On Dec. 4, Nick Hovick, artistic director of Children’s Experimental Theater and Staff Players Repertory Company, announced that this weekend’s musical revue performance at the Indoor Forest Theater by Taelen Thomas, Lynda Jardine and others would serve as “a farewell to CET.”

The nonprofit theater workshop for kids K-12, founded 50 years ago by Hovick’s mother, Marcia Gambrell Hovick, is being dissolved by its board.

The city of Carmel has extended a three-year lease on the Indoor Forest Theatre space to Stephen Moorer of Pacific Repertory Theatre and its children’s theater training program, School of Dramatic Arts (SoDA). Nick Hovick says the decision to segue the space to PacRep has been floated for “years.”

“It’s the end of the Marcia era,” says Moorer, who trained under Marcia in CET and worked with SPRC for two years. “But we’re carrying the torch of children’s theater.”

Nick Hovick took over as head of CET and SPRC when Marcia suffered a stroke last year, and when his sister, managing director Gwyneth, was diagnosed with melanoma.

“I did not allow myself into [Marcia’s] finances” before that happened, says Nick Hovick. But when he stepped in, he discovered the financial health of CET also was ailing.

The problems were compounded by low attendance.

In a Facebook post, Gwyneth wrote of her mother that “floating CET so long on her mortgage was not the smartest thing to do for [her] house… but it sure did keep CET humming.”