre’s evolution and success can be attributed to director Mike Webb.

Webb has worked on Starlight productions for 40 years, serving as its director since the mid-1980s. During those years, Webb has taken the theatre from little more than a farmer’s field with a rudimentary stage, to a state-of-the art performance venue complete with an architecturally designed roof that opens to the stars.

A driving desire and unfaltering determination from community members was behind the conception of Starlight Theatre decades ago.

“Two years after Rock Valley College opened, some students went to the Dean of Community Services, Reuben Johnson, a local organist and musician, and asked him if they could do a summer theatre performance,” Webb said.

After some discussion with Johnson on where to stage the production and the logistics of seating, he agreed and the musical “Finnian’s Rainbow” was presented in August of 1967.

“People came out in droves because it’s beautiful here in the summer,” Webb said. “The college was Dr. Rogers’ old dairy farm and so, the part where Starlight currently sits was a grazing field for the dairy cows, so it’s a very organic location.”

Webb said that many of Starlight’s early performers, directors and staff were drawn from theatre enthusiasts at Boylan Catholic High School and Rockford University. Some plays were presented in Starlight’s early days, but Webb said that musicals were better received by the audiences. Webb recalled an early production of “Oklahoma!” that used live horses.

In the 1970s, Starlight director Ted Bacino, brought Broadway-inspired productions to the theater department at Boylan High School and then to Starlight Theatre.

“Ted started doing productions at Boylan and these productions were legendary,” Webb said. “They were really topflight because he was copying the sets and renting the costumes from New York.”

The theatre got some much needed renovations during Bacino’s tenure.

“In 1975, bleachers were set up for seating and the college did its first capital campaign to build what was called the Community Arts Center. In 1976, $300,000 was raised to put in a stage platform and they graded a hill. There were no chairs but there was an orchestra pit, so the audience was pretty far away from the actors,” Webb said. “There was supposed to be a three-act renovation which was to include a stage, a seating bowl, a stage house over the stage and some tech towers in the back. That never happened.”

Thanks to renovations, the Starlight Theater company can rehearse from March through the summer months.

Webb’s friend and mentor, Neil Thackaberry was instrumental in getting Webb involved at Starlight during the 1980s.

“He called me up and said, ‘Hey, Mike, I need you to come out and paint the Wizard of Oz set.’ I said, ’Hey Neil, I just finished grad school and I’m getting married next Sunday and you’re coming to the wedding.’ And he said, ‘I know, the show opens on Wednesday.’ So I came over to Starlight with my best man and we spent 24 hours shifts painting and slept on the stage,” Webb said. By 1985, Webb was directing productions at Starlight and was officially hired as the theatre’s director.

For most of Starlight Theatre’s existence, the performers and the audience have been at the mercy of summer weather.

It wasn’t until 1999 that Webb was given a green light by then RVC president Roland “Chip” Chapdelaine, to begin the process of renovating the venue. Working only with a mental image, Webb built a paper model of his vision for the theatre.

“I said to the president, ‘I would like to put a roof over the audience, just to protect them from the rain.’ That was the hardest thing about my job, judging if it was going to rain between eight and 10 PM when the performances ran,” Webb said.

With the financial backing of the Sjostrom family, long-time benefactors of Starlight Theatre, Webb was entrusted with the task of retaining an architect who could bring his paper model to life.

Through his Starlight colleagues, Webb got in touch with Jeanne Gang, a native of Belvidere, who agreed to design the renovation.

“Jeanne Gang is now a ‘Starchitect’, not just an architect,” Webb said. She’s one of the top female architects in the world.”

With Gang in charge of the design, Webb had a special request for the renovation.

“I told her that I would love for the roof over the audience to open. She said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.”

The entire Starlight renovation project ran from 1999 to 2003 and included many upgrades benefitting the audience and performers alike.

“In 2001, we expanded the seating bowl and put in some additional concrete foundation. In 2002, we did the stage tower so I could close the doors (to the stage). The stage used to be an open platform so all the props up here had to be locked up after every performance…we used to carry the props down to the basement to lock them up and sometimes wouldn’t finish until after midnight…so, now it takes about seven minutes to close the doors to the stage and lock it up,” Webb said.

The theatre’s crowning glory is the roof which opens to the night sky. Typically open for performances, the roof uses an electric screw jack and compression bearings to open six triangular panels like the petals of a flower which form the outline of a star when fully opened. The concrete back wall of the seating bowl features porthole windows that are arranged in a pattern of constellations. Backlighting makes the portholes resemble stars. The entire Starlight renovation was completed in 2003 at a cost of $8.5 million. The theatre can seat 1,050 patrons.

The renovated Starlight venue allows for maximum outdoor comfort for patrons and performers alike. Webb recalls the perils of Starlight’s early performance seasons, “In the old days, we were out here in the open air, and there was nothing to protect anybody; so everybody got cooked. In the third year, the stage floor had rotted out so badly that I had to invest in a new stage floor, because it had sat out in the snow. That cost $17,000; so after that I was looking for ways to protect the floor,” Webb said.

Other issues like having a climate-controlled space big enough to hold rehearsals was another problem that was solved by the renovation.

“Now we rehearse out here on the Starlight stage from the end of March to the summer,” Webb said. “So if it’s bad weather, we keep the sliding stage doors shut and just rehearse on the stage; if it’s nice weather, we open the doors and if it’s nice, nice weather, we open the roof.”

When the stage doors are closed, the area can be air conditioned while the actors rehearse. In the 30 plus years that Webb has directed Starlight Theatre, he has never had to cancel a performance due to the weather; but there is a protocol in place in the case of severe weather during a performance.

With no immediate plans to retire, Webb continues to be the driving force behind transforming community members of all ages into performers committed to bringing a little bit of Broadway to their hometown.

“We’re here to do the best productions we can for the Rockford community. That’s the whole point,” Webb said. “The performances at Starlight Theatre may be the only exposure to the arts that some people ever get. And for that reason, we give it our all.”

— RVC’s Starlight Theatre sparkles in 50th season —

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