The Sunrise Theatre was built in 1923, during the silent film era, which is the reason it still works today. Theaters from that period were designed with full stages because programs often combined films with live performance. Movie houses built after talking pictures arrived did not need one. That century-old stage is now hosting rock concerts, hip hop, modern dance, and Broadway musicals, none of which existed when the architects drew it.
Numa Saisselin became executive director of the downtown Fort Pierce venue in July, coming from 14 years at the Florida Theatre in Jacksonville. The Sunrise is the fourth historic theater he has led. He joined The Current by TreasureCoast.com to talk about the building, how shows get booked, and what he hopes the theater becomes.
Key topics covered in the conversation:
- The 1,200-seat theater’s history and its 2006 renovation
- How the city’s partnership with VenuWorks works
- The three ways a performance lands on the stage
- The economics behind booking a touring act
- The Black Box space and a Halloween haunted house
- A practical warning about ticket scalpers
A Building With Foresight Designed Into It
Saisselin spent the opening of the conversation on what makes the Sunrise architecturally unusual. The 1,200-seat theater opened in 1923, was renovated in 2006, and reopened as a performing arts center. Its full stage, a holdover from the silent film era, is what allows it to host live performances 103 years later.
He framed that as a matter of luck as much as design. Fort Pierce was a relatively small community in 1923 to have a theater that size, and not every community has a cultural asset like it. He credited the residents who pushed to save and restore the building rather than let it go, describing himself and his staff as temporary caretakers for whoever follows.
What draws him to historic theaters generally, he said, is that they are embedded in their communities in a way a purpose-built modern performing arts center is not. He described a recent call from a Jacksonville colleague who turned out to be a Fort Pierce native and grew up going to the movies in the building Saisselin now runs.
How the City and VenuWorks Partnership Works
The City of Fort Pierce has owned the building for a long time. When Saisselin’s predecessor retired, the city decided to step back from venue management and contract it out, hiring VenuWorks to operate the theater on its behalf.
Saisselin was clear that this has not made it a less local operation. He is at City Hall several times a week, and described the organization as still city-centered and community-centered.
He also drew a line back to how the theater operated decades ago, when owners were local, scrappy business people constantly inventing community events, pageants, and contests to get people through the door. That kind of local spirit disappeared from the movie business when multiplexes and corporate ownership took over, he said, but it survives at a venue like the Sunrise, where getting someone in for the first time is half the job. Once they see the building and the service, they come back.
The Three Ways a Show Gets Booked
Saisselin walked through something most audiences never see: how a performance actually arrives on a stage.
- A rental. Someone rents the theater and puts on their own show. These are frequently community events, graduations, dance recitals, award shows, and benefit concerts, often from other arts or community organizations that need a 1,200-seat auditorium.
- A co-promotion. A concert promoter who has bought an entire tour calls and offers one night of it, asking the theater to partner on the date.
- A buy. The theater researches performers, negotiates with agents and managers, and purchases the show outright for the night.
That third category is where the risk sits. Saisselin said audiences often assume an artist calls up and agrees to split the door. In reality, the artist receives a guaranteed fee and gets paid regardless of attendance, which makes the theater the investor in the evening. Some nights do not work out. Over a full year, he said, the cumulative result is profitable, and that profit goes back into the building and the programming.
The Math Behind Booking an Artist
This was the most specific part of the conversation. Saisselin said it costs the theater roughly $15,000 simply to open the building for a night and market the show, before paying the artist anything. Artist fees range from about $10,000 to $100,000.
That math narrows the field immediately. The theater needs performers capable of selling somewhere between 800 and 1,200 tickets to make the night viable.
The negotiation runs both directions. Sometimes the theater calls an agent to ask about a specific artist’s fee and routing. Sometimes an agent calls because a tour has dates in Tallahassee, Orlando, and Miami and needs a Wednesday or Thursday from a venue sitting right on I-95. Those conversations can run a long time before the circumstances line up.
Saisselin described the final decision as part equation, part instinct. The theater compares itself to venues in other markets it considers similar, runs the numbers on fees, crew, advertising, and cleaning, then works out how many tickets at what price it needs to sell. After all of that, someone still has to decide it will work. He said they are right more often than wrong, but the outcome cannot be predicted with real accuracy. They repeat that process 40 to 70 times a year across every genre.
