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Plans for a regional playhouse in Estero now will take shape
with help from a Cleveland-based architectural firm that specializes
in performing arts facilities.
Paul Westlake, a lead designer for Westlake Reed and Leskosky,
has been hired to create final plans for the Gulfshore Playhouse
during the next three months. The completed renderings will
play a key role in continuing efforts to raise the $27 million
to build and operate the theater through its first year, said
Kristen Coury, founder and artistic director of the Gulfshore
Playhouse.
“Once we have these materials in hand,” Coury
said, “we’ll no longer have to sell the idea of
something.”
That sell also just became a little bit tougher.
Coury will have to raise $7 million more than she anticipated
to build and operate the Gulfshore Playhouse through its first
year. Early estimates set the price at $20 million, but final
designs and the costs of building in Southwest Florida have
increased that amount by $7 million.
“Obviously, we weren’t thrilled,” Coury
said. “But we weren’t shocked. We knew that until
we had a professional on board we were just estimating.”
Initial fundraising efforts have brought in less than $1 million.
Coury now has the monumental task of raising the rest of the
money by the end of the year to keep in step with a schedule
set by the D’Jamoos Group, which has donated the land
for the theater in the Estero on the River development planned
for the intersection of Corkscrew Road and U.S. 41.
Joe D’Jamoos, president of the Naples-based development
company, is working on a rezoning application with Lee County
to build on the land and hopes to break ground by the end
of this year.
“We are planned within their first phase,” Coury
said. “So we are doing everything to stay within their
timeline.”
The 33,000-square-foot theater is set to become the centerpiece
of the development and Westlake’s firm already has met
with the Orlando architects who are designing the Estero on
the River development, D’Jamoos said.
“We’re working with her architects and doing a
joint venture to make sure this becomes a project that just
blends together,” D’Jamoos said. “It’s
going to be something good for the community; it’s something
they don’t have. It’s very exciting.
The theater will feature a mix of traditional and new plays,
including Broadway and off-Broadway shows. It will be accessible
from both U.S. 41 and Corkscrew Road.
“It’s taken a primary position within the whole
project,” D’Jamoos said.
More than $300,000 in donations and pledges from corporate
and private sponsors has been brought in so far to build the
playhouse, which will serve as an alternative to the Barbara
B. Mann Theater in Fort Myers and the Philharmonic Center
for the Arts in Naples.
Contributions to the efforts to build a Gulfshore Playhouse
include a $250,000 pledge from the College of Life Foundation,
but that donation is contingent upon the closing of the Koreshan
land where D’Jamoos Group hopes to build.
The C ollege of Life, which acts as the caretaker for the
remaining assets that belonged to the utopian religious community
that settled in Estero during the late 1800s, has a contract
to sell the land to the D’Jamoos group if the zoning
is approved by Lee County.
Coury has decided against bringing in a professional to secure
the money and has taken more of a grassroots approach, working
with the same fund raiser who raised $66 million in donations
for the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm
Beach.
“We’re relying on people who have done it before,”
Coury said.
A capital fundraising campaign will begin in April, the same
month final plans for the project will be finished. An fundraiser
with stage and screen actress Carol Channing took place Thursday
night.
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