San Mateo Community Theatre

Broadway by the Bay, is a community-based musical theatre company located in the San Francisco Bay Area and performing in Redwood City. It also provides a "Youth Theatre Conservatory" offering performing arts experiences to local children. After beginning in with productions of three annual Gilbert and Sullivan productions, the company shifted its focus to modern musicals in 1966. Since then, it has produced musicals continuously in San Mateo County. In 1983, the group changed its name to Peninsula Civic Light Opera, and again in 1999, to Broadway by the Bay.

Broadway By the Bay is an outgrowth of a San Mateo Recreation Department program that originated in the 1950s as "La Honda Music Camp", in Jones Gulch, near La Honda, California in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Each summer, that program employed the talents of young musicians, singers, and actors to produce primarily Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, which were staged at the camp site in Jones Gulch near La Honda, California.

In June 1963, the San Mateo Recreation Department established the San Mateo Community Theatre, with Dr. Randolph Hunt as music director and Robert Lynch as drama director, at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, California. Dr. Randolph Hunt and Robert Lynch were the directors for the first two summer productions at Hillsdale High School, both of which were Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

The first production was Patience, in August 1963 in the little theatre at Hillsdale High School, with an additional performance at La Honda Music Camp. The cast of high school and college students included a future international opera singer, soprano Luana De Vol. Hunt conducted a small orchestra of musicians from San Mateo County. In the summer of 1964, Hunt and Lynch collaborated on The Mikado, again at Hillsdale High School with an additional performance at the camp. In 1965, Anthony "Duke" Campagne, the band director at Hillsdale High School, worked with Lynch on a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, which played at Hillsdale and one performance at La Honda Music Camp.

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