Bluff City Theater is the brainchild of Joe Anderson and Wesley Yargus.

Following Joe’s retirement in 2012 from a nearly 40-year career as a media executive, including 25 as Vice-President and Regional Publisher for Metroland Media (Mississauga, Ontario, Canada), the founders undertook a road-trip that included a stop in Wesley’s childhood home of Hannibal, Missouri.

While employed at Metroland, Joe had been instrumental in helping to launch Talk is Free Theater in Barrie Ontario, Canada along with Artistic Producer Arkady Spivak. Together, they created one of Canada’s most innovative and successful small theater companies, producing numerous world-premiere plays, winning a Dora Award for best musical, co-producing with larger institutions across the country and mounting a successful European tour. The experience helped establish Barrie as a premier Canadian theater center that attracts top directors, playwrights, actors and audience from across the country for its now two professional theater companies.

Hannibal has long enjoyed tourism centered around Mark Twain, but as Joe notes, Mark Twain is a generational draw- visitors come, tour the sites and leave, not to come back for 20 years. The key to place-based cultural tourism is to develop attractions and events that bring visitors back year-after-year; that encourage them to see Hannibal a desirable place to live, invest and start businesses.

Joe and Wesley felt that a regionally-significant professional theater would be one way to build cultural infrastructure capable of supporting long-term tourism. After meeting with community leaders and conducting a series of community meet-and-greets, they decided there was sufficient support to launch in the summer of 2014.

Lacking a performing space, the theater premiered with Tales of an Urban Indian, performed entirely on a moving transit bus. A powerful and raw play about the experience of being moved to the city after growing up on a reservation, it dealt with issues of racism, teenage sex, homosexuality, alcoholism and suicide yet had a positive and uplifting message about spirituality and life. The play ran for 32 performances over six weeks and was an audience hit.

In the summer of 2014, the founders acquired the former F&M Bank building at 212 Broadway, a neo-classical style Greek revival building that had been vacant for several years. With financial, physical and in-kind support from local businesses, the building was transformed into an intimate 90-seat performing space and came into service in January 2015 with its inaugural production of Andrew Edlin’s Churchill.
BCT likes to challenge how theater is performed and has produced two shows environmentally in the derelict 1888 Federal Building at 600 Broadway and one outdoors on the banks of the Mississippi.

As of 2024, BCT has produced 40 plays including three world-premieres, two American premieres of foreign works, one outdoor production and three environmental productions where local landmarks were transformed, temporarily, into performance spaces.

Directors come from across North America. Our professional actors, while primarily St. Louis-based have also come from Los Angeles, New York City and Toronto. For at least one production a year, we put local children and youth on stage with professionals.

In 2021, concerned with the national decline in attendance at live performances of all kinds, Bluff City Theater made the decision to eliminate the financial barrier to attendance as a means of attracting greater audience diversity.  The loss in paid admissions is offset by an increase in personal donations, corporate sponsorships, grants and other fundraising activities.

Audiences continue to be amazed at the diversity, creativity and excellence of Bluff City Theater productions. One of the most common comments we hear from first-time visitors is, “I can’t believe that something this professional is happening right here in Hannibal.”