After eight years of planning and fundraising and two years of construction, the long-anticipated theater complex described as the crown jewel of San Diego’s Arts District Liberty Station opened to the public this morning.

The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center is the new permanent home of San Diego’s Cygnet Theatre. It will also offer performance and exhibit spaces for area dance, choral, visual art and other arts organizations.

Completed on time and under budget at a cost of $43.5 million, the 42,166-square-foot arts complex at the southeast corner of Roosevelt and Truxtun roads has attracted national attention for how it has creatively taken shape inside a long-shuttered, 1942-era U.S. Navy recreation/retail building.

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Cygnet Theatre co-founders Sean Murray, left, Bill Schmidt and Lisa Johnson, the president and CEO of Arts District Liberty Station, on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

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On Friday morning, officials with Arts District Liberty Station, which owns the building, and Cygnet Theatre, the building’s long-term tenant, hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony where a new 5-foot-tall red block letter sign was unveiled bearing the name that the center will now be known as: The Joan.

That’s in honor of underwriter Joan Jacobs, who with her husband, Irwin, gave $10 million toward the center. She passed away on May 6, 2024, just four months after the project broke ground.

Take a peek inside The Joan, the $43.5 million new theater at Liberty Station

Arts District Liberty Station President and CEO Lisa Johnson said The Joan is the most ambitious adaptive reuse project in the 25-year history of the district, and it will now serve as the cornerstone and “welcoming center” of the community as drivers enter the district on Roosevelt Road from Rosecrans Street.

Johnson said seeing it all come to fruition in recent months has been deeply satisfying.

“I’m not a cryer,” she said, “but I’ve had more than one moment with this building where my breath was taken away and I was overwhelmed with emotion when I saw what we’d done.”

Those sentiments are shared by Cygnet Theatre co-founders Bill Schmidt and Sean Murray, who had long dreamed of finding a permanent home for their nearly 23-year-old company, which started out in a Rolando-area strip mall near San Diego State University, then spent the past 17 years at the Old Town Theatre in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park.

Theater lovers share memories of Old Town as Cygnet prepares for its next chapter

“When we started to look at this actual building, it was far beyond our wildest imagination,” said Murray, Cygnet’s artistic director. “I just am stunned sometimes at really how beautiful it is. I look at it and think, this is real?”

And Schmidt, Cygnet’s executive director, said that as wonderful as it is for Cygnet to occupy The Joan, there’s a bigger story to its construction than their own.

“I like to remind people is that this isn’t Bill and Sean’s theater. This is our gift to San Diego. We’re so honored to be able to do that. Without all of the patrons and supporters, we would be nothing, so we share it all with them,” Schmidt said.

Military roots

The Joan was built from the bones of Building 187, one of the many structures rapidly constructed during World War II at the Naval Training Center base near Loma Portal.

After the NTC base was decommissioned in 1997, the city of San Diego hired Corky McMillin Companies to repurpose 365 acres of the property, which was later renamed Liberty Station.

One hundred acres of Liberty Station was set aside to create Arts District Liberty Station, where McMillan and several ownership groups have reimagined 18 of the 26 former Navy barracks, offices and service buildings into a mix of galleries, art and dance studios, restaurants, retail shops, event spaces and — now — theaters.

(Restaurateur Ryan Thorson is now working with district officials to repurpose four former Navy officer homes and a guardhouse for a restaurant project called The Admiral, and the district’s final four barracks buildings are as-yet unleased.)

Johnson said Arts District Liberty Station was eager to bring Cygnet to the property because of the quality of theater it produced and the generosity of its loyal patrons, who have donated many millions of dollars to make The Joan happen.

There’s still $5 million to be raised for The Joan project, but Johnson said she’s confident the campaign will be completed in full. “We’ve had a robust campaign and we’re very close to 88 percent of the total we need raised. That’s just a small amount to go to close that gap.”

Johnson said Cygnet Theatre’s arrival has been hotly anticipated by the district’s current tenants, including restaurants, galleries and retail outlets who hope ticket-holders will arrive early for dinner, drinks and shopping.

“Everyone here is really excited,” she said.

One of the biggest bonuses for Cygnet theater-goers in Arts District Liberty Station is free and ample parking. Liberty Station has 15 parking lots with a combined 5,000 spaces, including a large lot catty-corner to The Joan.

While the city of San Diego has recently announced plans to expand paid parking spaces and hours to raise revenue, the lots at Liberty Station are privately owned and maintained.

“There will not be paid parking here in the near future,” Johnson said.

The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The jigsaw puzzle

Historic preservation rules restrict how the old Navy buildings at Liberty Station can be renovated. But because Building 187 was remodeled twice after 1942, the architects for The Joan project were only required to keep the original walls.

That allowed the central, non-original area of the building to be fully demolished to make way for the proscenium-style 282-seat Joseph Clayes III Theater, which takes up two stories of space on the basement and ground floor levels.

The Joan architects also restored the building’s original  long arched colonnade walkways (which had been walled in decades ago) and they brought back the building’s original brownish Miramar Tan-colored paint.

