Drive south on SW Grant Avenue past C.F. Tigard Elementary and you'll pass a low, well-kept building with a marquee out front. Most people assume it belongs to the school. A gym, maybe, or a shared auditorium the district built for assemblies and holiday concerts.
It doesn't. The building is The New Stage, the home venue of Broadway Rose Theatre Company, a professional musical theatre nonprofit that has been producing full mainstage shows in Tigard since 1992 and has run its own 270-seat house at 12850 SW Grant Avenue since December 2008. The address sits close enough to the ridge that local business directories tag it as Bull Mountain, not just Tigard proper. If you've lived here more than a season and never registered what's actually happening in that building, you're not alone, and you're about to miss a working, ticketed cultural institution that opens its fall mainstage run later this month.
How a school district ended up with a theatre company as a tenant
Broadway Rose started small. In 1991, Sharon Maroney and Dan Murphy, along with two other performers they'd met years earlier on a summer stock production in Pennsylvania, pooled $21,000 and incorporated the company as a nonprofit. The first season ran the following summer at the Deb Fennell Auditorium, the 600-seat space at Tigard High School the company still uses every summer for its larger productions.
For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, Broadway Rose operated the way a lot of regional companies do, borrowing space wherever it could book it. That changed in 2006, when the company approached the Tigard-Tualatin School District with a plan to renovate an abandoned building sitting on the C.F. Tigard Elementary campus and convert it into a proper theatre. The school board said yes. Fundraising started in 2007, the company signed a twenty-year lease with the district that same year, and a $50,000 grant from the Paul G. Allen Foundation helped cover the buildout. Soderstrom Architects designed the space and Robert Gray Partners built it.
The New Stage sits on land the Tigard-Tualatin School District still owns, under a lease Broadway Rose signed in 2007 and has operated inside ever since.
The building opened in December 2008 with a holiday show called Celebrate Home. That same year, Broadway Rose was one of only 24 companies nationwide selected by Music Theatre International to produce Les Misérables, a fact that says something about the level of work coming out of a converted elementary school wing on a residential street in Tigard. The company has picked up Drammy Awards and PAMTA recognition since, and 2026 marked its 35th anniversary season, which opened in January with In Clay, a new musical about French ceramic artist Marie-Berthe Cazin.
What's actually on stage this fall
The current mainstage lineup at The New Stage runs through the end of the year:
| Show | Dates | Venue | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Million Dollar Quartet | Sep 24 – Oct 25, 2026 | The New Stage | 270 |
| The Silver Belles | Nov 25 – Dec 20, 2026 | The New Stage | 270 |
That's the fall and holiday stretch. Earlier this summer, the company ran Newsies at the larger Deb Fennell Auditorium, which is how Broadway Rose has structured its calendar for years: intimate work at the 270-seat New Stage most of the year, and one or two bigger summer productions at the 600-seat high school auditorium a few miles away, alongside the company's children's theatre camp.
For a sense of what tickets run, the company's Dear Evan Hansen production earlier this year priced adult tickets between $35 and $58 depending on the date, with tickets in the upper section running $20 for ages 6 to 18 and $25 for ages 19 to 35. Group discounts kick in at 10 or more, and Oregon Trail Card holders can get two $5 tickets per show through the Arts for All program. Pricing shifts show to show, but that range is a reasonable baseline for what Million Dollar Quartet or The Silver Belles will likely cost.
Getting there and parking
If you've never made the trip, it's a short one. From I-5, take exit 294 onto OR-99W toward Tigard and Newberg, stay on Pacific Highway for about two miles, turn right onto SW Walnut Street, then left onto SW Grant Avenue. The New Stage is on the left at the end of the block. Parking is free in the theatre's own lot, with overflow parking available next door at C.F. Tigard Elementary, the same building most people assume the theatre is part of.
Why this is worth knowing now
Bull Mountain doesn't have its own downtown, so the neighborhood's cultural life tends to get credited to Portland or lumped into "downtown Tigard" without much distinction. Broadway Rose complicates that a little. It's a 35-year-old, award-recognized nonprofit that built its own venue on a twenty-year lease, draws funding from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, and puts up six mainstage productions a year, all inside a building most residents drive past assuming belongs to the school system. Million Dollar Quartet closes October 25, and The Silver Belles opens the week of Thanksgiving. Either one is a reason to finally figure out what's actually happening in that building at the end of your street.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually going on in the neighborhood before you decide whether it's home, that's the kind of local detail worth having on your side. Julie Williams works Bull Mountain and the Westside daily and keeps this kind of ground-level knowledge current. If you're weighing a move here or thinking about what your Bull Mountain home is worth in today's market, schedule a consultation.
