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History of Mountain Theatre Company
Our Story
Mountain Theatre Company is North Carolina’s oldest continuously operating professional theatre company, with a history rooted in the vision of a small mountain community that believed deeply in the power of live theatre.
From Community Theatre to Professional Theatre
As Highlands grew, so did its theatre. By the early 1980s, Highlands Community Theatre began employing professional actors, designers, and technicians for its summer seasons. No longer solely a community theatre, the organization increasingly became identified with the building it had occupied for more than half a century: The Highlands Playhouse.
For decades, The Highlands Playhouse operated as a professional summer stock theatre, bringing working theatre artists to the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau and introducing generations of residents and visitors to professional live performance.
Artists who began their journeys on the Playhouse stage went on to distinguished careers in the performing arts. Among them was Collin Wilcox, daughter of founders Jack and Ted Wilcox. After studying at The Actors Studio in New York City, Wilcox worked with artists including Tallulah Bankhead, Geraldine Page, and Tennessee Williams and became nationally known for her portrayal of Mayella Ewell in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Later in life, she returned to Highlands and helped establish the Highlands Studio for the Arts, providing arts education to children in the community where her own theatrical journey had begun.
The Mountain Theatre Company Era
Nearly ninety years after Highlands’ first summer players took the stage, the organization entered one of the most significant periods of transformation in its history.
In 2021, a national search led to Scott Daniel becoming the organization’s first Executive Artistic Director, leading a comprehensive evolution of its artistic identity, producing model, and operations. The following year, The Highlands Playhouse officially rebranded as Mountain Theatre Company, establishing an identity for the producing organization independent of the historic building that had housed it for generations.
The transformation extended far beyond a change of name. Under Daniel’s leadership, Mountain Theatre Company relocated its productions to the Highlands Performing Arts Center and evolved beyond the traditional summer stock model into a professional regional theatre presenting an expanded season of Broadway musicals, cabarets, original productions, and holiday programming from summer through December.
Drawing upon Daniel’s experience in Broadway, touring, cruise-line, and commercial entertainment, the company substantially expanded the scale and production quality of its work. National casting and creative recruitment brought professional actors, directors, choreographers, designers, musicians, and technicians from across the country to Highlands, while increasingly ambitious scenic, lighting, sound, costume, projection, and theatrical design elevated the experience offered to audiences on the Plateau.
Productions including Jersey Boys, Catch Me If You Can, Rock of Ages, and the original Dancin’ in the Street became some of the most successful and recognized productions of this era. For the first time in the organization’s history, Mountain Theatre Company and its artists received BroadwayWorld Award nominations as well as national recognition from the travel industry, significantly expanding awareness of the company beyond Western North Carolina.
The Daniel era also expanded the company’s commitment to making professional theatre accessible to more of its community. Sensory-specific performances welcomed audience members who had traditionally faced barriers to attending live theatre, while the creation of TYA x MTC brought professional theatrical programming to regional students. Its production of A Wrinkle in Time provided more than 1,000 young people with access to professional theatre at no cost, including transportation support for schools facing geographic and economic barriers.
Nearly a Century of Theatre in the Mountains
From its beginnings as a group of amateur players performing in a school auditorium to its evolution into North Carolina’s oldest continuously operating professional theatre company, Mountain Theatre Company has continually adapted while preserving the vision at the heart of its founding.
Each generation has imagined what the theatre could become next.
The Wilcox family and Highlands’ earliest players established a theatrical tradition where none had existed. Generations of community artists sustained it. The transition to professional summer stock brought working theatre artists from beyond the Plateau to Highlands. And the transformation into Mountain Theatre Company established a contemporary professional regional theatre with an expanded season, national artistic reach, and a renewed commitment to excellence, accessibility, and community engagement.
Today, Mountain Theatre Company carries nearly a century of history forward while continuing to evolve for the artists and audiences of tomorrow.
From 50-cent tickets and amateur summer players to nationally recruited artists and Broadway-caliber productions, one thing has remained constant: the belief that a small mountain community deserves extraordinary theatre.
The story began during the Great Depression.
In 1931, an auditorium was constructed for the Highlands School, creating a gathering place that would soon become home to a new theatrical tradition. By the mid-1930s, Jack and Virginia “Ted” Wilcox helped organize a troupe of local performers who used the auditorium during the summer months while school was out of session.
Among their earliest major productions was the Broadway comedy Dulcy by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Reserved seats cost 50 cents, bleacher seats were 35 cents, and the short run played to sold-out crowds. Live theatre had found a home in Highlands.
The summer players formally organized as the Highlands Little Theatre in the late 1930s and became Highlands Community Theatre in 1949. Over the decades that followed, generations of local artists and volunteers sustained an increasingly ambitious theatrical tradition, presenting works by significant playwrights including Thornton Wilder, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Kopit.
When a new Highlands School opened in 1952, the Town of Highlands acquired the original school auditorium, giving the theatre company a permanent home. In 1972, Highlands Community Theatre, Inc. was formally established as a nonprofit organization and received federal 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
“How could they have foreseen the growth of this charming town and the growing need for an expression by the people of Highlands? The point is, they did, and we now enjoy and grow as individuals and as a community with this cultural outlet…It grew and flourished and produced talent of professional caliber…It offered the young people in Highlands a chance to learn what theatre is all about…This year sees it stronger than ever and the dream a complete reality.”
The Galax News, July 27, 1967
