Setting the Stage:Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts raises funds for renovation project

After years of watching other cities across the state and the nation reap the cultural and economic benefits of a vibrant artistic life, Columbia suddenly seems to be catching up.

Recently named Missouri’s “most creative city” by the Missouri Arts Council, Columbia is in the throes of arts advances: the opening of visual art venues such as the Orr Street Studios and PS:Gallery; the founding of the professional Missouri Contemporary Ballet company; a surge in youth performing arts organizations; increasing international renown for the annual True/False Film Festival; and the attraction of ever-bigger names to the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series, to name just a few.

Now fund-raising for a development that ties the arts together, the restoration of the historic Missouri Theatre with its physical conversion into the Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts, is under way. And backers of MTCA say the project, roughly 15 years in the making and estimated to cost more than $6.67 million, is ultimately good for business.

“Communities across the country have found that the arts are a huge economic draw to any urban community,” said David A. White III, executive director of the Missouri Symphony Society, or MOSS, which owns the building. “It is a proven fact that the arts economically surpass professional sports for any community.”

White points to an economic impact study performed by the Washington, D.C.-based organization Americans for the Arts estimating that the average Missouri Theatre patron spends $22.10 in Columbia per event, beyond ticket sales, for expenses such as dinner, transportation and child care. If 60 percent of the seats are filled at the approximately 200 events held in the building each year, the organization estimates the theater’s total non-box-office annual economic impact at more than $3 million.

In another study, the Boston/San Francisco firm Sasaki Associates, which performs strategic planning and urban design, listed the theater as one of the top-seven catalysts for development downtown.

Upgrades in the renovated theater, projected to be completed in June 2008 following the building’s August 2007 closing, could make MTCA an even bigger draw. Plans by Architects Alliance, the Jefferson City firm in charge of the project, show a 3,000-square-foot gallery for the Columbia Art League; 2,500 square feet of grand foyer reception space; a new mezzanine-level lounge; food vendor space; Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant balcony seating with an elevator; and an auditorium with modern audiovisual systems, lighting and staging capabilities. The dilapidated seating, which was installed 40 years ago, will be replaced with modern seats staggered for better stage visibility.

With the plans mostly complete, MTCA will send out bids for a general contractor in April and make a selection in May.

Toward the project’s total $6.67 million, the MTCA set a fund-raising goal of $1.5 in a “quiet” capital campaign begun last November with a committee chaired by Axie Hindman, wife of Mayor Darwin Hindman, and Kevin Gibbens, president and CEO of First National Bank and Trust Co. Though committee members remain tight-lipped about numbers, at least one big donor, Boone County National Bank, made an impact with a $100,000 donation, and Axie Hindman said large corporations, smaller businesses and other donors have been “very receptive.”

“We have a community that wants to attract original-thinking, creative people. The university wants to do that, and so do various corporations around town,” Hindman said. “Those kinds of people, original-thinking people, are looking for art centers such as the Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts. This is something that will be a base of recruiting the kind of people we want in Columbia.”

As the quiet campaign winds down, MTCA is getting set to announce a public campaign. One aspect under consideration is known as “Take Your Seat,” through which donors would be honored with plaques on the backs of the theater’s new seats.

Supplementing private and corporate donations, MTCA has received a $50,000 city block grant for ADA accessibility and a $250,000 grant from the Columbia Convention and Visitors Bureau Tourism Development Program’s attraction development fund. In addition, by creating a temporary for-profit entity, the theater has become eligible for $2 million in historic rehabilitation tax credits from the National Park Service and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. After five years, if the project has met the tax credit program’s standards, ownership of the theater reverts back to non-profit.

Along with CAL, several established non-profit arts organizations have made MTCA their artistic home: the Boonslick Chordbusters, Columbia Chorale, Columbia Civic Orchestra, Missouri Contemporary Ballet, Missouri Symphony Orchestra, MOSS Children’s Choir, MOSS Youth Orchestra, Performing Arts in Children’s Education, Ragtag Cinema’s Missouri Theatre series and MU’s Show-Me Opera.

MTCA also plans to open Scene Shop, where high school juniors and seniors enrolled in the Missouri Technical Theater Institute, MTCA’s vocational education program, learn sound design, lighting, stage management and backstage skills preparing them for jobs in theater.
Young people, ultimately, stand to benefit from the theater’s preservation, board members say.

Hindman, who went to the theater on dates when she was in college, said she was moved by the reaction of her grandchildren, visiting from Nashville, Tenn., when they first saw the theater.

“It was such fun to watch their faces as they looked around. It’s such as magnificent building,” she said. “I feel very strongly that it’s up to us to see that the building is preserved and renovated and becomes the center for the arts for our children and our grandchildren and future generations.”