Arena Dinner Theatre

Born 1974, from the Fort Wayne Theatre Workshop of 1962

Roots: Arena's own history corrects the date often given for it. The company began not in 1964 but in 1962, as the Fort Wayne Theatre Workshop, part of the Fort Wayne Parks Department and the only theatre in the city then performing regularly in the round, at the old Jefferson Center on the southwest corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Fairfield Avenue. Parks Department budget cuts ended that arrangement, and in January 1974 the board re-founded the company as a separate not-for-profit under a new name — Arena Dinner Theatre — in the Anthony Wayne Ballroom of the Chamber of Commerce building at Wayne and Ewing streets, where dinner and a show in the round ran for ten years. Arena bills itself, still, as the area's only full-time dinner theatre.

A permanent home: After the Chamber years the company was nomadic for a decade. In 1995 it settled at 719 Rockhill Street in the West Central neighborhood — a building with an arts pedigree of its own: built in 1922 as The Little Art Theatre, a gallery for the Fort Wayne Art School, designed by Wing and Mahurin as an addition behind the Theodore Thieme house on West Berry Street. The first production in the new home was Chicago, with Wayne Schaltenbrand — a founding member from 1974 — playing Billy Flynn. The theatre seats about 120 patrons and mounts seven full-length productions a season; in August 2025 it celebrated thirty years at Rockhill.

Sources:

1. Arena Dinner Theatre, "Our History" (arenadinnertheatre.org) — the 1962 Theatre Workshop, the parks budget cuts, the January 1974 birth in the Anthony Wayne Ballroom, the 1995 arrival in West Central.
2. Whatzup, "Arena Dinner Theatre marks 30 years at Rockhill" (2025) — the nomadic decade, the Chicago first production, Schaltenbrand; West Central Neighborhood Association — the Little Art Theatre building, 1922, Wing and Mahurin, the Thieme house.