Taking a Bow: Performing Arts Facilities
BY NORA BURBA TRULSSON
Blue Man Group Theater
The Venetian, Las Vegas | HKS, Inc. | Las Vegas and Dallas
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BLAKE MARVIN/HKS, INC.
 Large props and special lighting are part of a performance inside the Blue Man Group Theater at The Venetian.
Blue Man Group is a wildly popular theatrical production with shows across the United States, as well as in Canada and Europe. Founded in the 1980s as street theater, it features three men with blue faces who combine mime, slapstick, rock music, subtle social commentary and lots of splashing toward the front rows of the audience.
After productions were launched in New York, Boston and Chicago, the show opened in Las Vegas at the Luxor in 2000. Several years later, Blue Man Group opted to move up the Strip to The Venetian, where the resort casino offered them grander digs: a new theater space, built specifically for the show.
The new Blue Man Group Theater was designed by the architectural firm HKS, Inc., with a team that included architect Rodney Morrissey, AIA, of the company's Las Vegas office, and interior designer Loretta Fulvio, IIDA, based in the firm's Dallas office.
"Blue Man Group uses full-scale props, including a replica of the nose cone of a 747 jetliner," explains Morrissey, an associate principal of HKS, Inc. who served as construction contract manager on the project. "They also go through eight layers of backdrops during the course of their 90-minute shows, and there's a lot of audience participation."
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A spare, modern look prevails in the lobby and the staircases to the theater's three levels, where colored lighting effects get theater-goers primed for the show. |
For the Blue Man Group, The Venetian proffered a 50,000-square-foot theater and nightclub off the main lobby that previously had been occupied by the Lord of the Dance show. The space, however, had 1,200 seats—too few for Blue—that were located back from the center stage, not allowing for the audience outreach the show has become known for. Additionally, the stagebox was too shallow for the new show's props and backdrops.
"We basically gutted the space," says Morrissey. "We opened up an exterior wall to remove the debris so we didn't have to go through the hotel lobby. We also had to do a lot of night work to mitigate the noise of jackhammers for the surrounding restaurants."
The new plan put in 1,760 seats in three levels, placing spectators closer to the stage, and allowed for a larger, deeper stagebox. Special consideration was also given to sound leakage so that the Blue Man Group's raucous live music didn't disturb other hotel guests.
As for the "splash zone" in the first 15 rows of seating, Morrissey points out that those seats were set on a black stained concrete floor, inset with a drain. "Those seats are vinyl, not cloth," he says. A hosing-off does the trick to clean the front of the theater, and audience members are given the option of donning plastic ponchos.
 The blue men.
The theater itself is entered via a special "Blue Man" lobby, located just off the hotel's restaurant wing. The lobby includes a beverage bar, ticket area, restrooms and a Blue Man Group retail store. The simple, modernist space is clad in marble and mirrors and includes special lighting that pulsates to music, changes colors and scrolls text onto the floor. The text spells out the names of audience members as they sign in for their tickets.
"The lobby space is designed to enhance the excitement and anticipation of show-goers," says Fulvio. "It gives a whimsical nod to the performance."
Blue Man Group's "Bluephoria" opened in the new theater in late 2005. HKS, Inc. won a 2006 Citation Award for the project from the Nevada AIA design competition.
Architecture and interior design: HKS, Inc., Las Vegas, NV and Dallas, TX; www.hksinc.com.
Structural engineer: John A. Martin & Associates (formerly Martin & Peltyn), Las Vegas, NV; (702) 248-7000 or www.jamanv.com.
Peoria Center for the Performing Arts
Peoria, Arizona | Westlake Reed Leskosky | Phoenix, Arizona
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL TIMMERMAN
 A copper-clad, tent-like roof floats over the block and glass performing arts center. The box office is marked by a long, horizontal window.
A generation ago, Peoria was a small, sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Phoenix, known more for its cotton fields and as a place to get gas on the way out to Sun City. Today, it's a boomtown and has become Arizona's fourth-largest city in terms of land area. It seems fitting, then, that the city recently opened the Peoria Center for the Performing Arts as part of its effort to establish a new city center.