Building a Calendar for the Whole Community
Profitability is one metric Saisselin tracks. The other is how much of the calendar gets used.
Setting aside a handful of holidays, he counted more than 300 nights a year the theater could potentially fill. The goal is not to book all of them immediately but to add to the total each year. He called it a lofty target and said that is the point of having one.
The programming philosophy behind it is breadth. He wants someone scanning a list of 40 to 60 upcoming shows to find one or two they want to see, which means deliberately building a calendar that spans music, dance, and theater across genres. A classic rock show, a country act, a family performance, a date night, a children’s show. If everyone in the community finds at least one thing a year, he said, the theater has done its job.
Readers looking for more arts and culture across the region can find upcoming listings on TreasureCoast.com’s events page, and may also want to hear the conversation with the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
The Black Box and a Halloween Haunted House
Beyond the main auditorium, the Sunrise has a 200-seat Black Box space with a portable stage that can be reconfigured as needed.
A comedy duo performs there twice a month, and the Fort Pierce Jazz Society uses it several times a year for jams and presentations. For Halloween week, the room is being stripped bare and built into a haunted house. Saisselin described it as low risk compared to booking a touring act, with the upside that it could become an annual event.
Why Arts Education Matters
Asked why exposing students to live performance matters, Saisselin corrected the framing before answering, saying it is not a question of whether it might be important.
He made two arguments. First, a well-rounded education includes the arts alongside math, science, language, and athletics. Second, the arts are an effective vehicle for teaching other subjects. He offered music notation as an example of an intuitive entry point into fractions.
The theater buses school audiences in for science-based performances, including an upcoming show from a performer whose work centers on ecology. Saisselin said a live performer who has found a creative way to tell that story accomplishes something a lecture about recycling cannot.
He then told the story behind his own career. His mother was a social worker whose clinic occasionally received free theater tickets, and his first live performance was Arsenic and Old Lace at about nine years old. A scene late in the play has characters bringing a body in through a dining room window. He expected to see the brick back wall of the theater when it opened. Instead there was a blue night sky.
He knows now it was a simple trick, achievable with a flashlight and a bedsheet. At the time it was proof that people could make something out of nothing, and it is why he has spent his life in theaters. Some child at the ecology show might be similarly hooked, he said, or pushed toward science. If neither happens, that child still spent an evening using their imagination, which he argued is increasingly rare when so much is spoon-fed.
What a First Visit Looks Like
Saisselin was candid about what the Sunrise is not. Arena-scale acts are unlikely to ever play a 1,200-seat room, and the Kravis Center to the south and the King Center in Melbourne to the north are roughly twice its size, so some shows will always go elsewhere.
What he offered instead was a case for convenience and range. A full spectrum of music, dance, theater, comedy, and jazz fits comfortably in a room this size. His picture of the ideal version: a resident a few miles away on Hutchinson Island leaves home at 7:30, is seated by 7:45, watches a nationally recognized performer, and is home by 10:30.
Buy From the Theater, Not a Scalper
One of the most practical pieces of the conversation was a warning about how tickets are sold online.
Saisselin said anyone searching a performer’s name alongside Fort Pierce will likely see several results above the theater’s own listing, and those top results are often resellers who bought tickets from the box office and are reselling them at a markup to buyers who do not realize what is happening.
His advice is direct: go to sunrisetheatre.com. Every ticket link on the site leads to the theater’s own platform at face value with no markup.
The website also has a button to join the email list, which goes out every Monday and typically announces a newly on-sale show.
Getting Involved
For anyone who wants a closer relationship with the theater, Saisselin pointed to three options.
Volunteering. Every usher at the Sunrise is a volunteer.
Membership. The program starts at $150 and scales through multiple tiers. Members buy tickets before the general public. Higher tiers add access to a VIP room, and the upper levels allow members to hold two seats for the full year, with the theater calling to offer them for each new show.
Buying a ticket. Asked how people can best support the theater, Saisselin’s answer was the simplest one available: buy a ticket and go see a show.
More information about upcoming performances, membership, and volunteering is available at sunrisetheatre.com. For more on what’s happening in Downtown Fort Pierce and across the region, visit The Current by TreasureCoast.com.
