Three theaters within a few minutes of each other are opening new seasons this September and October, and two of them happen to be marking round-number anniversaries at the same time. Round House Theatre begins its 50th season on September 9 with a co-production of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Adventure Theatre MTC, out at Glen Echo Park, opens its 75th season on October 2 with the world premiere of Beatrice Likes the Dark. Imagination Stage, in downtown Bethesda, kicks off a new season called "A Season of Heroes and Hope" on September 26 with Chicka Chicka Boom Boom: The Musical. None of the three coordinated this. The overlap is a coincidence of founding dates decades apart, and it happens to be landing on the same six weeks of the calendar.
What makes this fall worth paying attention to isn't the coincidence itself. It's that both anniversary organizations are using this specific season to open their doors wider than usual, in ways that are tied to the milestone and won't necessarily repeat next year.
Three Different Starting Points
Round House traces its first production, a staging of Godspell, to 1977, when a touring group called Street 70 renamed itself and settled into the former Bushey Drive Elementary School. The company didn't move into its current home at 4545 East-West Highway until 2002. Adventure Theatre goes back further, to 1951, when a group of parents and children started what has become the longest-running children's theater program in the Washington area, later merging with the Musical Theater Center in 2012 to become Adventure Theatre MTC. Imagination Stage has the most recent origin of the three: it started as the Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts in 1979, took its current name in 2001, and moved into its downtown Bethesda theater arts center at 4908 Auburn Ave in 2003.
Three separate starting points, three separate reasons for existing, and this year they happen to be opening seasons within four weeks of each other. Round House is one of only six League of Resident Theatres companies in the DC region and the only one in Maryland outside Baltimore. Adventure Theatre is the resident children's theater company at Glen Echo Park, sharing space with the Puppet Co. and the park's historic carousel. Imagination Stage sits in the middle of downtown Bethesda's walkable core, a few blocks from Bethesda Row.
What's Actually Opening
| Theater | This season's milestone | Season opener | Dates | Address |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Round House Theatre | 50th anniversary season | Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (co-produced with Olney Theatre Center) | Opens Sept. 9, 2026 | 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda |
| Adventure Theatre MTC | 75th anniversary, "A Platinum Jubilee" | Beatrice Likes the Dark (world premiere) | Oct. 2 – Nov. 1, 2026 | 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo Park |
| Imagination Stage | New season, "A Season of Heroes and Hope" | Chicka Chicka Boom Boom: The Musical | Sept. 26 – Oct. 18, 2026 | 4908 Auburn Ave, Bethesda |
Round House's full anniversary season runs through July 2027 and includes two world premieres, three regional premieres, and a new Broadway-sourced production of Cult of Love over the winter holidays. Adventure Theatre's Platinum Jubilee continues with a remount of Frosty the Snow Man starting November 21 and a stage adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, with a score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, opening in February.
The Money Behind the Milestone
Round House marked its 50th by hiring the design firm Pentagram to build a new visual identity, a robin's-egg-blue wordmark framed by two vertical lines that animate like stage curtains opening and closing. Artistic Director Ryan Rilette has said the company's approach to the next fifty years isn't about getting bigger. It's about doing the same depth of work more efficiently. That restraint shows up in how the anniversary season is being celebrated: not through expansion, but through a season-long program called 50 for 50, offering free staged readings, backstage tours, tech rehearsal look-ins, and a random-drawing lottery for 50 free tickets to the first Thursday performance of each mainstage show.
Adventure Theatre's milestone came with a different kind of investment. Maryland's District 16 delegation, led by Delegate Sarah Wolek and State Senator Sara Love, secured $250,000 in legislative bond funding for renovations to the theater's seating, lobby, restrooms, and electrical systems. Wolek called it good fortune that the company calls Bethesda home. The money is funding new theater seating and reupholstering that began in September 2026, ahead of the anniversary season, along with restroom upgrades and the conversion of the old box office into a dedicated Quiet Room for patrons who need a lower-stimulation space during a performance. Adventure Theatre has also launched a matching campaign aiming to raise another $250,000 by August 2027 to sustain the programming that a state senator's office described as having served six generations of families in the region.
The Access Window, While It Lasts
A handful of specific things are available this season that are tied directly to the anniversaries and won't necessarily carry into next year's calendar:
- Round House's 50 for 50 program runs the full 2026-27 season, including a free screening and cast conversation around the theater's Homebound web series, a 25th-anniversary production of the Sarah Metzger Memorial Play in March, and a 50th Anniversary Gala planned for March 13, 2027.
- Adventure Theatre's Flexpass, a book of 10 tickets good for any show in the Platinum Jubilee season, is priced at $185, which the company says works out to an average savings of $72 over buying tickets individually.
- Adventure Theatre's new seating and reupholstering work began this September, meaning audiences attending the 75th season are the first to sit in the refreshed house before the rest of the renovation, including the new Quiet Room, comes online.
- Imagination Stage's season includes a limited two-week engagement of The Questioneers in the spring, available only through its bundled ticket packages rather than as a standalone run.
None of these are permanent features of how these theaters operate in a normal year. They exist because two organizations decided to spend their fiftieth and seventy-fifth years opening things up rather than closing a season quietly, and the third happened to land a new theme and a new opener in the same narrow stretch of fall.
Why This Particular Fall Is the One
A theater company doesn't get to be fifty or seventy-five twice. Round House's free-ticket lottery, its backstage tours, and its March gala are built around this specific anniversary year, and the programming calendar makes clear it won't be repeated at this scale next season. Adventure Theatre's renovation has a defined arc too. The seating work started this month, the matching campaign closes in August 2027, and by the time both wrap, the theater residents will be watching shows in a rebuilt house that no longer needs the fixes this season is funding.
If you already have a habit of catching a show at Round House or bringing kids to Glen Echo for Adventure Theatre or Imagination Stage, this is the season where that habit gets more out of a single ticket than usual. If you don't have that habit yet, this is a reasonable season to start one, since the entry points, free events, discounted flex passes, newly reupholstered seats, are more generous right now than they're likely to be once the anniversary campaigns wind down.
Bethesda's downtown core makes Round House and Imagination Stage a short walk from each other, and Glen Echo Park is close enough by car that a family could realistically catch a Saturday matinee at Adventure Theatre and dinner back in downtown Bethesda the same day. That kind of density, three professional theater companies within a few miles, isn't something every suburb of this size can claim, and it's part of what defines daily life in Bethesda beyond the restaurants and the farmers market.
If you're thinking about how a neighborhood's arts calendar fits into the way you actually want to live day to day, not just what it looks like on a listing sheet, Jill Schwartz Group can talk through which corners of Bethesda and Chevy Chase put you closest to the parts of local life you'd actually use.
