New Stages’ theater harmonizes with city’s changing arts culture
$35 million Gordy shows success of mid-tier company
For generations, Houston has been known as a “one-theater town,” a reference to the Alley Theatre, founded by Nina Vance in 1949. No other company, save the musical-producing Theatre Under the Stars, has come close to reaching the Alley’s size and reputation.
Stages is trying to change that paradigm. On Jan. 18, it will open The Gordy, a $35 million, 66,825square-foot theater across the street from its old home near Allen Parkway.
The opening of the sleek, industrial building symbolizes a new achievement for the local arts scene — Stages has become the first theater to break through Houston’s seemingly impenetrable mid-tier ceiling.
“Ultimately, it will create a different arts community for Houston,” managing director Mark Folkes said of the new building. “We now have fully resourced companies at all economic levels in a way that we didn’t before.”
Five years ago, Stages — then known as Stages Repertory Theatre — had a budget of just over $2 million compared with the Alley Theatre’s 2017 budget of $20.6 million. Today, Stages’ budget has more than doubled, sitting at $5.5 million while the staff has grown from 22 to 34 full-time employees in the last five years. Budgets for Houston’s non-downtown professional theater companies, such as A.D. Players, the Ensemble Theatre and Main Street Theater, range from $1 million to $3 million.
Shayna Schlosberg, managing director of the Catastrophic Theatre, says the growth of Stages is an exciting step forward for Houston’s cultural scene.
“What’s so exciting about Stages is they’re right — there’s been the Alley, they’re known as the place for regional theater, for a certain caliber of work … and then there’s everyone else. That’s been the perception of the city.
“That’s symptomatic of a city that doesn’t see itself as a theater city,” she said. “Now we’re going to have a second state-ofthe-art facility where high production values can exist and great design can happen in a way that’s visual to the rest of the city. We’re able to support a second theater that can support flashier productions — this might be what it takes for people to see this as a city of theater.”
Sitting in a first-floor boardroom on Monday, Folkes gestured toward the industrial-chic design of the building. The Gordy — designed by architectural firm Gensler — is a nod to its former life as a warehouse storing artworks owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Sporting garage doors, exposed ceilings, a gray stone floor and a steam-punk-style curtain made from metal chains, the Gordy has elements of both a historical Brooklyn warehouse and a Silicon Valley start-up.
The building’ feels deliberately modern, eschewing traditional markers of luxury one might find at Jones Hall or the Wortham Theater Center — columns, marble, carpet — for more contemporary, minimalist elements.
Located in the rapidly developing Waugh neighborhood, near Montrose at 800 Rosine, the property was likely to be turned into condominiums before Stages purchased it.
The familiar family names of its three auditoriums — the 251seat Sterling Stage, the 223-seat Lester and Sue Smith Stage and the 134-seat Rochelle and Max Levit Stage — are painted sideways in all caps on the walls, and color-coded. A mission-statement-of-sorts-greets visitors on the two-story wall at the entrance: “We sit together in the dark to know how to love each other in the light.” The phrase matches the taste of the company’s artistic director, Kenn McLaughlin, who often brings plays that tackle serious matters, such as homeless LGBT youth, heroine addiction and suicide, but which contain hopeful, humanitarian messages.
The lobby is designed to be more than a waiting area, but rather a collaborative community space, McLaughlin said.
“We didn’t have a mid-sized company that had the resources of what this building has now provided Stages,” he said. “Stages has been part of a growth across the sector, including MATCH and A.D. Players. There’s new investment in Houston’s arts and culture scene that’s not just about the legacy organizations downtown.”
The building is part of the company’s rebranding, which started with the name change. The company has a new logo, which is the word “Stages” inside a funky, purple rectangle with a curtain tassel at the end.
The user experience feels utilitarian. There is only one main public entrance and exit — meaning stars and talent don’t have a secret back door to avoid the crowds. All the seats in the theaters are around the same distance from the stage; there is no clear distinction between an expensive and cheap seat. And the display of beers on tap at the bar — the company is Houston’s first theater to have an installed tap line — gives the lobby the ambiance of a watering hole in the Heights.
The theaters themselves are unique in the Houston market. The designer, Charcoal Blue (responsible for St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and the National Theatre of London), emphasized seats located in close proximity to actors by building mid-size stages — three sides surrounding the stage — with balconies. Compared to Stages’ former theaters, The Gordy’s two main theaters still feel like intimate experiences, but feature a significant increase in square footage in the room, particularly with higher ceilings and less obstructed views.
A third black-box space will be a home for a new experiment in Houston theater: a marketbased show that runs as long as people continue to buy tickets. Most regional theaters set specific run dates months in advance of a show, forcing popular soldout shows to close to make room for the next play or musical. McLaughlin wants to try a model similar to that of Broadway, so that Houston can finally have a long-running musical with a rotating cast of actors. The end result, McLaughlin hopes, is a major increase in the amount of work available for local artists.
McLaughlin said he can’t overstate the number of new tools artists are now offered — a recording studio, a laundry room, a digitized prop inventory and storage area, upgraded dressing rooms, a bigger and better shop to build sets and costumes.
“For the first time in a long time I feel like anything is possible,” he said.