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“Do you have vision?” asks Sarah Rigles, the director of Classical Ballet Academy, before leading WW on a tour of her renovation of Foster Theater (5444 SE Foster Road, fostertheaterpdx.com).
For the past decade-plus, vision is something that has been seriously lacking for the 1915 building, once known as the Day Theater and part of a cluster of movie and vaudeville theaters in the Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood. The previous owner had an idea for it to become a recording studio and performance space but died before that could come to fruition, Rigles says.
In 2023, Rigles really just needed a bigger space for the ballet school. The fact that the Foster Road property she found (and fully renovated) had a 7,400-square-foot theater attached? “It was definitely a bonus,” she says. “That’s kind of a childhood dream of mine, to have a theater.”
Two years ago, the building was months away from being condemned and torn down by the city, she says. Instead, the theater is now well on its way to being restored beyond its former glory, with 250 comfy chairs, a 50-by-50-foot stage big enough for dance performances, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems. The lobby will feature an original mural, a concessions area, and gender-neutral restrooms.
“It was never a big, beautiful ornate theater—it was always a utilitarian space,” theater manager Paul LeFeber says. “Even in the oldest pictures we could find, it was a pretty basic old vaudeville theater, not an ornate opera theater.”
For now, the property is a full-on construction zone, but the project is coming together for a grand opening this fall. The crew kept an enormous vintage Coca-Cola advertisement found painted on the wall intact, near the soon-to-be upstairs bar. And Rigles couldn’t help but lean in to the opera house aesthetic and order curtains for the stage.
Rigles is excited to see what kind of acts will book the venue, from comedy and music to theater. But her heart is with the idea of providing Portland a proper dance venue, complete with Marley dance floors (a special surface for dancers, with lots of shock absorption).
“I’ve had the ballet school for a little over 20 years, and this is the type of space I was looking for when I first started,” Rigles says, “and it just didn’t exist.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2025 here!
