Discovering Local: Golden Chain Theatre
You know the name. Now discover something more.
Drive north through Oakhurst on Highway 41 and Golden Chain Theatre is hard to miss.
For nearly six decades, the community theater has entertained generations of mountain-area residents and Yosemite visitors with melodramas, musicals, plays and live performances.
But the next time you settle into a seat and wait for the curtain to rise, take a look around.
There was a time when the people sitting in roughly that same space weren’t watching actors on a stage.
They were bowling.
Golden Chain Theatre traces its beginnings to 1967, when a group of local residents began looking for a way to give travelers heading through Oakhurst toward Yosemite a reason to stop in the mountain community.
With help from the local Chamber of Commerce, Golden Chain Theatre was born.
The fledgling troupe initially performed at the Oakhurst Community Center, with productions centered around 19th-century historical theater and melodrama.
The community embraced it, and before long, the performers needed a place of their own.
That’s where the story gets interesting.
Local Discovery
Here’s something you might not know about Golden Chain Theatre.
The building wasn’t originally a theater. It was a bowling alley.
In 1972, Golden Chain’s founding board members took a considerable gamble on the future of their little theater company.
According to Golden Chain’s history, the board members put their own homes up as collateral to purchase the former Snowline Bowling Alley.
Then they went to work turning a place built for strikes and spares into a home for live theater.
The old bowling lanes were converted into the auditorium. The saloon was remodeled, gift shops were added and the former bowling alley began a new chapter as Golden Chain Theatre.
More than 50 years later, that’s still the building audiences walk into today.
It’s one of those pieces of local history that’s easy to overlook, especially if you’ve driven past the theater hundreds of times or attended performances there without knowing what came before.
But the bowling alley isn’t the only interesting part of Golden Chain’s story.
The reason the theater was created in the first place says something about Oakhurst, too.
Long before today’s restaurants, hotels, shops and attractions lined Highway 41, local residents were already thinking about how to encourage Yosemite-bound travelers to do something other than simply pass through town.
Golden Chain was part of that effort.
What began as a summer melodrama troupe intended to entertain visitors gradually became something much larger for the community itself.
Today, Golden Chain Theatre is a nonprofit community theater presenting a variety of live entertainment while continuing its long-running tradition of summer melodrama. The organization also emphasizes fine arts education and opportunities for people of different ages and experience levels to become involved in live theater.
And the building that started its second life in 1972 eventually became truly theirs.
In 1999, Golden Chain announced that the final payment on the mortgage had been made, giving the organization outright ownership of the theater its founders had risked their own homes to purchase decades earlier.
That’s quite a journey for an old bowling alley.
A place originally built for an entirely different kind of entertainment became a stage where generations of local actors have performed, young people have discovered theater and audiences have gathered for a night out in the mountains.
And somehow, the original idea behind Golden Chain still works.
Nearly 60 years after a group of residents decided Oakhurst needed to give people a reason to stop on their way to Yosemite, people are still pulling off Highway 41, walking through those doors and taking a seat.
Only now, nobody has to rent bowling shoes.
Sometimes Discovering Local means finding something you’ve never noticed before.
And sometimes it’s discovering that the place where you’ve been watching the show has a pretty good story of its own.