When producer Matt Meece first came to town, he possessed little but ambition and a dream: to establish a successful theater company embraced by locals and tourists alike.

"We really wanted to create a stable theater," Meece said. "We wanted to become the must-see marquee activity in Savannah."

The plan has apparently worked.

On Thursday, Meece and his company, Savannah Theatre Project LLC, will have given 1,000 performances since debuting a song-and-dance revue called "Lost in the '50s" at the restored venue on Aug. 10, 2002.

It's a milestone in terms of consistency: Of the five productions staged at the theater - including "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change!," "A Christmas Tradition" and "Broadway on Bull Street" - the bulk of those 1,000 performances comes from "Jukebox Journey."

And it's a milestone in terms of frequency: The cast has performed one of the shows six to seven times per week for 11 months of the year for the past four years.

"God had a lot to do with it," Meece said.

Indeed, it seems divine providence would be necessary to maintain that kind of pace. But Meece said such frequency is not uncommon in the life of a song-and-dance man.

In Branson, Mo., dubbed "The Live Music Show Capital of the World," Meece and his five business partners cut their teeth on some of the more than 130 acts on constant rotation there. The upside was nine months of working a dozen shows per week. The downside was three months of unemployment.

"You couldn't have a normal life," Meece said. "I wanted to go to the beach and have a dog."

They devised a plan to start their own theater company. They had plenty of ambition, time and energy. All they needed was money and a place to make it happen.

They pooled whatever money they possessed or borrowed and began searching the country for an ideal location. Eventually they settled on Savannah because of its steady stream of tourists.

But the Hostess City offered something unexpected: a substantial amount of patronage by locals.

"We still don't get as many tourists as we first thought," Meece said. "Without locals, it would have been tough."

There's still a lot of marketing strategy to learn, Meece said. The company is making headway, evident in the soaring number of tour buses stopping at the theater, but it will be some time before a musical revue becomes a key reason for people to visit Savannah.

Until then, the company has had to rely on locals to turn a profit. About 50 percent of patrons are from Savannah, the Coastal Empire and lowcountry, said Mike Meece, Matt's dad and director of each of the shows. To keep things fresh, the company has put on new shows during the off-season.

That is, in February, after the holidays and before March madness. Mike Meece said these new shows are done with no intention of replacing "Jukebox." But this last February, something unexpected happened. "We had the most people we've ever had in a month," Mike Meece said.

What he's talking about is "Broadway on Bull Street," a show based on the same song-and-dance model as "Jukebox Journey" only instead of pop and rock tunes from the '50s, '60s and '70s, the show features tunes from hit Broadway musicals.

An estimated 90 percent of regularly sold-out shows were local, Matt Meece said, a staggering turn of events that revealed far more potential in the local market than they'd first realized.

It's the reason why the company will officially celebrate its 1,000th performance with the return of "Broadway on Bull Street" on June 2. The show will run through Sept. 3. And it's the reason Meece is thinking about developing a season of musicals for locals to subscribe to. If they showed up for "Broadway" in such numbers, Meece said, imagine what they'd do for a full season.

"We wouldn't bring 'Broadway' back if not for the demand," Meece said. "We don't want locals to get bored."