Let There Be Theatre! – is a title of our new production paying tribute to the illustrious seventieth birthday of our theatre. This quasi-biblical call is even more meaningful at a time when theatres have been closed for almost a year and inaccessible to the public. But we believe that our prison sentence is slowly coming to an end and that people will soon be able to sit in their theatre seats, with their eyes, ears and hearts open, and absorb the artistic nectar we are all craving for.
Let There Be Theatre! is a musical-theatrical performance that takes us to “the last dress rehearsal for the premiere of the missed celebration of our theatre’s seventieth anniversary last year ... with guests”. This is how we subtitled the show. It actually says it all. The event should have taken place on 6 December, 2020, exactly 70 years after the day when the Municipal People's Committee issued a decree on the establishment of the Celje City Theatre. That is when the professional course of our theatre began. Notably, the amateur theatre society had operated in Celje long before that; its first performance in the Slovenian language was documented on 16 September, 1849, which is more than a hundred years before the official establishment of professional theatre. Celje is therefore one of the pioneer cities of Slovenian theater, which we are and should be proud of.