The Westside Theatre Foundation is expanding into the historic Strand Theatre on Clay Street with plans for a grand opening in June.

“We have come to a point now that our group — our actors, our directors and our audience — have grown so much that we needed to expand,” said Jack Burns, the man behind the creation of the theater company. “We want to further the entertainment options in Vicksburg.”

The company has been performing and operating for nearly three years at the Coral Room inside The Vicksburg, less than a block east of the Strand, and will continue to offer such intimate events as dinner theaters and jazz clubs there while bigger productions such as musicals and plays will be performed at the new venue.

Burns said the company also is seeking to offer foreign and independent films at the new theater.

“The Coral Room is our base of operations,” Burns said. “One thing I like about the new venue is the high ceilings and the shape of the room, and since having been a movie theater, it lends itself very well to showing films. One thing we intend to do is to provide some of the film-going public with the experience that they can’t get very easily anywhere around here.”

The Strand Theatre, which is located inside the Adolph Rose building owned by local resident Malcolm Allred, opened in 1934 and closed in 1966.

“I’m delighted that someone is doing this,” said Allred, who has owned the building for about 20 years. “I hope they have real success with it.”

The theater houses 85 stadium-style seats. Burns and his company plan to reconstruct the area to allow for a bigger audience and backstage area.

“The plan is to wall up that stage and make it into dressing rooms and a prop room,” said Stacie Schrader, Westside’s volunteer project manager and a Beechwood Elementary School fourth-grade teacher. She said another stage will be built where the wall that serves as a projection screen sits, and a space for an orchestra will be built on top of the stage.

“I can’t wait to get started,” she said.

Renovations by volunteers will begin next week. Work that cannot be done in-house will be contracted out, Burns said.

Burns is hopeful he can extend the nostalgia left by the old theater.

“After we add the theater lighting and the stage, the rest is going to be pretty much like it was when people came to watch movies,” he said. “I’m hoping this will be very much like the kind of experience of someone who came here during the 1930s and ’40s.”

The leased space will retain the Strand Theatre name.

“The name will augment the nostalgia,” said Burns, 62, and retired from 30 years in the cement industry.

The company has about 60 volunteer actors, directors and backstage crew members. They have produced a variety of shows, including the Broadway musical “Chicago,” the fringe cult “The Rocky Horror Show” and the classic “Gold in the Hills.”

The company’s next project will be “Hairspray,” a Broadway musical laced with music from the 1960s. Auditions wrapped up Sunday, and opening dates are set for the first weekend in May in the Coral Room.