Some of the many features of The Joan are the 150-seat Dorothea Laub Theater, which is a flexible studio space nicknamed “The Dotty,” a box office, dressing rooms, green rooms, a costume shop, dedicated rehearsal and orchestra spaces, an art gallery, a patio and bathrooms.

Making theater

Moving to The Joan has been quite good for Cygnet Theatre so far.

“Our subscription numbers are way up and ticket sales, as well,” Schmidt said, adding that when they invited subscribers to come and check out their new seats at The Joan, more than 400 people showed up “and they were universally excited.”

Schmidt and Murray say that they’re now in the discovery phase with The Joan, figuring out audience, cast and crew traffic-flow patterns, creating schedules for moving scenery in and out, and handling the challenges of producing shows simultaneously in both the Clayes and Dotty spaces.

As a result, they’re going somewhat easy on themselves in the first season. This year, only a few weeks will have two shows in session at the same time.

“We want to learn how it works before we dive in and start doing big, big things,” Murray said.

They’re also monitoring how long it takes for the production team to build and dismantle sets, hang and focus lights and accomplish other technical jobs so they learn how to schedule and staff appropriately in future seasons.

“This first year I think we’ll learn a lot of lessons,” Schmidt said. “The challenge for us is we tend to have to plan a year-and-a-half in advance, and we maybe haven’t learned all the lessons yet that might help us better align.”

One of the greatest benefits of being at The Joan, Schmidt and Murray said, is that all of Cygnet’s employees are working under the same roof for the first time.

In Old Town, their offices were in a building a half-mile from the theater. And in both Old Town and Rolando, there was no onsite dance rehearsal space, so they rented warehouses, often without air-conditioning and many miles away, for decades.

“Being in rehearsal is very different because now the theater’s literally just down the hall,” Murray said.

When Cygnet moved from Rolando to Old Town in 2008, Schmidt and Murray kept the lease on the Rolando space for a year to experiment with having theater productions running concurrently in both spaces.

“And it damn near killed us,” Murray said.

Their current lease on the Old Town Theatre continues through December 2026, but they won’t make the same mistake again.

They’re now subletting the Old Town space to other performing arts groups, including Arms Wide Open, a performance program for youths with special needs, that will present “Beetlejuice” this fall. They’re also in talks with another group that might lease the space for all of 2026.

The curtain-raiser

To kick off the first season in The Joan, Schmidt and Murray are presenting Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Broadway classic “Follies.” It opens in previews on Wednesday.

It’s about about a 1971 reunion of long-retired chorus girls at the soon-to-be-demolished Broadway theater where they all performed in the 1920s and ’30s.

The production will feature a large cast of 27 actors, who could never have fit on the stage at either of Cygnet’s previous venues.

Murray said “Follies” is a show he’s always dreamed of doing and he thinks its story about the community of theater artists and their shared passion for art-making is a great way to christen the Clayes stage.

Schmidt and Murray said they could have chosen a bigger-name musical like “Monty Python’s Spamalot” or “My Fair Lady” (both of which they’ve produced in the past) for their first show, but they wanted to make a statement with “Follies,” which hasn’t been staged in San Diego in decades.

“The first show we do, it brands us,” Schmidt said. “While I love to do really commercial shows that will sell a lot of tickets, we had to look at what fits the Cygnet brand.”

When Cygnet was launched in 2003, its first show was the edgy, cult-favorite rock musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” And the first show produced in Old Town was Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” Murray said that these big, artistically challenging kickoff musicals are a way to both reward regular subscribers and recruit new audiences.

“Our Cygnet subscribers, they already know what we do, but this is also introducing us to a whole new level of people that don’t maybe know who we are,” Murray said.

The rest of Cygnet’s 2025-26 seven-show season includes the comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha And Spike,” Oct. 8-Nov. 9; the annual “A Christmas Carol,” Nov. 26-Dec. 28; “Cygnet’s A Magical Holiday: Christmas at The Joan,” Dec. 10-28; “Somewhere Over the Border,” Feb. 18-March 15, 2026; “The Lehman Trilogy,” March 25-April 19; and “The SpongeBob Musical,” June 10-July 5.

Art-making

As part of Cygnet’s lease with Arts District Liberty Station, Cygnet will plan its seasons to accommodate performance periods reserved for other local performing arts groups.

Malashock Dance, which is also headquarters at Arts District Liberty Station, is planning to present a program at The Joan next spring. And a local women’s chorus is looking to make The Joan its artistic home.

Murray said he and Schmidt have been so preoccupied lately with moving into the space and getting things ready for “Follies” that they sometimes forget to step back and look at the big picture of what The Joan means to San Diego.

“Theater is so ephemeral,” he said. “But then to actually be part of something that’s long-lasting and something that will impact the community? That didn’t sink in for us until somebody told us that. Oh God, that’s absolutely right. And it’s very humbling.”

Originally Published: September 5, 2025 at 10:05 AM PDT