With all due respect to the four plays on its 2011-12 schedule, Next Act Theatre's most spectacular production of the year will be completed before the house lights dim the first time in the new season. The 22-year-old company will open its new 150-seat performance space and theater complex in a cavernous industrial building across the Milwaukee River from the Third Ward next month.
The new facility gives Next Act 50 more seats than its old Off-Broadway Theatre as well as a larger lobby, box office, concessions booth, dressing rooms and costume fitting-storage room. A 30-car parking lot comes with the building. The new home also provides the company with its first green room, the traditional backstage lounge for actors to use when they aren't onstage during a performance.
Perhaps the best feature of the theater is what it doesn't have – pillars. Next Act's previous space had them, complicating and limiting the stage options available for mounting productions. The elimination of the columns allows the company to add the 50 seats without sacrificing theatrical intimacy, according to producing artistic director David Cecsarini.
"The theater is going to feel very familiar to our audience," Cecsarini said. It will feature a thrust stage, with seating on three sides of the performance area. Just as in the Off-Broadway Theatre, the center section will be six rows deep.
The side sections will have four rows, an increase from the uneven two and three row arrangement that flanked the previous stage. The absence of pillars allows for more of a fan-shaped auditorium that can accommodate the extra seats.
Next Act's new home is located in the former Transpak Corp. building at 255 S. Water St. Transpak warehoused, packaged and shipped large freight, and giant overhead cranes traversed the structure. The facility is so huge, semi-trailer trucks drove into it.
A scant two blocks from the Broadway Theatre Center in the Third Ward, the building's address reflects a quirk of Downtown geography. Water Street is one of Downtown's major north-south thoroughfares, but immediately south of the Water Street Bridge, it makes a sharp turn east and follows the Milwaukee River to the harbor.
The new theater is in the second block east of the turn.
In its new home, Next Act is leasing 11,000 square feet – 2,750 square feet more than the Off-Broadway – from Lighthouse Development Co. for 15 years, with an additional five year option. Lighthouse is developing and redeveloping multiple buildings on a 5-acre campus it is calling South Water Works.
The wide open space in the former Transpak building is ideal for a theater, but the scale is so large, Next Act has built a 3,000-sq. foot box within the box for the performance space. The industrial structure's ceiling is 32-feet high. The theater box is half that.
It is higher than the Off-Broadway Theatre's ceiling, and Cecsarini is enthusiastic about the lighting angles and set heights the new space can accommodate. "If we want to create a second story on a set, or put somebody on a platform, we can do it," he said while walking through the uncompleted space last week.
The stage will have the same 20-foot width as in the old theater, but it will be slightly more shallow. "I wanted to flatten it out a little," Cecsarini said.
Public areas outside of the theater box reflect the industrial nature of the building. The design is spare and muscular.
Patrons will walk from the spacious lobby through a tunnel into the theater box. Next Act has purchased 50 new seats that contrast in color with the 100 it moved from the Off-Broadway Theatre.
Managing director Charles Kakuk placed the project's price tag at $1.1 million, slightly more than planned due to higher engineering costs and legal fees. The company has raised all but $50,000 of the total.
Next Act salvaged everything from doors to backstage toilets from its former theater to save money. The Off-Broadway Theatre's lobby banquettes are now being put to use in the green room.
Cecsarini and a crew of volunteers are doing much of the painting and installation of the seating risers.
The 50 additional seats Next Act can sell for each performance is permitting it to compress the runs of its productions. That not only saves money, it allows the company to offer more rental time of the facility to other performing groups. The Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation is providing $15,000 in subsidies to organizations that need help with the rent.
"Our $1,400 a week rental fee is an absolute bargain in Milwaukee," Cecsarini said. Kakuk reported that the theater has only two unoccupied weeks for 2011-'12.
The Next Act season opens Oct. 7 with the large cast "The Exonerated." "Sylvia" (Nov. 18 to Dec. 18), "Vigil" (Feb. 3 to 26, 2012) and "One Time" (April 6 to 29, 2012) will follow. "Summer Stories with John McGivern" (May 2 to 27, 2012) is outside of the company's subscription series.
The new theater has yet to be given a name. A large donation can change that.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
