Our Mission
Presentation Academy Top Hat Theatre Company provides quality education and experiences to those onstage, backstage, and in our audience. Theatre and the arts enrich our lives. The lessons and skills learned here empower us; through these experiences, we grow into more compassionate, inclusive, and civic-minded individuals.

Our Past
Theatre arts have a long-standing tradition at Presentation Academy; senior class members performed annual productions in the 3rd-floor classroom under the tower. Then in the early 1990s, Charlie Douglas created the first formal theatre program at Pres, building Top Hat Theatre from the ground up. We continued performing plays in that classroom, and the auditions opened up to the rest of the student body.

The program soon grew as more and more students became interested in performing in plays and musicals. We moved to Spalding University’s auditorium in the mid-1990s and expanded the program further by adding technical elements like set building, theatrical lighting, and sound. We began producing full-scale productions, now using all technical aspects, putting on shows like Grease, The Miracle Worker, Wizard of Oz, and Steel Magnolias, to name a few.

In 2009, Presentation Academy opened the Arts and Athletics Center diagonally across the street from the academic building. This building houses art classrooms, a gymnasium, a weight room, a dance studio, and our dedicated theater space and scene shop. This new space allowed us to do even larger-scale productions like Cats, Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan, and Godspell.

Charlie Douglas passed away in the fall of 2018, and we rededicated our theater space in her honor. Without her dedication and ambition, we would not have grown to be the program we are today. Thank you, Charlie, for always inspiring us.