Boston Supports Expanding Theatre Scene

Boston is about to build its first new theatre in over 70 years. In fact, it's about to build two of them.

On Oct. 4, Mayor Thomas Menino, the Boston Center for the Arts, and the Huntington Theater announced plans for a $20 million performance venue to be built next to the historic Cyclorama in the city's South End, as part of a residential/retail complex being developed by the Druker Company, the fourth member of this partnership. The city of Boston will commit $3 million to the project; another $3 million has been pledged by the Huntington Board of Trustees, and the theatre plans to begin a drive to raise at least $7 million more. The venue will occupy 40,000 square feet and is expected to open in 2003. A designer has yet to be selected.

The new space will contain a 350-seat theatre, intended primarily as the Huntington's second stage, and a 200-seat theatre. The Boston Center for the Arts presently has three small theatre spaces located on the other side of the Cyclorama (192 seats, 90 seats, and 40 seats), which a number of small established companies call home. For these and similar companies, the new 200-seat theatre is intended.

The announcement comes as a pleasant shock to the Boston arts community, which has long been unaccustomed to receiving more than token financial support from the city. And by Boston standards, this is something of a rush deal—it's only been seven years in the making. The BCA and the then-new Menino administration began discussions in 1993, the Huntington Theater joined the conversation in 1997, and momentum increased conclusively in the last few months, thanks in large part to a healthy economy.

The announcement also comes at a time when the city has a large and growing theatre community and nowhere to put it. Small companies can rent the spaces at the BCA whenever the BCA's own resident companies aren't using them, and the Boston Playwrights Theatre on the Boston University campus is a small but useful space for fledgling, shoestring, or one-shot companies. But most of the area's other venues are makeshift at best—hastily renovated upper stories, for instance, or church basements. Even the city's LORT companies work in borrowed spaces: the Lyric Stage Company occupies the second floor of the YWCA, and the Huntington itself performs in a theatre owned by Boston University.

Other plans for adding performance venues to Boston's theatre scene have been announced and forgotten over the last ten years, including a proposed arts complex in the old Combat Zone (Boston's version of the 42nd Street of yore) and a renovation of the Opera House. The Majestic Theatre, once a commercial house, was purchased and renovated by Emerson College in the 1990s and is now the only space in the Theatre District that, when not being used by the College, is readily available to local theatre companies.