INTERVIEW: George Street ready for new season, new building
Photo credit below.
George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is one of the preeminent regional theaters in the United States, pumping out original material from some of the best composers and playwrights working in the business. They also attract quite a lot of on-stage talent. Only a couple of years ago, they had Kathleen Turner in a play.
Now George Street is preparing for arguably its biggest move yet: a new season in a new theater complex in downtown New Brunswick. For the past two years they have been housed in an old agricultural museum on the Cook campus of Rutgers University. Now they return home, to the newly named New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, with a fresh look and hope for more success in the future.
“I’ve been at George Street for 23 years, and we’ve been dreaming about this new building for a lot of that time,” said David Saint, artistic director of George Street Playhouse. “It’s finally happening. I’ve been working with the architect for the past couple of years, and it’s all now coming into fruition. And it’s an extraordinary facility. I mean, there are two beautiful new theaters and gorgeous new lobby and donor lounge and all the amenities.”
Saint was so thankful that the architectural team listened to his input. He wanted to be the theater practitioner in the room who could comment on the usability of the spaces. He was able to relay messages on what the actors and production staff truly need to make the theatrical magic happen night after night.
“So we have two beautiful spaces, one just under 500 seats and one under 300 seats, and they have all the amenities stage-wise with traps and orchestra pit and fly space and wings, all of that,” he said. “At the same time, it’s still an intimate enough space so that you can really gauge an audience’s interaction with the show, and that’s what was so important to me because we do a lot of new work. Doing new work, it’s so important to judge the effect that the piece is having on the audience, and if you have that intimate space, you can really gauge that reaction.”
Although George Street is saying goodbye to Rutgers, Saint has fond memories of the two seasons at the old agricultural museum, a raw space not far from the farms of Rutgers’ agro-school.
“It’s a wonderful raw space,” Saint said. “Through Rutgers, we were able to move in there, and basically we only had four months to outfit it into a theater. But we all pulled together and did it. It’s been wonderful. Again, George Street originally started in an old supermarket, and it was retrofitted to be a theater. Same thing with our space for many years was an old YMCA, and we turned that into a theater. And then now we turned this temporary space, an agricultural museum, into a theater. So it’s really so thrilling to finally have a space that’s designed as a theater from the beginning.”
Saint is a transplant from Seattle Repertory Theatre, where he served as associate artistic director. The artistic director at the time was an influence on Saint’s career, and one bit of advice has stuck with the George Street theater professional: “He taught me that when you open a new building, a new theater, the audience will come the first season to see the building and get a load of what’s in store there and how it’s going to feel to see an event there, but then you have to wow them that first year because you only have that first year once. And they’ll come back based on what they see.”
With that in mind, Saint and company have crafted a varied and engaging season of theater, kicking off in October with Last Days of Summer, a new musical based on the bestselling book by Steve Kluger. Broadway veterans are behind the scenes on this inaugural show, including composer Jason Howland (Little Women) and director Jeff Calhoun (Newsies).
“Because of this new facility and its technical abilities, we’re able to do not one but two pre-Broadway musicals,” Saint said. “[Last Days of Summer is] a story about a young Jewish boy from Brooklyn who doesn’t have a father, has a single mom, and just as he’s turning to his bat mitzvah age enlists the help of a famous young baseball player that he writes to, of whom he’s a fan. And he becomes involved with the boy and sort of becomes a surrogate father, and so it’s a very heart-warming story. It’s got gorgeous music, and it takes place right before Pearl Harbor. So that enters into the story as well. It’s got a lot of resonant factors to it, and when I first saw a reading of it, I was in tears. It’s beautiful and funny and moving, so I thought this would be great. And so we’re leading off the season with that.”
That show will take place in the new Elizabeth Ross Johnson Theater, running Oct. 15 to Nov. 11. In the more intimate Arthur Laurents Theater will be My Life on a Diet, starring and written by Renée Taylor, of The Nanny fame.
“A friend of mine, Julian Schlossberg, was the producer, and he called me about it,” Saint said. “I saw it in New York with Renée Taylor. … It got great reviews in New York, and it’s just been playing in L.A., where it got reviews. It’s hysterical. It’s called My Life on a Diet. Renée Taylor was the mother on The Nanny, but she’s done a lot of movies. She’s an Academy Award nominee and Emmy winner, so it’s the very, very funny story of her life on a diet and the many Hollywood people she got to know and work with. … Renée is 85 years old, and she’s incredible. She’s a force that doesn’t stop, and one of her lines in the play is ‘I keep telling my agent, I’m 85, but I can play older.'”
Rounding out the inaugural season, in 2020, is a theatrical adaptation of Midwives, a novel by Chris Bohjalian. Joe DiPietro’s Conscience, about the Red Scare, is also on the docket for 2020. Finally, a musical adaptation of A Walk on the Moon film will close out the first season.
In other words, there’s enough wow factor to go around.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on George Street Playhouse’s inaugural season in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