The $13 million, 21,000-square-foot center, which opened in February, was designed by the architectural firm Westlake Reed Leskosky, known for its work on performing-arts facilities. Set on a flat, three-and-a-half-acre site, the building includes a 280-seat main theater and an 80-seat, flexible black-box theater. It was designed to accommodate the city's main tenant, Theater Works, a community theater group, for its performances and educational programming.
"We like to build in context," explains Ronald A. Reed, FAIA, principal of the firm who led the project design, "so when we were in design phase, we looked at Peoria's existing buildings, including those of the nearby city complex."
The key idea for the building's contemporary design sprang from tents used for summer theater festivals, Reed explains. "We kept thinking about something with flaps, something that was lighter than air. The roof, then, became an abstraction of a tent structure, something like origami."
 Slatted wood details mark the main theater, which is cooled by the use of blue fabric seating.
In elevation, the "tent" roof floats over a flat roof on a series of clerestory windows. It angles down and flaps up at one end, signaling the main pedestrian approach to the building. Various sections of the building pop out from the main mass, signaling their function. The box office, for example, marked by a narrow, horizontal window, juts out of the building at the main entrance. A large, paved outdoor space serves as the extension of the lobby.
Because of the nature of the site, the building could have no "back" side. "All the sides had to be finished and dressed, including the actors' entrance and the loading dock," says Reed, whose design team included architects, mechanical and electrical engineers, an interior designer and a theater specialist, all from Westlake Reed Leskosky. "I like to say that this building has the most elegant loading dock ever."
The building's exterior materials were chosen to reflect those found in other Peoria city buildings, such as block walls. "We chose a ground-face masonry block, with a color selected to match the site's desert floor," Reed says. "That anchors the building to the site. The joints were deeply raked, making the walls look like dry-block construction."
The tent-like portion of the roof was clad in copper, which, Reed points out, will darken, not turn green, in the desert climate. "It will turn a deep umber because of the desert conditions."
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Simple materials, including concrete flooring, were used in the center's hallways and lobby. |
The masonry block walls continue into the lobby, where poured concrete flooring was tinted a deep espresso brown. Wood details warm the space. The wood also was used in the main theater in the form of slat details, which partially obscure views of the stage and seating area when audience members first enter through the sound and light lock doors. "There's a low ceiling there, also, when you first come into the theater," Reed says. "We wanted the space to reveal itself to the theater-goers."
The theater seats are covered in a deep-indigo blue fabric, a departure from the standard red seating. "Red seemed too hot for the desert," Reed says. "The blue seemed like an oasis against the color of the other, natural materials. It's the color equivalent of water."
The stage itself was designed primarily for the spoken word, not for dance performances or concerts. Reed points out that there is an orchestra pit for musicals, which can be covered when not in use.
The balance of the building includes classrooms, administrative offices, dressing rooms and a green room. The lobby also has gallery space for the display of artwork.
In the meantime, Theater Works has made itself a new home in the center, presenting its first full season there, with productions that include The Importance of Being Earnest in the main theater and Extremities in the black-box theater.
Architecture, interiors, mechanical and electrical engineering and theater consultant: Westlake Reed Leskosky, Phoenix, AZ; (602) 212-0451 or www.wrldesign.com.
Builder: Sletten Companies, Phoenix, AZ; (602) 273-1474 or www.slettencompanies.com.
Landscape architect: A. Dye Design, Phoenix, AZ; (602) 234-2111 or www.adyedesign.com.
Kent Denver School Student Center for the Arts
Englewood, Colorado | Semple Brown Design | Denver, Colorado
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RON POLLARD
 The center's dance studio, which doubles as an intimate concert space, is an extension of the lobby.
Established in 1922, the Kent Denver School is an elite college prep school, serving middle- and high-school students in a bucolic, 200-acre suburban setting. Until last year, the school's visual and performing arts classes were scattered in various buildings throughout the campus. Additionally, the school's theater was housed in an older building that once served as the cafeteria.
