CURTAIN UP!

CURTAIN UP!
New Gulfshore Playhouse theater a lightyear leap in space, potential

Originally published by The Naples Press: https://www.naplespress.com/2024/09/27/curtain-up

By Harriet Howard Heithaus harriet.heithaus@naplespress.com

27 September 2024

Kristen Coury positioned herself on the balcony that rides the stone wave coursing around the new Gulfshore Playhouse, a cruise liner of a building that seems built to sail Naples’ coronary artery of Fifth Avenue South.

That seagoing theme is no accident. The front doors of the new $72 million structure—full title, Gulfshore Playhouse Baker Theatre and Education Center—are within walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico.

If Coury, who was up there for a photo, looked ecstatic, it was because she has worked 20 years, 10 of them in direct fundraising and planning, for this scenario. Yet it’s what’s inside the 40,000-square-foot building hugging the perimeter of central Naples that excites her. The potential for new theater in Naples is why she is standing there, delighted to christen the building she has championed since well before the inaugural pledge from Patty and Jay Baker in May of 2015, a $10 million matching grant.

Gulfshore Playhouse opens for previews of its inaugural musical, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, Oct. 27. Its repertoire is about to become vastly broader, with a two-stage season that tucks intimate plays such as the single-star Every

Brilliant Thing and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill into its flexible 50-by-50-foot Struthers Studio theater. Larger-than-life musicals including Sweet Charity and stage-consuming farces such as Noises Off will be in the balconied Moran Mainstage theater.

Increasing boundaries exponentially

Coury can now think about complex works on a stage with 57 backdrop lines that can create endless scene changes. Can she set its perimeters a-twinkle for a work such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? Yes.

Send a cast circling the stage on a turntable, as has been done in Hamilton? Certainly. And she might consider both.

Gulfshore Playhouse has taken a diversity of genres as its mission, and the new theater makes that possible. Coury is also looking to bring pre-Broadway works.

“We want to be able to partner with Broadway producers. We’re already creating those pathways to getting to the right show that they’re looking to develop and put on Broadway that they would let us produce first,” she continued. “Which would be great. They could work on it while they’re here—work out the kinks, spend time, hear audience feedback.”

For Naples, it can bring a sense of helping shape the blockbuster. For the producer, it can bring some economy, she said: “It costs a million dollars a week to tech a show on Broadway.”

Along with the theater she’s excited about producing, Coury hopes her audiences appreciate the theater that was built to bring it to them in the best possible way. Inside its double- walled main hall you can hear a paper cup hit the floor on the stage, but not a cavalcade of jets passing overhead to land at nearby Naples Airport.

“We have three-foot walls, three-foot ceilings,” she said. “There’s like a channel of air and then a wall and then another channel of air.” She admitted she had already forgotten how soundproof the building is that morning, “until I opened the door to the terrace, and then whoosh! The sounds of the planes and the traffic, it all hit me.”

Visual tributes to Broadway

Inside the quiet of its Moran Mainstage hall, there’s a strong visual affinity for an actual Broadway theater.

“It’s definitely Old-World elegant meets— thoroughly meets—modernity,” Coury said of the Lisa Kahn Designs planning. “You can see, all the curves and the clean lines, that it’s very modern, yet we wanted to bring some of that historic theater-esque feeling.

“You can feel you’re almost in a Broadway theater. If there were three balconies above you, we’d be in a Broadway house, but we wanted to maintain the intimacy of this so people could still see and feel everything that’s happening onstage.”

Gulfshore Playhouse opted for a single balcony, and kept its seating to 368 seats.

“And that’s by design. If you’re sitting in row ZZ, you’re not engaged at all,” Coury declared.

That second story balcony opens out onto an atrium that surveys the rooftops and trees of central Naples, and the Founders Lounge on the south side of it takes in Naples to the Gordon River. Nearly every expanse of glass in this building designed by Arquitectonica/H3 opens up an eye-friendly vista.

Inside the main performance hall, the Lisa Kahn Design style takes a retro-contemporary dichotomy to the walls. Midnight blue wallpaper with compass points embedded in a ’30s architectural motif is velvety there but done in vinyl behind what’s expected to be a hard-working bar in the lobby. The blue fabric theater seats are shot through with gold threads to reflect the gold tone in the wood details. There’s terrazzo floor in the public areas, and planetary circle chandeliers of varying dimensions over the lobby.

There are generous squares of wood paneling, along with wood wallpaper for the curved surfaces. It’s primarily in walnut-stained oak that tempers, but doesn’t swallow the abundant light that pours in. In the Struthers Studio, to the left of the mainstage theater, there is a floor-to-ceiling view of the neighborhood, but room-darkening curtains will allow performances, as well as rehearsals on its sprung maple floor.

It will hold a cabaret-style audience for the Lady Day performances, theaters in the round and even luncheons from the adjacent catering kitchen. The lack of community meeting space makes it a good addition to the city’s inventory, she pointed out.

“People thought I was crazy for wanting the rehearsal studio to be beside the main hall,” Coury recalled. And smiled.

Space, and lots of it

Inside the main hall, the stage is mammoth to mouse on the scale of the organization’s Cambier Park performance venue. It’s 108 feet wide and 43 feet deep, and wings are 20 feet wide and 43 deep. Returning directors and actors will get a spatial shock.

“The Norris Center [stage] is exactly one half of one wing—we’re going from less than 700 feet to 3,000,” she said.

Anything Goes will take advantage of that: At any one time the ensemble piece can have 22 cast members onstage, without even taxing the space, and a 12-piece orchestra.

The largest musical Gulfshore did on the Norris Center had 12 onstage for its ensembles “and an orchestra of four pieces tucked into the piano room backstage at large cost. And I don’t mean moneywise. I mean the argument over whether we could add drums or not was a very lengthy one because we just didn’t have room backstage,” Coury recalled.

There is no orchestra pit in this theater, however. One sound-absorbing upstairs room, among the classrooms and conference rooms, will hold the musicians, who are observing the action from a wide-screen TV while they play; the sound is wired to the hall. It’s a necessity with the sea-level location; digging deeper to install a pit was not an option. The land underneath the structure had already been built up by 3 feet just to site it above flood plain level.

It has already been tested by Hurricane Ian, which gave Collier County a $2.2 billion lashing, much of it in storm surge. But the floods didn’t come within 5 feet of this front door.

Coury is well aware operation costs will also be vastly larger for this theater; the board and administration created operating reserves for any unexpected situation. Advancement goals have been increased—and met, she said.

There were plans for an endowment fund, she added in an email on the topic: “Our intention was to begin an endowment campaign as soon as we were done with the capital campaign (and we’re nearly there) but one of our patrons beat us to it. We recently announced that we received a $1.5M donation from Anthony and Beverly Petullo to kick off our endowment fund.”

A month of details

That leaves Coury a little breathing room to focus on the last month before the curtain rises for the first performance.

“I’m triple-tasking all the time. We’re at a meeting, people are texting me—hello!” she broke midsentence to greet staff members looking to help with the photo shoot. Five minutes later she was eyeing what appeared to be a paint splotch on the stained oak lobby wall.

“Can I get a roll of blue tape?” she asked facilities manager Joe Salemme. “I just want to mark things as I see them.”

There’s the parental eye of someone ready to send their only child to the prom: “Do the rails on that stairway look straight to you?” she asked the reporter. Assured they did, she sighed and offered a better analogy: “I’m just so conscious of everything. I’m like a director with her first play.”

And what a play it will be.