Is your Theater the right Size?
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Topic: Is your Theater the right Size?
Posted By: Guests
Subject: Is your Theater the right Size?
Date Posted: 12/02/03 at 8:43pm
We're emabraking on a new theater project here in Redding, CT. A large industrial mill-site and surrounding buildings is being re-developed...developer wants to give our group a "black box theater" He will use it as a cultural anchor for the site. He's offered 5,000 sq. ft (our community is 9,000 people with many similar size upscale communities around us) We want to build to the proper size as a community thaeter/performance space and not have fixed seatings. i would welcome folks telling me the size of their communities/size in sq. ft. of their theater/Number of seats (fixed? or flexible?/construction cost of theater
Many thanks for ANY help
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Replies:
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 12/03/03 at 12:50pm
The theater I work at is a black box. The main part of the building which houses a 16'x40' stage, 140 seat audiance area, lobby and two small restrooms is about 3000 sq ft. This does NOT include any backstage space (except what we build into the set), dressing rooms, storage, offices, etc. We have an old house attached to the theater that serves these pruposes, but I can't give a good estimate of it's space.
I believe when we built the black box 15 years ago it cost us around $100,000 for just the building (we had the land), and that was for just an empty shell.
The 5000 sq ft you are being offered would be a fairly small theater.
Dan
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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 12/03/03 at 1:06pm
We are an isolated island community with an average population of 4,500 - maybe down to 3,000 in the winter 6,000 to 8,000 in the summer. We support two community theaters - our large theater has a 35 by 28 stage with 213 seats and a 40 by 30 black box. The total size of the theater complex must be around 15,000 sqft.
Our small theater has a 26 by 16 stage and 66 seats on wheeled platforms - four seats to a platform. The seats can be rolled into the "kitchen" if there is a dance or other non theater use. This theater has 2,400 sqft (40'x60') with another 600 sqft (20'x30') in the kitchen. We can increase the number of seats to about a hundred if necessary - right now we can fill most of our seats most of the time - our theater would look empty if we had 100 seats now - call it room for growth.
I can highly recommend : Will It Make a Theatre? Find, Renovate, & Finance the Non-Traditional Performance Space by Eldon Elder - it is available at Amazon - it will answer a lot of questions - I wish I had known about the book before I built our theater. In addition to the things you know you don't know this book will tell you hundreds of things you didn't know you didn't know.
A couple of thoughts: I think the 99 seat limitation only applies to professional theaters with union contracts - there is evidently a different contract for theaters over 99 seats. I also think there is another break at 400 seats - royalties are higher for over 400 seat theaters.
Hope this helps.
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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 12/04/03 at 7:48pm
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We are a smaller company in Orange County, CA. We have a standard black box that seats anywhere from 55-100 people depending on the arrangement of the seating. Since we are in a warehouse-industrial space we are able to arrange our seats to create more innovative staging. We have two tiny bathrooms, dressing rooms, an office and a small lobby. Because of our limited space we have to invent differnt ways of storage and display. For example in our lobby we have padded bench seats around the room. The seats are hinged and open so that we may store lighting equipment inside. Think...more is less....and it is not the size of space it is what you do with it. :)
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