"We only put on shows we're super passionate about," says Callie Prendiville Johnson, co-artistic director of Electric Company Theatre. It's the kind of line you'd expect from a company with a marketing department and a season subscriber base. Electric Company Theatre has neither. Prendiville Johnson runs it with her husband Brian, no permanent staff, paid positions handed out show by show, and this year that meant putting on four different productions in four different corners of Fullerton before landing, this November, back where the company actually lives: the amphitheater stage at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center.
That landing isn't a quiet one. ECT's season finale, a production of Carlo Goldoni's "The Servant of Two Masters," opens on the Muck's outdoor stage in the same stretch of days when the mansion is also hosting its 32nd annual Artistic License Fair and its Día de los Muertos Festival. Three unrelated calendars, one hillside, one long weekend. Most people who've been to the Muck have been to one of these things. Almost nobody clocks that they're all the same weekend.
A Theater Company Without a Fixed Address
Electric Company Theatre's 2026 season is worth tracing because it shows how much of Fullerton's arts activity actually funnels through the Muckenthaler without advertising the connection. The year opened with "Once The Musical" at The Charleston, a new venue for the company inside downtown Fullerton's historic Williams Building. It was the first theatrical performance ever staged in that space, a third-floor room that spent the 1920s as an Odd Fellows meeting hall and more recently housed a dance studio. From there, ECT moved to the Muck's own art gallery for a kids' show, "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," timed to overlap with a Tom Everhart exhibition of Peanuts-inspired artwork. By June, the company had shifted again, this time staging "Tristan & Yseult" in the driveway on the side of the mansion, with combat choreography from Cal State Fullerton devised-theatre faculty member Michael Polak.
Four productions, three physical locations, one company operating without a building of its own to call home base. The season closes the way it started, at the Muck, except this time it's sharing the calendar instead of having it to itself.
The Weekend Everything Lands on the Same Hill
The overlap isn't a coincidence of scheduling so much as a function of how much the Muckenthaler packs into the final week of October. The mansion's free outdoor amphitheater series, which runs most Thursday evenings through the summer, closed its 2026 run on September 17 with a performance by Darden, an Americana harmony act. That closing show marks the hinge point. Once the Thursday concerts stop, the fall block starts almost immediately.
Jarabe Mexicano performs on October 29. Two days later, the Artistic License Fair opens, a fine crafts show now in its 32nd year that brings in more than fifty artisans from Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties, running from Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon. That same Sunday, November 1, the Muck holds its Día de los Muertos Festival, with ofrendas, local artisans, and live music on the grounds. And somewhere inside that same window, ECT's amphitheater stage turns over to "The Servant of Two Masters" for the rest of the company's 2026 season.
A resident who shows up for the craft fair on Saturday and comes back Sunday for Día de los Muertos is standing in the same spot where a theater troupe with no full-time staff is about to close out its year. None of these three organizations is coordinating with the others in any visible way. They just all happen to use the same eight and a half acres.
Almost a Hundred Events a Year on Nine Acres
None of this is really new behavior for the property. The Muckenthaler was built in 1924 as the home of Walter and Adella Muckenthaler, donated to the City of Fullerton in 1965 by their son Harold with the explicit wish that his childhood home become a public cultural center, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Fullerton Public Library, an independent source with no stake in ticket sales, notes that the Muck now produces close to 100 events a year, including five free cultural festivals, concerts in both the outdoor amphitheater and an indoor cabaret space, rotating gallery exhibitions, and an occasional film series.
A hundred events a year works out to roughly two a week, which means the density around Halloween and Día de los Muertos isn't an anomaly so much as the calendar doing what it does every month, just with more overlap than usual because three separate traditions (a summer concert series ending, a craft fair with three decades of history, a theater company's season finale) all happen to close or open in the same short window. Residents who treat the mansion as a once-a-year Halloween stop are seeing a fraction of what's actually scheduled there.
What makes this fall block worth paying attention to isn't any single event on it. It's that the mansion up the hill from downtown is quietly the connective tissue for organizations that would otherwise look unrelated: a scrappy resident theater company with no permanent employees, a craft fair old enough to have outlasted several other Fullerton institutions, and a Día de los Muertos festival that draws its own separate crowd. Anyone who's driven past the Muck without stopping in has been driving past all three.
If you're mapping out your own November weekends around what's happening on that hill, The Kennedys have been driving past the Muckenthaler for years and still check the calendar before making plans.
