The show won’t go on tonight at Wichita Community Theatre

Sometime between 10 p.m. Monday and 6 p.m. Tuesday, thieves broke into the air-conditioning units at the Wichita Community Theatre to steal copper wiring.

Now the College Hill theater is postponing its opening night of “Reading the Obits,” scheduled for Wednesday, because the theater is too hot.

The theater had the same issue about 5 years ago, when copper wiring was also stolen from the theater’s air-conditioning units.

“It was happening all over Wichita then – it was pretty prevalent everywhere,” said Mary Lou Phipps-Winfrey, president of Wichita Community Theatre. “We were just shocked to find that it’d happened again.”

Phipps-Winfrey estimates the repair to the units will cost about $3,000.

The show won’t go on until those units are fixed, she said.

“Hopefully tomorrow will be our opening night,” she said. “Whether they can get it done by tomorrow, we don’t know. So we may have to postpone again.”

The theater, like other nonprofit organizations, runs on a “shoestring” budget, she said – so a $3,000 surprise isn’t good.

“We don’t have a huge budget – we’re all volunteer,” she said. “We exist because people come to our theater and pay for tickets. We also have wonderful people who donate money.”

If you’re interested in donating to the repairs, you can donate at Razoo.com, write a check to the Wichita Community Theatre, 258 N. Fountain, in the mail, or drop by in the evening whenever the theater reopens.

This story was originally published July 19, 2017 at 5:31 PM with the headline "The show won’t go on tonight at Wichita Community Theatre."