It seems the San Francisco Giants acquired the historic Curran Theatre for a song, and the sale came at a significant loss for seller Carole Shorenstein Hays.
We learned last week that the Curran Theatre had changed hands for the second time in 15 years, with local theater producer Carole Shorenstein Hays opting to sell after renovating the theater in the last decade to become a venue for envelope-pushing work.
The SF Business Times reports that the 1,667-seat theater sold to the Giants for $13.66 million, after being on the market for more than a year. And the publication notes that this figure is “half the average annual salary of the team’s star shortstop, Willy Adames.” In other words, not a huge hit to the Giants’ bottom line.
And that means that while Ms. Shorenstein Hays may have seen her investment in the theater and its renovation in the last decade as a personal project and a gift to the arts community at large, she nonetheless took a serious loss in selling it.
Records show that she purchased the then-pretty-musty theater outright from former business partners in 2010 for $16.6 million, and sunk untold millions into its renovation — a renovation that took nearly seven years, and reportedly included a basement level that was hand-excavated with shovels in order to create new, modern bathroom facilities.
As Shorenstein Hays’s husband, Dr. Jeffrey Hays, told the Chronicle in 2016, “The Curran is a second family home, and it means much more to us than a commercial venture.” And Shorenstein Hays could certainly afford it, being the daughter of the late real estate tycoon Walter Shorenstein, and heiress, along with a sibling and other family, to his significant fortune and ongoing interest in Shorenstein Properties, which is now run by her nephew.
It’s unclear what transpired in the background over the last eight years, besides the unpleasantness of a lawsuit from those former business partners, the NY-based Nederlander organization, to change the family’s mind about their theatrical “home.”
But it’s the Giants’ home now, to do with as they wish — though they said last week that nothing much will change, and if anything, having more programming there than there has been in the last two years will be a welcome thing. In addition to the usual two- and three-week runs of Broadway SF shows, we can likely expect more concerts by artists who perform in venues of this size, as opposed to stadiums.
Previously: The San Francisco Giants Organization Is the New Owner of the Curran Theatre