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SPACE EXPLORATIONS
Boston palace for the arts
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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For those of us who remember when you had to cross the stage to get to the bathrooms at the Boston Center for the Arts (and therefore worry that if you got back late you’d be in the play), Tuesday was like the morning after the miracle. It marked the ribbon-cutting by Mayor Tom Menino (who, given the recent reopening of the Opera House, has been a regular Scissorhands of late) for the two brand-spanking-new theaters in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. The new theater complex — the result of a public/private partnership among the City of Boston, the BCA, the Huntington Theatre Company, and the Druker Company, developer of the posh Atelier 505 condominium building in which the Calderwood Pavilion is housed — is like a mini Kennedy Center in what was, not so many decades ago, a neighborhood that God (not to mention the Muses) forgot. The gentrification of the South End did not, of course, begin with the addition of these two theaters, with their long, two-tiered shared lobby of golden-hued Venetian plaster and light mahogany. But combined with the long-established theaters next door (now deemed the Theatres on the Plaza), the Cyclorama (to which the new space is connected), Boston Ballet’s headquarters, the Mills Gallery, Community Music Center, and numerous working artists’ studios, the Calderwood Pavilion puts a lavish, functional finish on what, at the grand opening, was dubbed without hyperbole "the Arts block." At the unveiling, Mayor Menino called the Huntington — which will manage the new complex and share booking with the resident companies of the BCA — "the counterpart to Boston’s beloved Red Sox," pointing out that the spaces will accommodate "the farm teams, where local talent is recognized and nurtured." The BCA resident companies include SpeakEasy Stage Company and Súgán Theatre Company, both of which will produce in the 200-seat Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre (an airy, high-ceilinged black box with cushioned burgundy seats), as well as the Theater Offensive, Pilgrim Theatre, and Company One. The Huntington Theatre Company will inaugurate the 356-seat Virginia Wimberly Theatre (a plush but intimate-feeling proscenium space "embraced" by walls of royal blue and mahogany) October 8 with the world premiere of Sonia Flew, by Huntington Playwriting Fellow Melinda Lopez. SpeakEasy opens the Roberts a week later with its 35th-anniversary revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Speakers at the presentation ceremony — thanking one another, their staffs, their allies, and what must have been every bank in Boston — included the mayor; the Druker Company’s eponymous honcho, Ron Druker (who called the four-year undertaking an "example of public/private partnership for the country"); BCA president and CEO Libbie Shufro; and Huntington board chair David Wimberly, managing director Michael Maso, and artistic director Nicholas Martin, who drolly remarked, "I’m just going to put on plays in here." (He directs Sonia Flew.) Martin, an Obie-winning director who routinely turns up on and Off Broadway, makes no secret that the promise of a new new-play-friendly, smaller theater was the "clever bribe" that made him commit to the Huntington. As a surprise at the photo opportunity-cum-press conference, Maso presented the mayor, whom many credit with bringing together the project’s disparate commercial and artistic forces, with an enlarged version of a plaque that will adorn a plush red-velvet front-row seat in the Wimberly. Trying out a sample chair, Hizzoner pronounced it "more comfortable than the seats at Fenway."
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