Pocket Sandwich Theatre has nearly completed its first run of shows in more than a year since moving into a new building, and one of the last performances had a special guest in the audience.

Actress and singer Selena Gomez attended Sunday’s performance of the melodrama theater’s annual holiday show Ebenezer Scrooge at Pocket Sandwich Theatre’s new space in downtown Carrollton.Nick Haley, one of the theater’s partners, says that Gomez’s younger sister is part of this year’s Ebenezer Scrooge cast and found out the day of the show that her sister wanted to be there.”My understanding is we found out that day just as kind of a heads up,” Haley says. “She was super great, super nice. She was just out for a night with her family, so she kept a low profile.”

Gomez also offered to wait until the audience cleared the theater so she could take photos with the show’s cast. Some of those photos popped up on Reddit.

“It was a pretty cool night,” Haley says. “We tried to be cool about it, having an A-list celebrity who’s on a hit show currently like Only Murders in the Building. It was pretty surreal to have her at the theater, especially in our new space.

“The 40-plus-year-old-theater founded by Rodney Dobbs and Joe Dickinson operated in a strip mall on Mockingbird Lane in Dallas until July 2021, when the building’s owners chose not to renew its lease. The decision forced Pocket Sandwich’s staff and crew to leave, and the following December, the theater made a deal to move into the building in Carrollton.

Crews took several months to renovate the space to house a theater in a building that resembled the old location. Eleven months later, Pocket Sandwich Theatre announced it would start its first run in Carrollton on Nov. 25 with Ebenezer Scrooge, written by Dickinson, who passed away in 2010 at 78. Dobbs retired at the end of the 2021 season.

The Ebenezer Scrooge show will run until Friday, Dec. 23, but good luck getting a ticket. Haley says all shows sold out before the run even started.

“Scrooge sold out a while ago, a few weeks ago,” Haley says. “We basically sold out every performance. There’s a very large standby list. Now that we have three more performances unless someone cancels, we’ve been sold out every night. It’s really a nice change from construction for a year to finally putting on shows.

“Haley says guests and performers are settling into the new space just as easily as their old home.

“There’s been a lot of positives,” Haley says. “One of my favorite things I’ve heard from guests is it’s so familiar to the old space. It looks like the old space so that’s a win.” 

Source: dallasobserver.com