With a year of performances under its belt, the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts will celebrate its first birthday on Saturday and Aug. 26 in an event called “Show Us Some Razzle-Dazzle — A Benefit Celebrating the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts’ First Birthday.”
The fundraising celebration will take place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Aug. 26 and will include a public variety show, a silent auction, and birthday cake. Center Managing Director Megan Flanagan said the show, which includes volunteer performers both young and old and of various performing backgrounds, will showcase the area’s wide range of talent.
“We really just want it to be a fun, exciting, energetic, and unique event,” she said. “It’s a little bit of everything; it’s definitely a variety show. We’ve got singing and piano, we’ve got dancing, we’ve got Broadway performances, we’ve got some comic theater happening — so, it’s just generally a mix of performance styles.”
The center had a busy first year, Flanagan said, hosting sold-out City Circle Acting Company shows and other theatrical events, concerts, local elementary-school activities, and fundraisers for the Children’s Museum, University of Iowa Children’s Hospital, the Muscular Dystrophy Association of Eastern Iowa, and others.
“A key part of our mission is to add to the vitality of our community, and our way of doing that is by increasing cultural opportunities both for people to participate in creating art and for people to experience art,” Flanagan said. “I think now that we have a year under our belt, things are going to be a lot smoother, but also I think it’s going to be a lot busier this year.”
With the event free and open to the public, she said, she and other staff members hope the event will serve as a method of thanking community members for their patronage of the center as well as an entertaining fundraiser for the facility’s future endeavors.
“We have a lot to celebrate, and that’s what we want this event to be: a celebration,” Flanagan said.
– by Emma McClatchey
