College theater construction underway

PALMER — There’s a whole lot a college can do with a new theater.

“This is good, good for us and it’s good for the Valley too,” Mat-Su College Director Talis Colberg said of the $20 million project under construction since May that had its official groundbreaking ceremony last week.

The theater, he said, will serve a few purposes. During the week it will hold classes in the daytime and some at night. Night uses in the week could also include lecture-type events not connected to a class.

On the weekends, though, it’ll house performing arts-type events.

“What that will do is give it both an academic and an entertainment value and it’s going to make this a seven-day-a-week operation out here,” Colberg said. “We really are shut down on Sunday and most of Saturdays.”

The venue could hold concerts or plays or other things that need a stage. It’s not something the Valley has now, at least not in abundance.

“I like to in my own mind compare it to West High School in Anchorage when I was a kid,” Colberg said.

The auditorium at West High was a venue for concerts and comedians and pretty much everything that came through Anchorage in the days before the Performing Arts Center and other theaters were built.

Colberg said that in addition to the theater, the building will have all kinds of “support rooms.”

“It’s going to have a costume shop, a scene shop, two dressing rooms, a green room, smaller dressing rooms and significant bathroom space for patrons,” Colberg said.

If you’ve perceived the college as lately undergoing something of a building boom you wouldn’t be the only one.

“It’s a significant surge. There’ve been three major construction projects,” Colberg said. “The combined total of those three is $31 million, which is huge for this campus when you think that our yearly budget is $10.8 million total.”

In addition to the theater, there’s the $3.5 million expansion of the space available for the paramedic and nursing programs and a water project conducted jointly with the city of Palmer, “which isn’t as intriguing to people because it’s not a building that you walk in to, but it’s a $7 million infrastructure project,” Colberg said.

The grand opening for the theater is December 2014 and he believes the slate of programs and performances offered there will steadily grow.

“Everyone has kind of imagined what they would like to see in the theater and as time passes a lot of that will actually happen,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.