BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) - The Magic City has no shortage of theaters all driven by the goal of making magic on stage with the stories they bring to life. From family-friendly classics to takes on award-winning shows, there’s plenty of stories to experience and ways for those theatrically inclined to get involved. One community theatre though really aims to bring new, and well, terrific, shows to Birmingham.
“We’re in that pool of small community theatres in Birmingham, but I think what we do is just a little bit different,” said Tamara DeBolt, executive director for Terrific New Theatre.
Terrific New Theatre is conveniently located in Birmingham’s Central City community, and having central tied to it in any way is a great coincidence since what drives the theatre’s mission is accessibility.
“I want this place to be a place where people can get better at what they do.”
— Tamara "Tam" DeBolt, executive director for Terrific New Theatre
“We try to do like our name,” said DeBolt. “We try to do new and terrific things. So, we look for new material, we look for new people. We try to bring new people in to teach them how to do what we do. It’s all part of our mission to keep theatre accessible to everybody, whether you know how to do what we do or not.”
A bit of history
The theatre was initially founded in 1987 by Carl Stewart and Steve Stella as a for-profit theatre, according to DeBolt. The founders were originally part of Birmingham Festival Theatre, having started that theatre 15 years prior to the creation of Terrific New Theatre.
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“They broke away from that organization to start their own Terrific New Theatre,” DeBolt explained. “They wanted to be able to pay actors and performers and people that did things at the theatre, and set design, all of that. So, it was a profit-sharing concept. They would just take the ticket sales at the end of the show and just spread it out. Keep what they needed to stay afloat and split the rest.”
DeBolt said that approach only lasted about three years. From there, Stewart and Stella formed a non-profit 501(c)(3).
“That opened up a whole new world of funding: federal funding, state funding, funding from the city,” DeBolt said. Terrific New Theatre has the opportunity to bring in part-time employees and spend money on building the sets they use for their shows. “Having that extra money makes a big difference in the quality of what we’re able to do.”
What they’re able to do is bring stories to life. 2026 marks 40 years since the terrific beginning of their theatre; a theatre started by two men with the desire to pay their employees and let anyone and everyone experience theatre.
Starting the 2026-2027 season
The 2026-2027 season isn’t their 40th season because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and despite the anniversary, DeBolt said they didn’t plan their upcoming season with the anniversary in mind. Despite that though, the season is still driving home the goal of terrific, and new, stories for Birmingham’s audience.
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The season opens with All Nighter, a play about a tight-knit group of college roommates at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania who pull one last all-nighter ahead their last college finals. It’s technically a period-piece, set in 2014, and still very new with an original premiere in 2025 off-Broadway.
All-Nighter is only the third noted play by Natalie Margolin, a playwright, tv and film writer.
It’s New York, off-Broadway debut featured Havana Rose Liu; Kristine Froseth, who is known for her lead roles in tv show’s like The Buccaneers and Looking For Alaska, which is an adaption of the book written by Alabama-native John Green; Kathryn Gallagher; Alyah Chanelle Scott; Julia Lester, known for her role in Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series; AnnaSophia Robb; star of the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Soul Surfer, Bridge to Terabithia and more; Isa Briones; Olivia Puckett and Tessa Albertson.
While the Birmingham production isn’t boasting any current Hollywood known names, it’s got a talented, all-woman cast. All of the actresses are young, a requirement the playwright apparently had that the people at Terrific New Theatre were all too happy to respect.
“I’m really excited for the actors because, as a woman in theater, who is really young, I’ve not really gotten to be in a majority female room,” said Claire Waldrop, assistant director for All Nighter at Terrific New Theatre. “It’s really exciting to see an all-female cast and kind of see them develop friendships.”
“They’ve really built a great friendship among all of them, I think,” said Jordan DeWitt, director of All Nighter, about the cast. His thought was echoed by actresses Rin Glover and Celia Knox who visited WBRC’s Now at 11 to talk about the experience.
All Nighter is described as a bit of a drama-edy. A comedy with some drama, as DeWitt put it.
Despite it being about college-age women, it draws in questions people may ask themselves all throughout life, while also exploring themes of friendships and identity in an “interesting way,” according to DeWitt.
“It’s really about the transition between phases of your life and how do you deal with it,” DeWitt explained. “The patterns you’ve established from one era of your life, moving into the next era of your life. How do you break those patterns? How do you decide that those patterns of behavior are okay or not okay? Especially transitioning from college to the real world, those friendships that we’ve built at college, how ephemeral are they? How important are they to us as an individual? Do we define ourselves by our relationships or are we our own thing?”
All Nighter is so new that not many places have been able to perform it. Waldrop said after speaking with Margolin, the cast and crew at Terrific New Theatre learned they are the first theatre to do it in Alabama and the second to do it in the U.S.
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Selecting the right stories for Terrific New Theatre
Selecting new stories isn’t always easy.
“I just keep the mission of the organization in mind whenever I read something,” said DeBolt. “‘Will our people like it? Will it serve our mission? Is it new? Is it exciting?’”
“It’s really cool to see a space where that stuff is allowed to flourish, and in a community that you wouldn’t necessarily be like ‘oh, they’re doing cool, interesting art stuff!’” said Waldrop.
According to DeBolt though, ‘cool, interesting art stuff’ is exactly what Terrific New Theatre’s audiences want.
“Our audience is very smart too,” said DeBolt. “They expect challenging material. ... They want to come into this building and walk out of this building and have conversations on the way home about ‘Oh my God, what did I just see? What was that?’ They love the challenge of smart and new material.”
“As soon as I read it, I was like ‘we gotta to, we gotta do this thing,’ because it’s, like it’s so smart!”
— Jordan DeWitt, director of All-Nighter at Terrific New Theatre
All Nighter was sort of a perfect pick, in the teams opinion because, it is “so smart,” according to DeWitt.
DeWitt said he’d reached out to DeBolt wanting to work on a show with Terrific New Theatre and sent a few ideas. DeBolt thought of All Nighter, a show she was especially excited doing in the summer because they could cast college-age women who were home from school for summer break.
All Nighter runs through Sunday, Aug. 9. You can purchase tickets when you click or tap here.
Keeping theatre accessible
A part of Terrific New Theatre’s mission, guided by one of the founders, Stewart, was to put theatre on in front of whoever wanted to experience it, which is why the theatre does a “pay what you can afford” ticket on the second and final Thursday of shows.
“He had people walk in with Ziplock bags of change,” DeBolt said about Stewart. “He would take it. He would just tackle it and say ‘I don’t care what you got. Come and see the play. Come see the play.’”
So, Terrific New Theatre keeps up that mission, to make theatre accessible and affordable. The option is even available online now as more and more transitions to the internet.
To learn more about their pay-what-you-can tickets, click or tap here.
“It’s really important to this organization that we continue to let whoever wants to come, come.”
— Tamara "Tam" DeBolt, executive director of Terrific New Theatre
“I just love this place. I think Tam’s built a really special place here,” said DeWitt about DeBolt and Terrific New Theatre.
To check out the entire 2026-2027 season at Terrific New Theatre, click or tap here.
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