Closing the curtain on 20 years: GRT director Christian Sanders stepping down

After serving 20 years with Graham Regional Theater,  including 18 as managing director, Christian Sanders will be stepping down in July and taking a position as the theater teacher at Mineral Wells High School.

The director’s last show will be the summer musical ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,’ which he said is not a bookend to his time at GRT, but a farewell for now. Sanders said the GRT board will be stepping in taking over the aspects of his role within the organization.

“We knew that there was going to come a time when we (...) needed to start training a replacement for me and the only way to do that will be to expand the theater and we feel like we’ve kind of reached a point where the theater has established the way it needs to be established. So the only way to do that was to either(...) to start training someone to take over that job, or start training the board members, which we’ve already been doing. We always wanted to make sure that no matter what happened, if for some reason I was gone all the sudden one day, that Graham Regional Theater wouldn’t stop working. And so we made sure to have a board member that knows how to run the lights, someone that knows how to do the sound, someone who knows how to get the royalties and rights and someone that knows how to take care of some of the mechanical functions of the theater (...) as well as providing all the backend functions that you require for theater. (...) And I’ve been slowly doing that. So we’ve just accelerated that a little bit,” Sanders said. “We feel like the theater is in a financial position and in a volunteer position to be able to move toward a permanent volunteer situation. (...) my goal has always been not just survival, but the thriving of Graham Regional Theater. (...) the theater to continue being what it is, to continue to maintain the structure that it has, does not necessarily now require a managing director. (...) We have the ability now to (...)where we’re working on a volunteer (basis), and there are many community theaters that work on a purely volunteer basis.”

Sanders made his way to Graham in 2002 when he was asked to be the technical director for the show “Music Man” for a summer musical put on by the city and auditioned and received the part for the character Marcellus Washburn. At the time he was working as an actor in Fort Worth.

For the full story, see the Saturday, June 4 edition of The Graham Leader.