City Repertory Theatre

City Repertory Theatre operates out of a black box space inside City Marketplace at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, sharing the same stretch of central Palm Coast that houses several other small businesses along Cypress Point. Founding director John Sbordone launched the company with Diane Ellertsen back in 2010, and by its 2025 season the troupe was marking its fifteenth year of programming, a run that has made it one of the longest standing independent theater companies in Flagler County. The company describes its own mission as delivering entertainment through “intimate, innovative theatrical experiences,” and that description matches how the space itself works: a small black box room where the audience sits close to the actors rather than across a wide proscenium gap.

CRT has built a reputation locally for programming that does not play it safe. Past seasons have included staples like “Jesus Christ Superstar” alongside more challenging works such as George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” and Jeanine Tesori’s musical “Violet,” plus adaptations pulled from Shakespeare. The 2026-2027 season lineup keeps that range intact, mixing a Sondheim musical, Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” the holiday staple “A Christmas Carol,” Christopher Durang’s absurdist comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” and Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” alongside “The Apple Tree” and other titles running from September 2026 through May 2027. Recent programming has also included a set of absurdist one act plays that closed out the prior season, a sign that the company is comfortable putting less commercial material in front of Palm Coast audiences.

The theater’s standing in the community got a visible boost in 2024, when the Palm Coast Arts Foundation awarded CRT a $69,000 gift, described at the time as the largest single gift the company had ever received. That kind of local philanthropic support, on top of ticket revenue and season pass sales, is part of what keeps a company this size running without the backing of a national theater chain or a university theater department behind it.

Tickets run $25 for adults and $15 for students on most productions, with individual tickets and season passes both available online through the company’s ticketing partner at crtpalmcoast.com, or by calling the box office directly at 386-585-9415. Showtimes typically follow a Thursday through Sunday pattern with evening performances and weekend matinees, though exact days and times shift from production to production, so checking the online calendar before making plans is worthwhile. Walk-up tickets are usually available at the venue before curtain if a show is not sold out, but popular titles do sell through in advance.

For anyone building a weekend around Palm Coast’s small but real live arts scene, CRT is worth planning around. It is locally founded, still led with the same independent spirit it started with in 2010, and it fills a niche that the area’s movie theaters and touring concert venues do not: real actors, live and unamplified, working scripts that a national road show would probably never bring to Flagler County. The company partners regularly with the Flagler County Cultural Council and local sponsors such as Dolphin Printing and Design, which reinforces its role as a community supported institution rather than a purely commercial operation.