All in all, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s 10th anniversary season is shaping up to be a milestone for the largest regional theater in South Florida.
The Maltz recently passed the 7,000-subscriber mark, counts 70,000 theatergoers annually, and earlier this month announced the launch of a $10 million endowment campaign.
Last month, the theater received 25 Carbonell nominations, more than any other South Florida theater. And that same month, the Maltz held a gala at the Breakers Hotel on Palm Beach that raised $430,000, thanks in part to philanthropists Susan and Ross Johnson and PNC Bank.
“We have a great, professional staff at the top of their game, including our production manager, Clayton Phillips, who worked with Hal Prince on Broadway,” said Artistic Director Andrew Kato. “We have an incredibly supportive board.
“And, to paraphrase Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, ‘If we create consistent, quality work, the community will come and support us.’ All these factors contribute to our success as a regional theater,” Kato said.
Last week, the theater offered a preview of its 10th anniversary season, including live stage excerpts from its coming productions for 2012-13.
On tap for the anniversary season are Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, 1981 Tony Award winner for Best Play about composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the crowd-pleaser musicals The Music Man, Singing in the Rain and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
Drama takes a front seat with John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Doubt, about a priest’s relationship with an altar boy and with special events including, The Laramie Project, scheduled for early September.
A play by Moisés Kaufman, The Laramie Project, is based on the true story of the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo., and it will be presented by local high school students as part of the theatre’s Youth Artists’ program.
“We are celebrating our tenth season of success with the best Broadway-caliber productions and events that we’ve ever assembled,” said Kato, who in the off-season works as the coordinating producer for the broadcast of the Tony Awards.
“Our season is filled with classic musicals, family entertainment and captivating plays, including four Tony Award-winning productions and an MGM spectacle. Our audiences will be completely dazzled.”
At the introduction event, Carbonell-nominated actor Matt Loehr performed a number from Crazy for You, last season’s finale. Actor Curt Dale Clark whirled on stage previewing Singing in the Rain, which arrives next January, while two conservatory students sang John Mercurio’s original song, What I’m Going Through, from next October’s Through the Looking Glass, a contemporary retelling of Alice in Wonderland.
As the lights dimmed, Milton Maltz, founder and chairman of the theater’s board of directors, appeared in front of a lit backdrop of the word made indelible by John Lennon: Imagine – the theme of the campaign.
Maltz announced a three-to-one matching challenge grant (the “campaign to secure the future’) to secure a $10 million endowment.
The challenge requires the theater to raise $2.5 million by June 30 to receive $7 million from the foundation. This, added to its existing $500,000, will bring the total endowment to $10 million, an amount typically unheard of for a theater this size.
“We are privileged to provide the financial stability the theater needs to remain an artistic jewel in our community and we encourage the rest of the community to join us in ensuring its future,” Maltz said.
Volunteer, donor and employee Eileen Weissmann of Jupiter was mingling backstage and socializing with guests.
Canvases and mock-ups of the theatre’s current show, Red, which runs from Feb. 14-26, about abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko and his relationship with his assistant, graced the periphery of the room.
“I stretched the canvases,” says Weissmann proudly.
Nearby, another volunteer, Fran Borgenicht, (aka Francine Bizar), who, along with her producing partner, Nick Demos, make up the production company Demos Bizar Entertainment, drove to the theatre in her 1983 Rolls Royce Corniche to iron shirts for the cast and fill in as a non-speaking nun in last season’s production of A Sound of Music.
The show she produced with Demos in New York, Memphis the Musical, won the 2010 Tony award for Best Musical.
“When I’m not at my home in Manhattan or farm in New Jersey, I’m here at the Maltz ironing shirts,” Says Borgenicht, widow of philanthropist Jack Borgenicht.
“However,” she adds regretfully, “in Red, there is only one shirt to iron.”
The Maltz Jupiter Theatre is located at 1001 East Indiantown Road in Jupiter. For more information, please visit: www.jupiterheatre.org or call: (561) 575-2223.
