Staff photo / Andy Gray Maureen Collins shares her experiences performing as a child at the Youngstown Playhouse during a press conference Monday at the theater. Collins will serve as host of Playhouse’s 100th anniversary gala on June 21.

Maureen Collins said, when she dies, she wants a plaque hung up at the Youngstown Playhouse that reads, “No one loved this place more.”

The Playhouse is where she first got on stage, where she worked with many of the community theater’s veteran performers and directors who shaped her career, and where she met Todd Hancock, her cofounding partner in Easy Street Productions.

Collins will serve as the host on June 21 for the Youngstown Playhouse 100th Anniversary Gala, the culmination of its year-long celebration of the theater’s centennial.

“This is the place 60 years ago where I fell in love with theater,” Collins said during a press conference Monday to talk about the event. “Let’s face it, (where) I fell in love with performing. I was hooked.”

The main stage gala will feature about 40 singers and another 20 readers / narrators / actors, according to Rick Blackson of Beyond Broadway Entertainment, who will serve as music director and accompanist for the event.

Blackson worked with J.E. Ballantyne Jr. to shape the program. Ballentyne spent nearly a decade going through the Playhouse’s voluminous (and disorganized) archives and conducting interviews for his 2024 book “Where the Stars Still Shine,” which chronicled the theater’s history. Many of the old photographs Ballantyne found from past productions will be projected on a screen during the gala.

“Jack and I have painstakingly taken his book and pared down and condensed and tried to extract and find some of the major points from each of the decades, and we put it into a narrative,” Blackson said.

Each decade will have a theme and songs representing that era. During the press conference, Blackson accompanied Ken Umeck as he sang “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” which they will perform during the segment on the 1930s. The evening will include more than two dozen songs.

“Pulling all of this together is our special weapon,” Blackson said. “Our special weapon is going to be a personality. We needed a dynamic personality, somebody who could kind of tie all this together and link it together and introduce certain aspects of each of the decades, and we could think of nobody better than Maureen.”

Collins said, “I’m sitting here trying to write my intros, and I’m getting teary eyed from every decade. The first 40 I wasn’t there, but they’re still so touching.”

Actors who went on to fame and fortune — Ed O’Neill, Joe Flynn, Oscar nominee Elizabeth Hartman — got their starts at the Playhouse. More recently, Playhouse veterans Michael Moritz Jr. and Joey Monda have become Tony Award-winning producers

Musicians who played in the pit orchestra for Playhouse musicals have had long, successful musical careers, and many who started out behind-the-scenes as volunteers turned that experience into professional careers.

“If you look at the book that I wrote, there are a couple of pages of lists and lists of people who ended up doing professional theater or TV,” Ballantyne said. “They used to be here at the Playhouse, came through the Playhouse, got their start here.”

Just as important, he said, is the Playhouse’s youth theater program, which continues to this day and has cultivated generations of performers and theatergoers.

The main event will start at 7:30 p.m. June 21 on the main stage and will be followed by a dessert reception and karaoke in the Moyer Room. Tickets also are available that include a pre-show cocktail reception with heavy hors d’oeuvres.