Why Panida Theater Sandpoint Has Stayed Open
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Walk past 300 North First Avenue on almost any given week this fall and the marquee is lit, the doors are open, and something is happening inside that has nothing to do with a movie screen being blank. That is the part of the Panida Theater's story most visitors miss and most longtime Sandpoint residents take for granted: a nearly 99-year-old building has spent the last four years mid-repair, and there's no sign it ever closed its doors to do it.
That choice, more than the building's age or its Spanish Colonial Revival facade, is the real story here. Most historic theaters facing a multimillion-dollar capital campaign go dark for a season, sometimes longer, while contractors work. The Panida didn't. It kept selling tickets to first-run films, hosting touring musicians, and putting local kids on stage, all while raising the money to replace its own roof. Understanding why tells you something real about how this town keeps its cultural center alive, and what to expect from it as it heads into its 100th year.
The Panida opened in November 1927, built by local entrepreneur Frank Clarence Weskil as a vaudeville and movie house, its Spanish Colonial Revival styling praised at the time as unlike anything else in the city. Its first bill was the silent film "Now We're in the Air," opening just a month after the first "talking picture" had premiered in the United States, right as the business it was built for was being upended.
The building did not have an easy run to its centennial. By the early 1980s it was slated for demolition, its marquee at one point bearing a "Building for sale" sign, less than 60 years after it first opened. A community fundraising and restoration push saved it, and the Panida reopened in 1985 as a nonprofit performing arts center. It has since been placed on the National Register of Historic Places and picked up preservation honors including the Idaho Historic Preservation Council's Orchid Award. In the decades since, it has built the identity locals know now: a 500-seat house that has hosted acts as varied as Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, and the Spokane Symphony, alongside local recitals, film festivals, and town meetings.
That history matters for one reason. A building this close to being torn down once already tends to get treated carefully by the people responsible for it now. The current renovation campaign reflects that caution, and it explains the decision that makes the Panida different from theaters that shutter for repairs.
In the fall of 2022, the Panida board launched what it called the Century Fund, a five-year campaign aimed at raising $1.9 million by the theater's 2027 centennial to cover deferred maintenance and renovation across the main theater and its smaller sibling, the Little Theater. The first-year target was $273,000, earmarked specifically for new roofs on both buildings, which by that point were leaking.
Chris Bessler, who chaired the campaign, called the scale of the ask "audacious" at the launch, and the fundraising leaned on more than individual donors. Ting Internet pledged to match donations up to $200,000, and grants from the Idaho Heritage Trust and the Equinox Foundation, channeled through the Innovia Foundation, added another six figures early on. By the following July, the theater had already cleared its first-year goal.
None of that fundraising required closing the building. The roof work, the phase-by-phase structure of the campaign, and the theater's own programming ran in parallel for the entire stretch since 2022. That is the part worth sitting with if you live here: the Panida treated staying open as part of the plan, not something to pause while the building got fixed. Four years into a five-year campaign, with the 2027 centennial now about a year away, that approach is why the calendar has never gone quiet.
The range of what has shown up on that stage and screen during the campaign says something about what the Panida actually is to this town: not a museum piece, but a working venue that still books whatever the community wants to see.
None of that reads like a theater in crisis. It reads like a theater doing exactly what it has done since 1985, just with scaffolding somewhere in the building at the same time.
The person now running day-to-day operations came from inside that same local ecosystem. Robb Talbott took over as executive director starting in November 2023, arriving with a decade of experience in event production through Mattox Farm Productions, the company he founded in 2017 after his own start putting on shows at the Panida. Talbott's résumé includes building out the Sandpoint Summer Music Series and SledFest, events that overlap with the same audience the Panida already serves.
Board chair Jim Healey framed the hire as continuity, not a shift in direction, saying Talbott's experience with promotion and his relationships in the community would serve the theater well as it kept moving through the Century Fund. Nearly three years into the role now, Talbott has been steering a theater that was already mid-campaign when he arrived, which is its own kind of vote of confidence: the board picked someone who understood the plan rather than someone who'd need to invent a new one.
It would be easy to write the Panida's centennial as a nostalgia piece: old theater, old town, a hundred years of movies. That story is true but incomplete. The more useful fact for anyone living here is that the theater chose to fund its own survival in public, in phases, without ever asking its audience to wait a season for the doors to reopen.
The membership structure the board built into the Century Fund reflects the same logic. Tiers start at $25 for "Friend" and climb through "Supporter," "Good Neighbor," and "Benefactor" before topping out at the "Karen Bowers' Standing Ovation," named for the managing director who steered the Panida from 1987 to 2013 and set at $1,000 and up. The perks at every level, free popcorn, discounts, free entry to Second Wednesday member events, get better as the donation does, but none of them ask you to skip a show while the building gets fixed. They ask you to come to the show, and to help pay for the roof over your head while you're there.
That is the actual thesis of the Panida's countdown to 100: this is a building that decided the way to survive another century was to keep proving, every week, that people still want to walk through its doors. As the theater closes in on the final stretch of its five-year campaign before the 2027 centennial, the marquee has stayed lit through every phase of it, which is a harder thing to pull off than raising the money.
If you're weighing a move to a town where a theater built in 1927 still runs on ticket sales and neighbor donations rather than a chain's balance sheet, that says something about the kind of place Sandpoint is. Gove & Co works with people making exactly that kind of decision. Request a Private Market Review and let's talk about what a home here actually looks like, on and off the marquee.
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