Written by Hayden Seder 

Standing proudly on Hailey’s Main Street is the iconic Liberty Theater, a landmark in the area since it was built in 1938. In its almost 100 years of history, it has had many owners, seen a variety of performances come through, and been an entertainment mainstay to the residents of the Wood River Valley.

History

The original Liberty Theater was built in the early 1900s across the street from the present-day theater, which was built on the site of an old outdoor skating rink in 1938. It sold to new owners in the ’70s, and again, in 1994, to new locals Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. It was Willis who convinced his friend Denise Simone of the then two-year-old theater company Company of Fools (CoF), then located in Richmond, Virginia, to relocate to Hailey, Idaho, and use the theater as her company’s new home.

Despite having never been to the area, Simone and her CoF cofounders were convinced, and promptly relocated to their new town and the theater they would call home for the next few decades. The company debuted with a performance of Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, which performed to thirty people over two nights for $5 a ticket. At the time, the theater showed both plays and movies, meaning CoF had to work their productions around movie screenings. Once the Bigwood 4 Cinemas movie theater opened down the street in Hailey, though, the Liberty phased out its movies and CoF took over the building operations, adding lights and sound production and adapting the stage for more live performances.

The Liberty was occasionally rented out to one-off events, like when The Second City comedy group would come through town, or the two times that Robin Williams (who owned a home in the area) wanted to try out his new acts. In 2013, CoF joined the Sun Valley Center for the Arts (now the Sun Valley Museum of Art, or SVMOA), and in 2016 Willis and Moore donated the theater to the organization. Sadly, the COVID pandemic hit the Liberty hard. The theater went dark during this time, and the CoF disbanded. For several years, the iconic marquee on Main Street was empty and the once lively heart of entertainment in the south Valley seemed like it may never beat again.

photo by Kristen Shultz

As the theater sat empty, its future was up in the air, whether that meant new ownership or even tearing it down. The CoF, which had disbanded and formed into a new performing arts organization, the Liberty Theatre Company (LTC), was offered the building in 2021 by SVMOA, but after raising money for repairs for a year and a half, elected to walk away from the offer due to the money needed for ongoing maintenance of the building. SVMOA even offered the building to the City of Hailey and other nonprofits, but ultimately these alternatives fell through, and the theater went on the open market.

The Next Generation

With the theater on the verge of being torn down, local Realtor Logan Frederickson took action, and in 2023 took over ownership of The Liberty. Though Logan, who moved to the area in 2012, had only ever been to one event at the historic theater, he knew it was an icon for the area, and envisioned bringing it back as a venue for plays and movies again, yes, but also for music, and whatever other acts might be appealing for the area.

Getting the Liberty back up and running was certainly going to be no one-man job, so Logan recruited a team of friends to enter a five-man partnership: Luc McCann, Ryan Rosmarin, Pete Vallimarescu (who acts as a full-time general manager), and Patrick McCain. While each man wears many hats when it comes to The Liberty, they each also have certain skill sets that Logan thought could benefit the theater, whether that’s Pete’s six years of working in events and community building, Luc’s local connections after having grown up here, Patrick’s experience with food and beverage from working in the restaurant industry, or Ryan’s handyman skills and jack-of-all-trades quality.

The multistory, 212-seat theater obviously needed some TLC after sitting vacant for a number of years. After a structural engineer signed off on the theater, the group had a new audio/visual system put in, complete with new lighting, sound, and projecting. As luck would have it, their first night as official owners, the heating went out, which meant dipping into reserves for new furnaces and a new HVAC system. Later, at one of their biggest events, the plumbing went entirely out, requiring attendees to use bathrooms across the street and prompting them to dip into the budget once again in order to do some no-dig plumbing solutions through a local plumber. “We all realized very quickly that maintaining and being part of a physical building is a lot,” says Pete.

In terms of what events and types of entertainment the Liberty now showcases, there’s practically no limit. The Liberty Theatre Company rents the building out four times a year for theater productions, but otherwise, the programming is at the discretion of the group, though Pete, given his background, comes up with a good portion of the line-up. Having live music as often as possible was a priority for everyone on the team, and the result has been numerous live shows each month (sometimes each week) of bands ranging from local acts like St. Terrible, Dump Rules, and Andrew Sheppard to national acts like Boot Juice, Thunderpussy, and Jeff Crosby.

Other events at the Liberty run the gamut of events, from a local man’s one-man story hour to a burlesque night to silent discos, battle of the bands, and avalanche safety talks. The theater shows touring films as well as old movies most weeks, as regulations prevent them from showing new releases.

Figuring out how many events to book, which kinds, and on what days has been a learning experience for the group, with the original intent to have heavier programming and pull back over time as patterns emerged in terms of what people would attend and when. The community response, though, has been tremendous, with people not only attending events but wanting to put on events at the theater, giving many of these events a truly homegrown feel.

“Making sure the community feels like they can be a part of it is super important,” says Pete. “I’ve learned you have to include everybody if it’s going to succeed. My hope and my goal is to have something for everyone, always.”