Olney Theatre Center is, on this mid-September morning, two days out from an opening night a decade in the making. But the vision of a bustling arts hub is already a reality.
Virginia’s Synetic Theater is decorating the Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab in spooky accoutrements for a visiting production of “Sleepy Hollow.” In the lobby, an artisan is sewing costumes for the “Les Misérables” production that’ll storm into the Roberts Mainstage later this fall. Nearby, in a sprawling new makers’ space, another craftsperson is painting an ornate railing for “Some Like It Hot” and the speakeasy set that occupies the freshly renovated Bernard Family Theatre.
Within 60 hours, Olney Theatre Center would christen its $36.5 million campus overhaul with the song-and-dance spectacle of “Some Like It Hot” — the first production in its original 1938 space in nearly five years. And it’s just the final feather in Olney’s hard hat: In addition to revamping that historic venue, the company has in recent years added two new buildings — an education center and a makers’ space — while sprucing up its existing lobbies, dressing rooms and more.
“Theater is so hard to do for so many reasons,” says “Some Like It Hot” actor Jacob Tischler, who has performed in shows at Olney since 2019. “To see an actual new facility come up out of the ground, and to see talent and audience members come into this space and relish in the experience of gathering and of new art and of new theater, you never get to see that anymore.”
That was Jason Loewith’s ambition when he took over as Olney’s artistic director in 2013 and soon realized that the company’s marquee, barn-shaped theater — one of three indoor stages on the 14-acre campus — was on borrowed time. The sight lines were appalling. The rigging system needed a $250,000 update. Beyond the occasional rental opportunity and mercifully simple production, the 1938 Original Theatre (as it was known at the time) was essentially unusable. So when Debbie Ellinghaus arrived as the company’s executive director a year later, she and Loewith sat down for a big-picture brainstorm and confronted the elephant in the campus.
“We had a giant butcher paper and just wrote all of our dreams and thoughts for what Olney Theatre could be,” Loewith recalls. “Of course, a huge part of it was: ‘The historic theater is useless. It is falling apart.’ It was the heart of our campus, and it was the heart of our legacy. So we knew that making it a playable space, a real theater again, was going to be the heart of everything that we did.”
All kinds of ideas came and went as Olney worked with architects on concepts for a full campus redesign, anchored by the ambition to revive the historic theater. Eventually, Olney hired the firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple to oversee a three-phase renovation. The first, headlined by a refresh of the outdoor Root Family Stage, began in 2020. The 1938 Original Theatre was hollowed out and refurbished during the second phase. The final phase, which included construction of the makers’ space and education center, concluded in August.
Late this month, audiences will flood the campus when “Some Like It Hot,” “Les Misérables” and Synetic’s “Sleepy Hollow” briefly overlap — Olney’s first simultaneous trio of productions since January 2022.
“The more things that you can produce, the more people come through your doors and the more artistic stories you get to tell,” Loewith says. “You produce your way out of a crisis. You don’t retreat from it.”
Since the Roberts Mainstage — with its traditional proscenium stage and 400-plus capacity — has served as Olney’s flagship space since opening in 2005, the company opted to strip the 88-year-old original theater next door of its permanent seats and reimagine it as a flexible space. Freed from a fixed configuration, the stage, seating arrangement and capacity can be reoriented from show to show (though it generally seats around 350).
“When you’re in this new flexible space, there’s a lot more possibilities,” says Ryan Douglass, the scenic designer for “Some Like It Hot.” “It can be hard to find that direction or hard to narrow in on exactly how you want to do it, but that’s also super exciting because it opens the door to new ways to tell stories to the audience and to bring about the visual world that we want.”
“Some Like It Hot,” a musical adaptation of the riotous 1959 film starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, puts that freedom to good use. In staging the first regional production of the 2022 Broadway show, Olney found itself tasked with reinventing a crowd-pleasing romp. So Loewith, the show’s director, oversaw an immersive revival that has transformed the Bernard Family Theatre into a Prohibition-era nightclub.
The thrust stage is surrounded by cabaret table seating. The 16 actors weave in and out of the audience with vaudevillian abandon. The tapping and quipping and crooning are just inches away from many audience members. All the while, the escapades of Joe and Jerry — cross-dressing Chicago musicians on the run from the mob — become that much more transporting.
“It’s just delightful for me to see audiences leaning in and paying attention in a way that you do not get when you’re operating on a proscenium stage,” Tischler says. “No one expects to see a musical of this scale in a space this small.”
The production also gets to debut the theater’s flashiest new toy: A sprawling LED wall tailor-made for vivid backdrops. “It’s an incredible asset,” Douglass says. “And it’s a super fun point of collaboration between all the people that are working on the show.”
Then there’s the musical’s apt mantra. Written by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Matthew López and Amber Ruffin, this spin on “Some Like It Hot” trades the movie’s gender-bending irreverence for a more thoughtful rumination on identity and acceptance. And what better way to set the tone for Olney’s new era?
“We’ve created a cultural space where everybody can feel at home,” Loewith says. “What ‘Some Like It Hot’ says so clearly — in this, I think, brilliant rewriting of the movie — is that this world is a home for anyone of any kind.”
Although the Bernard anchors the campus makeover, the behind-the-scenes additions may prove equally key to Olney’s ambitions. The makers’ center includes a dedicated painting facility, prop storage and a costume shop. (The previous costume shop was a crammed enclosed porch.) The Bernard’s green room and dressing rooms are also new. And it may not be the buzziest update, but a loading dock makes the logistical side exponentially easier.
“This new space allows us all to be under one roof and collaborate together,” says Jerid Fox, Olney’s director of production. “How can we create the world so that when an audience member walks in, they’re transported to a new place? It just allows us to take a more ambitious bite at creating more dynamic worlds.”
The redesign also includes the education center, with two classrooms and a second rehearsal studio that overlooks the campus’s lush woodlands. As a community-driven arts institution, Olney offers summer programs, private lessons and myriad classes. (Among the upcoming options: a clowning class with Tischler and a jazz dance primer with “Some Like It Hot” swing Gianna Vasquez Bartolini.)
Looking to supplement the donations and ticket sales with rental income, Olney also renovated the Bernard Family Theatre with weddings, bar mitzvahs and other celebrations in mind.
“I want Olney Theatre Center for the Arts to be a community cultural center,” Loewith says, “with theater at its heart.”
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