The marquee outside 1111 Park Avenue carries a name that took decades to earn. On October 24, 2026, the S. L. Roundtree Theatre at Booker T. Washington High School hosts "Born a Revel: Alumni & Community Reunion Production," a program of historical theatre performances staged by and for the people who came through the school's arts academy. The city calendar lists a 1 p.m. matinee and a 7 p.m. evening show on the Saturday, following two Friday performances at 9:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. It is billed as a reunion production, which is the tell: this is not a touring show dropping into a roadhouse, but a homecoming assembled inside a historic Black high school in Norfolk.
The building itself is the reason the production lands the way it does. For generations of Norfolk families, Booker T. Washington High School was the only game in town. Yvonne Wagner, a member of the Class of 1969, put it plainly to WTKR: "Booker T. was one the school they gave African Americans back in 1917 because there was segregation and we did not have a high school. We could not go anywhere else." Charles Gore, Class of 1962, told the station something that sounds less like a testimonial than a fact of life: "Booker T. taught me how to be a man. It gave me directions on how to stand on my own two feet and face the challenges of life."
That history is the raw material of a program described simply as "historical theatre performances." The phrase is doing real work here. A school that has spent generations as a civic institution for Black Norfolk has a story that is not written down in one place, and theatre is one of the few forms that can hold it — the segregated years, the teachers who doubled as mentors, the doctors and lawyers and city workers Wagner ticks off as products of the place. Alumni reunions tend to produce photo albums and banquet chicken. This one produces a script.
The venue's name is itself a piece of that history, and a recent one. The auditorium was dedicated to Samuel L. Roundtree, the teacher, director, and choreographer who guided the school's theatre program from 1984 to 1991 and who oversaw the development and introduction of the Academy for Visual and Performing Arts. A petition circulated in support of the renaming made the case in generational terms: Roundtree "may have taught your mother, maybe your grandmother, which was decades before he would have the opportunity to teach you." It described him as having "pioneered the arts movement in the Hampton Roads area," and noted that he ran his own studio while teaching in the public schools. The dedication ceremony, covered by the New Journal and Guide, fell on his 78th birthday and included tributes, performances, and the unveiling of a commemorative plaque.
At that ceremony, former student and Thespian Hermione Patrick remembered the standard he set. "Mr. Roundtree expected your best and did not allow any excuses from any of us," she said. The New Journal and Guide quoted her further: "Excuses are tools of the incompetent and built on monuments of nothingness, those who practice them a—" — a line that reads like something drilled into a teenager and carried for decades. Principal Matthew Mason told the paper he had never "worked at a school with so much history." The article traced that legacy outward, from the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis to Lyon, France, where the drummer Grover "Sangoma" Everett is regarded as one of the world's top jazz drummers.
So the reunion production arrives at a particular moment in the school's long arc. The campus is in the middle of a $44 million renovation — doors, windows, roofing, bathrooms — and alumni have been pressing the division for a fuller rebuild, arguing that a building with this much history ought to be brought up to the standard of the legacy it houses. Enrollment sits above 900 students. The school's colors are maroon, white, and gold, and its teams are the Mighty Bookers. In that context, a weekend of theatre staged by the people who once walked those halls is a way of asserting continuity while the scaffolding is still up.
Details beyond the schedule are thin. The city's calendar entry lists no ticket price, no reserved seating, and no capacity figure; VisitNorfolk's listing puts the price simply as "TBA." Anyone planning to attend should treat the 1 p.m. Saturday matinee as the anchor of the weekend and confirm logistics with the school directly. What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing: four performances across two days, in a theatre named for the man who built the program, performed by the alumni he built it for, in a school that has long been a center of gravity for Black Norfolk.
There is a word in the title worth pausing on. A revel, in the old sense, is a festive gathering — a celebration with music and performance at its center, the kind of thing staged in a hall rather than bought at a box office. "Born a Revel" frames the whole enterprise as an inheritance rather than an event: the claim that the people who came out of this building were made for exactly this, and that the appropriate response to a long history is to put it on a stage and invite the neighborhood back in.