Cleveland will lose its third-largest theater -- PlayhouseSquare's 2,500-seat Allen -- in September.
The promised payoff, a year later: A three-venue, 1,000-seat complex for the flagship Cleveland Play House, which sold its outmoded facility, and forCleveland State University's undergraduate drama program.
All for a relative bargain -- under $30 million -- and preserving the 1921 Allen's architecture.
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CSU's theater program, which has grown from seven majors in 2003 to 70 today under the leadership of Michael Mauldin, would become one of the few undergraduate programs in the country affiliated with a professional theater and could have a shot at national prominence.
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Next door to the 81,500-square-foot Allen, in what is now a parking lot, Westlake has designed a 44,000-square-foot addition that would house two state-of-the-art theaters the likes of which Cleveland has never before seen.
The northernmost venue, called the "second stage" in the drawings, could be configured in just about any way a director wanted, up to 350 seats. It was inspired by Bloom's visit to the New Theatre, erected at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2002.
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The southern end of the Allen addition would be a similarly flexible but smaller 150-seat laboratory theater, which Bloom called "the workhorse of the complex," for student projects, children's theater, readings and events in the Play House's annual FusionFest.
The firm retained for the transformation, Westlake Reed Leskosky, is the team behind the original renovation of Playhouse Square Center. If you think CSU Summer Stages was amazing in the Factory Theatre, just wait until we move into a beautifully renovated, state-of-the-art downtown performance space.
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