In 2006, the school raised the curtain on its new Student Center for the Arts, a 29,000-square-foot facility that incorporates a 500-seat theater, an experimental black-box theater, music and art classrooms, a dance studio, a lobby, offices and theater support spaces.
 A circular form was used for the theater's design. The catwalk is accessible, allowing students with disabilities to learn theater tech.
"The school is top-notch in academics and very strong in sports," explains architect Bryan Schmidt, AIA , a principal with Semple Brown Design, the Denver architectural firm charged with the new center's design. "They were just missing a facility for fine and performing arts."
The new center was placed in an open, sloping six-acre site, across from an existing science building, creating a quadrangle where students, faculty and visitors could gather during the course of a school day. It also helped create a natural spine of buildings from one end of campus to the other, as well as a new focal point for the school.
 The glassed-in lobby faces the campus buildings.
Schmidt and the Semple Brown Design team, including Rob Forslund, Eric Bowman and Sarah Brown, did an inventory of the school's existing buildings as a starting point for the center's design. They found low-key, red brick structures nestled into the natural, woodsy site.
"We decided to acknowledge the scale of the existing buildings by downplaying the building's volume," says Schmidt. The firm took advantage of the site's slope to place the lobby and main entrance to the theater and some of the classrooms at grade level, making it seem as if the building is one story toward most of the campus. In the back, along the slope, the building expands down into two levels, housing the loading dock and more utilitarian spaces in the lower level.
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Opposite the lobby, the building expands to two levels. |
In elevation, a sweeping arc of glass-lined lobby faces toward the campus buildings, while offset rectangular forms make up the back side of the building. "Technically, there is no back of this building," says Schmidt, pointing out a campus drive that winds past the two-story volume. To keep that side of the building visually interesting, the glassed-in upper-level lobby space was extended into a cantilevered wedge at one end, which projects out over the loading dock. The space, which is used as a dance studio or small recital space, acts as an illuminated beacon by night, drawing the eye away from the loading dock below.
To further tie into the campus buildings, the architectural team chose red brick as the primary exterior material, accented with integrally colored precast concrete panels. Large expanses of anodized aluminum-framed windows allow those on the outside to view some of the building's activities, as well as provide plenty of daylighting for the interior.
Window walls bring natural light into the building. |
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Inside, materials were kept simple—vertical-grain fir wood for walls and details, linoleum flooring in the lobby and a sprung maple floor for the dance and recital room at the end of the lobby. A dramatic staircase, constructed with floating cast-concrete stair treads and a stainless-steel cable-rail system, leads from the lower-level entry to the upstairs lobby.
A circular form was used for the main theater, which is accented by wood-slat walls. The 500 seats are divided in half, with 250 seats in the inner ring and 250 more placed on the outer sections of the theater. "If you just want to seat 250 people, you shine lights on the central section and darken the outer seats," explains Schmidt. "You don't notice the outer ring of seats, so the theater seems more intimate."
 A terraced lawn area surrounds the two-level side of the building.
Another feature of the main theater is the circular catwalk. "It's an accessible catwalk," Schmidt notes. "That way, kids with disabilities can still get up there and learn theater tech."
The school's center for the arts opened in time for last year's school session. Students painted, learned dances, played music and put on the musical Urinetown in the main theater. "The acoustics were fantastic," says Schmidt. "They were able to drop pretend money from the catwalk."
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The dance studio, suspended over the loading dock, shines like a beacon at dusk. |
Architecture and interiors: Semple Brown Design, P.C., Denver, CO ; (303) 571-4137 or www.sbdesign-pc.com.
Builder: CMC Group, Inc., Denver, CO ; (303) 741-4500 or www.cmc-group.com.
Landscape architecture: EDAW , Denver, CO ; (303) 595-4522 or www.edaw.com.
Acoustical consultant: Robert F. Mahoney and Associates, Boulder, CO ; (303) 443-6989 or www.rfma.com.
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