“West Columbia came looking for us.”

That’s the factor Columbia Children’s Theatre Artistic Director Jerry Stevenson singled out as the biggest reason why the organization will relocate to the city’s Brookland-Lakeview Empowerment Center later this month.

The theater company, which has spent 15 of its 18 years in Forest Acres’ Richland Mall, has been seeking a new home for some time now, because the space it occupies in the defunct shopping complex doesn’t meet all of its needs and because it has long been on the cusp of being sold.

“It’s been under contract and people have been doing their due diligence six times since we've been in the mall space,” Stevenson said.

But when a sale that had been under contract went final earlier this month, making way for the mall to be demolished, the theater was suddenly faced with needing to vacate by Feb. 7, due to liability concerns about having children around while work on the mall began.

Luckily, the theater’s new home had already been secured, with the deal largely settled about a year ago and a letter of intent signed about seven months ago, Stevenson told the Chronicle.

“They came to us and said, ‘Don't you want to move out here?’” the artistic director said of West Columbia. “Unlike Columbia. Unlike Forest Acres. I don't really want that to come off sounding bad. But you know, West Columbia gets it, and they get the amount of economic impact that bringing tens of thousands of people into your city every year has.”

And West Columbia proved it with more than words. The city gave $155,000 from its hospitality tax coffers to help with moving and renovation costs during the relocation to the center, a nonprofit operation that looks to preserve the history of the Lakeview School (the segregated Black school that was once housed on the property) while seeking to educate and empower members of the surrounding community.

“The Columbia Children's Theatre is an incredible program that provides performances to our community that bring children in and work with children to teach them theater, teach them performance,” West Columbia Mayor Tem Miles told the Chronicle. “The actual productions that they do are unbelievably well done.”

He added that this makes it a perfectly appropriate recipient of city hospitality tax funds.

“The purpose of those tax programs are to collect money from folks coming and eating and drinking in restaurants and other establishments, and then that money is used to further activities that bring more folks into the community to do those types of things and go out, eat, drink and socialize in town,” Miles said. “The Columbia Children's Theatre will bring many folks into our town to support our local businesses and restaurants.”

The theater plans to begin holding classes at the center on Jan. 30, with its offices moving a couple weeks thereafter and rehearsals shifting to West Columbia at that point. For the time being, the company will continue in the “movable feast” mode it’s been in since Richland Mall entered its first COVID-19 closure in 2020, Stevenson said, noting that it will continue to host performances at area schools and venues such as Irmo’s Harbison Theatre at Midlands Tech and the Arts Center of Kershaw County in Camden.

Even when it did have a home performance space, touring around and meeting audiences where they are was and continues to be a big emphasis for the theater. The responses it has seen out in Irmo and in schools around the West Columbia area helped prove that Lexington County is a place where the company can find crowds and also do some good with its mix of youth and professional performances, classes and camps.

“When I moved back from Chicago [before the Columbia Children’s Theatre started], when I saw the landscape here, I went, ‘There is no theater for young audiences,’” Stevenson said, explaining that the company tries to provide that with its Mainstage performances, where professional actors perform for families, young audiences and school groups.

“It’s the same situation out there,” Stevenson said of the area west of Columbia, noting that Lexington community theater Village Square is “busting at the seams” to give local audiences as much as it can and that fellow Lexington company On Stage Productions recently departed for Myrtle Beach.

“The West Columbia area could definitely benefit from some of this and the classes that we teach in our workshops and summer camps,” he said. “We think it's going to be a great addition out there because those kinds of things within the theater discipline are just not as prolific

out that way.”

Stevenson said the hope is to eventually build a state-of-the-art performance space within Brookland-Lakeview, adding that the National Register of Historic Places, which recently added the property, has said that potential demoing and remodeling for such a purpose could be done within certain guidelines.

For its part, the center seems happy to have its new tenant.

“The Columbia Children's Theatre and the Brookland-Lakeview Empowerment Center share a commitment to educating young people and preparing them for the challenges and opportunities of the future,” Cindye Richburg-Cotton, the center’s executive director, is quoted. “We are confident that this partnership will positively impact youth and families throughout West Columbia and the Midlands.”

Kailee Kokes contributed reporting to this article.