Palm Coast Arts Foundation’s Parting Legacy: a $69,000 Gift to City Repertory Theatre

Since the Palm Coast Arts Foundation’s creation in 2004 and City Repertory Theatre’s in 2011, the two organizations were among the brighter burning stars in Flagler County’s modest constellation of cultural organizations–PCAF shining brightest with its annual Picnics and Pops concerts with the Jacksonville Symphony, CRT’s audacious productions developing a loyal following that now routinely sells out its half-dozen productions of more every season.

Like a few other cultural organizations, and with less backing than it was hoping for from Palm Coast’s promised arts district, the arts foundation did not survive Covid. CRT has, in good part because of the foundation: during the pandemic, the theater company kept going thanks to PCAF’s tented outdoor stage in Town center, with ample room for socially-distant seating. The seats continued to sell-out, especially as CRT developed its Shakespeare in the Park productions.




This afternoon, Sam Perkovich, the foundation’s long-time president, handed a $69,000 check to CRT’s John Sbordone and Diane Ellertsen at CRT’s black box heater at City Marketplace, a parting gift from the dissolving organization. Sbordone and the CRT troupe had not been aware of the size of the gift until today. They celebrated amid a group of 30 supporters, including members of the troupe, board members, donors, and City Council member Nick Klufas, a lone tribesman for the arts on local government boards more inclined to pay lip service than hard cash to foster the arts.

“Oh my god, we’re so grateful,” he said. “I can’t tell you how, when you don’t own land or the building, it is very hard to raise substantial money. And we’ve had generous donors and wonderful in-kind contributors” (he mentioned a few, among them Dolphin Printing), “but this is just–it’s really remarkable. My fingers are crossed until it’s in the bank, but elated would be a good word to describe our feelings about about this, and grateful that it’s coming from our partners who thought enough about us to pass it on.”

The foundation and CRT are both non-profit organizations. Since the foundation is dissolving, it is required to disburse its remaining money to one or more kindred non-profits. “We’re supposed to use good judgment, that it operates in the black and has somewhat of a similar mission,” Perkovich said. “Their mission scope was a little bit smaller than ours was. Ours was more all encompassing, with all artists. But they’ve always been our partners. They’ve always been right there with us. They’ve always brought the best quality, high quality of arts, culture and entertainment to their stage that they can and we know that they’ll manage that money well.”

To Nancy Crouch, the former executive director of the foundation who now leads the Flagler County Cultural Council, CRT “is a leader in the theater community.”

“They’re well managed, they’re very careful with their funds, their primary concern our our their patrons,” Perkovich continued, “and they do things that nobody else does, always a little edgy. It can be a little political. Some people don’t like that. I think it’s great that we have somebody like that.”

“We try to do different things,” Sbordone told the assembled this afternoon. “We try to make a difference in the county so that you can come here, and if you walk out? As I often tell the cast: if we get people to walk out, we’re doing our job. Because art isn’t supposed to be all Disney. Disney’s fine. But art’s got to move you, it’s got to make you think.”

“Or feel,” a man in the audience said like a prompter to the star.

“Think or feel. Thank you,” Sbordone said.

For example, opening CRT’s coming season is an all-female production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The season will also feature “Topdog/Underdog,” the 2001 play about two Black brothers’ lives through poverty, racism, difficult childhoods and difficult loves. The play earned Suzan-Lori Parks the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and that won the Tony for Best Revival last year (i’s still playing on Broadway). CRT is further exploring race themes with its show for Black History Month, “The Niceties,” Eleanor Burgess’s 2018 play centering on a Black student’s paper on slavery and the American Revolution, and her white professor’s reaction. In March CRT will stage the musical “Violet,” a metaphorical story of cross-country healing which happens to take place during the civil rights era. There’ll be more, too, including Neil Simon and Shakespeare, since CRT is nothing if not big into heavy lifts.

A previous funding campaign helped CRT begin to rework its seating for patrons. “This will enable us to finish the process of getting the risers in,” Ellertsen said, “and hopefully getting different seats in there because with the risers that we are getting, we can only have like 39 people in the audience. And we need to try and get that to 50.”

The new money, Sbordone said, will also help the company improve productions and such things as better light insulation at the door to preserve the interior’s permanent dusk, though Sbordone said there’s not been much time to think about it yet. “We were pretty bare bones, platforming and light, which has been our calling card,” Sbordone said, “But we will now be able to afford better costuming, we’ll be able to afford better scenery, we’ll be able to keep the place up to date. If it were a couple of hundred thousands, we might even be able to find a bigger space somewhere.”

If the foundation had gone forward with the roofing of its stage and the construction of some of its planned additions, like a black box theater, that theater would have been CRT’s home. The city has no current plans to add a roof. “I don’t see the majority of our current local leaders that have arts and culture on their scope,” Perkovich said. “It’s very sad. We always kind of get the short end of the stick. I don’t know if they researched the monetary value of that. You only have to look around you know to see the communities that really thrive have a great structure with the arts and culture.”




Sbordone and Ellertsen had served on the foundation’s board previously, when they still worked with the Flagler Playhouse. Then as CRT developed, they started to interact with theatre productions. The first in 2014 was a production of Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” a fund-raiser for the foundation, with Annie Gaybis leading the cast.

There were more, before the flowering of Shakespeare in the Park. “We did three shows”–“Romeo and Juliet,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Macbeth.”. And they were pretty big projects for CRT and couldn’t have been done without PCAF helping out,” Sbordone said. “We did that whole season during Covid when nobody else was up, because we had a collaboration with PCAF, and we were able to use the tent and do outside productions that whole season. We just had so many kinds of interactions with them.”

CRT contributed money for PCAF’s own projects, among them the design of hat was to be a theater venue at PCAF’s home, never expecting that it would be like a winged seed that, PCAF’s regrettable ending aside, today took flight.

The beauty of CRT is that you are a rarity,” Awilda Hamilton, a supporter of Sbordone and Ellertsen since their Playhouse days. “So this is a gift to us. You are a gift to us.”

“Sometimes we were living by the skin of our teeth here, but not anymore,” Sbordone said. He ended his toast to Perkovich and the foundation: “We’ve always thought here that theater can make a difference in people’s lives.”