Charles Martinet played Gremio. It was the early 1980s, a WWII-themed production of The Taming of the Shrew at a scrappy young theater company in downtown San Jose. Martinet was not yet famous. He would go on to become the voice of Mario at Nintendo, one of the most recognized vocal performances in entertainment history. But first he stood on the stage of the San Jose Repertory Theatre, trading Shakespeare with a cast of unknowns who did not yet know what they would become. The Rep, as everyone called it, had a gift for catching people on the way up. Founded in 1980 by James P. Reber, San Jose's first resident professional theater company spent thirty-four years producing work, launching careers, and fighting for survival before finally closing its doors and filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on June 11, 2014.
James Reber was born in Butte, Montana, but raised in the Santa Clara Valley. After serving as the first employee of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, working his way from business manager to general manager, he returned to San Jose with an idea that seemed improbable at the time: a professional repertory company in a city that had never had one. The Rep opened with Noel Coward's Private Lives and followed with three more plays in 1981, including one directed by Tony Taccone, who would later become artistic director at Berkeley Rep. Early support came from the City of San Jose's Fine Arts Commission and a key grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Dr. Clayton Feldman led the first board of trustees, and Phil Hammer, whose name would eventually grace the building itself, succeeded him. From its inception, Reber insisted on paying competitive wages and negotiating Actors' Equity status, a commitment that signaled the company's seriousness even when its resources were thin.
The list of people who passed through the Rep's early years reads like an improbable alumni directory. James Houghton went on to found New York City's Signature Theater Company. James Bundy became artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater and dean of the Yale School of Drama. Kelvin Han Yee built a career in film, television, and theater. And then there was Martinet, whose turn as Gremio preceded one of the strangest and most enduring career pivots in show business. The productions themselves were ambitious. A collaboration with the San Jose Symphony produced the only known staging of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus with live Mozart performed by Opera San Jose singers. Emily Mann's Execution of Justice, about the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, was co-produced with Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Eureka Theatre. David Lemos, a Santa Clara University graduate who started as production manager and rose to artistic director, recruited talent with an eye for potential that proved remarkably prescient.
For its first seventeen years, the Rep performed at the Montgomery Theatre, a 500-seat venue attached to the San Jose Civic Auditorium that the company shared with other organizations. In 1997, the dream of a dedicated home became real when the Rep moved into the Sobrato Auditorium, a new 584-seat theater built specifically for the company in downtown San Jose. The move coincided with the artistic directorship of Timothy Near, who had joined in 1987 and steered the company toward work that spoke to San Jose's diverse communities through modernized classics, contemporary plays, and new commissions. Freed from the constraints of a shared venue, the Rep began producing world premieres, U.S. premieres, and West Coast premieres. Among the most notable was The Haunting of Winchester, a musical about rifle heiress Sarah Winchester and her obsessive, never-finished mansion just a few miles away. The Rep had always punched above its weight, but in the Sobrato it finally had a stage proportional to its ambition.
Financial trouble shadowed the company for years. In 2006, the city of San Jose extended a $2 million bailout loan to stave off insolvency, later restructured into a long-term obligation. After the American Musical Theatre of San Jose folded in 2008, the Rep became the largest nonprofit professional theater in the South Bay, carrying a $5 million annual operating budget. Rick Lombardo arrived as artistic director in 2009, bringing world premieres including Matthew Spangler's stage adaptation of The Kite Runner, named Outstanding Production at a Large Theatre by the Bay Area Theatre Critics' Circle. A rock musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen was later invited to the New York Musical Theatre Festival. But the financial bleeding never stopped. In June 2014, while Lombardo was in rehearsal for the American premiere of Joe Penhall's Landscape with Weapon, the board informed him they had voted to close. The Rep filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The building reopened in 2015 as the Hammer Theatre, operated by San Jose State University and named for Phil Hammer and his wife Susan, the former mayor who had co-founded the Museum of Art across the plaza. The stage endures, even if the company that built it does not.
Located at 37.334°N, 121.886°W in downtown San Jose. The former San Jose Repertory Theatre, now the Hammer Theatre Center, is part of the downtown cultural cluster near Plaza de Cesar Chavez. San Jose International Airport (KSJC) lies approximately 2.5 nm to the northwest; Reid-Hillview Airport (KRHV) is about 5 nm east. Within KSJC Class C airspace. The building sits along San Fernando Street, identifiable from lower altitudes as part of the theater and arts district south of the main downtown core.