Dinner theater gets renewed lease on life

Approval of a commercial planned unit development at the Naples Dinner Theater site will not cut short the landmark’s planned entertainment program for 2007.

Huge advance sales and plans beyond May 2007 mean that patrons and season ticket-holders won’t lose their money, theater managing director Stuart Glazer said Thursday.

“We have a lease,” Glazer said.

Next year’s theater season runs through May 2007, and, after that, there’s a chance that the lease will be continued, he said.

“If not in this location, then at another,” Glazer said.

Founded in 1975, the theater is on Piper Boulevard, just north of Immokalee Road between Goodlette-Frank and Airport-Pulling roads.

The 3½ acres under the theater was sold earlier this year to BRB Development, a group of Northfield, Ill., businessmen who plan to build stores, a self-storage shop called The LockUp and medical offices.

Collier County leaders on Tuesday unanimously approved a plan to rezone the land, after BRB Development agreed to kick in $25,000, half the maintenance cost for the small Cypress Way bridge, one of two entrances to the adjacent Palm River neighborhood.

BRB Development attorney Rich Yovanovich told commissioners that his clients were amenable to the plan, even though “we don’t think we’re the sole reason the bridge needs to be there,” he said.

When Naples Dinner Theater opened Oct. 7, 1975, that portion of Collier County was largely agricultural.

Now, across the road sits the NCH Wellness Center and the Green Tree Shopping Center.

Descendants of theater founder Julius Fiske owned the land until they sold it to BRB Development.

Now called the BRB Development commercial planned unit development, county appraisers put the land value at $3 million at the time of the sale.