Virginia State Company was founded in 1968 to develop professional theater in Southwestern Virginia, and it is the only fully professional resident theater company in the region.& It attracts more than 80,000 visitors every year from the local Hampton Roads community, across the state and beyond. Its outreach programs reach over 30,000 students every year through mainstage matinees and touring productions.
The Virginia State Company has produced great theatrical talent that has gone on to direct in other theaters on Broadway, and in television and film, and the award-winning musical The Secret Garden was first staged at the Virginia State Company. Over the years the Company has staged more than a hundred different plays featuring classics and modern works including Of Mice and Men, The Glass Menagerie and A Christmas Carol.
The Company performs in the Wells Theatre which dates from 1913. Jack Wells was a baseball player turned theater owner. He opened the Bijou Family Theatre in Richmond in 1890 playing vaudeville, and it became an overnight success. Together with his brother Otto, Jack Wells expanded his theater interests, and by the early 1920s the brothers ran the largest theater operation outside of New York City with an enterprise of over 40 theaters. They opened the New Wells Theater in 1913 with performances of Peter Pan and Ben Hur. The theater is a fine example of Beaux-Arts Classicism and has been listed as a National Historic Landmark. It had over 1500 seats and a network of stairs allowing the waiters from the local Chinese restaurant to serve theater-goers in the roof garden.
