The Alley Theatre, the first of Houston’s arts companies to forge a national reputation, has been central to the city’s claims as an arts mecca. Recently, though, the theater has fallen behind.
In January, the Alley was shut out of Fodor’s Top 10 regional theater list. The Alley’s once-ground-breaking minimalist facility had become a liability. It couldn’t accommodate musicals and other large-scale productions.
Now, after a $46.5 million makeover, the Alley Theatre is poised for a comeback.
With this weekend’s opening of a reborn Alley, the days of compromises are over. The renovations will enable the company to replicate any production designed for any stage in the world, managing director Dean Gladden said
The Hubbard Theater, the larger of the Alley’s two stages, now equals the size and flexibility of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre — Broadway’s grandest space.
The Alley could serve as the linchpin in the revitalization of downtown’s Theater District.
Founded in 1947 by Nina Vance, a pioneer in the regional theater movement, the Alley is one of the nation’s three oldest resident professional companies. It staged its first shows in a former dance studio at the end of an alley. The name stuck, although the company spent most of its first 20 years in a converted fan factory near downtown.
The Alley hit its stride in the early 1960s, when coverage by national arts arbiters, such as New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson, established it as one of the significant regional houses.
The Ford Foundation’s major grant became the cornerstone for construction of the Alley’s current complex on Texas Avenue. The design incorporated two stages considered state of the art by standards of the time. The Brutalist building’s opening made national and international news in 1968, and was a major leap for the Alley in visibility, professionalism and scale of production.
Vance made bold moves, such as inviting Moscow director Galina Volchek to re-create the Soviet production of Mikhail Roschin’s “Echelon” with an American cast in 1978. Pat Brown, Vance’s successor, also scored notable exchanges: Prolific British playwright Alan Ayckbourn brought his Stephen Joseph Company to Houston, where the troupe performed his “Way Upstream” and “Absent Friends.” The Alley reciprocated by sending its production of “Close Ties” to his Scarborough theater.
Artistic director Gregory Boyd marked his first decade at the company with cutting-edge innovation. He undertook a raft of ambitious projects in the ’90s, including two-part epics such as Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and the ancient classics omnibus “The Greeks.” The Alley collaborated with the National Theatre of Great Britain on the world première of Tennessee Williams’ “Not About Nightingales,” which went on to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony.
A Shakespeare repertory had Vanessa Redgrave directing and starring in “Antony and Cleopatra” and Corin Redgrave directing and starring in “Julius Caesar.”
Other notable guest artists collaborated with the Alley. Avant-garde icon Robert Wilson directed the epic “Danton’s Death.” Lynn Redgrave performed her “Shakespeare for My Father.” Ellen Burstyn starred in O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night.”
As a crescendo, the Alley won the regional theater Tony Award in 1996.
Familiar staircase
Major donors got the first look at the Alley renovations during a sold-out black-tie gala. When the public gets its chance to enter the lobby during a free open house Saturday visitors will see the familiar upward sweep of the large circular staircase.
Now, though, it’s enhanced, partly thanks to new bright red carpet and the sheen of the refinished woodwork on the wide balustrade. But it’s also because the staircase extends to the fourth level, where once it broke off halfway, at the entrance to the Hubbard Stage.
The stairs flow uninterrupted to the top of the interior, where the A‑shaped skylight is prominent. The lines of the interior, along with lighting, draw the eye skyward.
So it goes through the remodeled building’s spacious, pleasant public areas. A new bar overlooks Texas Avenue. Meeting rooms and other amenities are punctuated with pops of red. A curtain motif is carried throughout.
And, not lastly, the cramped bathrooms have doubled in size, which should halve the time people spend waiting in line at intermission.
The improvements aren’t strictly cosmetic. The Hubbard Stage is substantially deeper and wider. It boasts a four-story fly loft, a traps space under the stage that can extend as an orchestra pit, extensive wing space on either side and all-new sound and lighting equipment.
“Everything we produced in the Hubbard was restrained by not having a fly space, traps or adequate side stage,” Gladden said. “We made do with what we had, because these were the restraints of the theater.
“We were offered the chance to partner on pre-Broadway runs for a number of shows, but we had to turn them down.”
Intimate feeling
The seating has been re-configured in an extended horseshoe format around the thrust stage, and the number of seats reduced from 824 to 774. The house now has a more intimate feeling, with every seat closer to the stage.
Boyd is reveling in the possibilities the new stage affords.
“Both its technical capacities and its flexibility have increased ten-fold,” he said. “At the same time, we believe the ‘Alley-ness’ of the Alley has been retained — which was a top priority.” Those characteristics include the grand central staircase, as well as architect Ulrich Franzen’s striking Brutalist exterior.
Boyd will inaugurate the new stage with the hit British comedy “One Man, Two Guvnors,” which starts previews Oct. 2. He plans to make good use of the space’s new flexibility with tons of drops and other scenery flown in from above and surprises popping from below.
The $46.5 million renovation cost is part of the $56 million plan covering the first two phases of the Alley’s current capital campaign.
The other $10 million breaks down to an additional $1 million for artistic enhancement each fiscal year through 2017. The Alley has raised all but$3 million of the total.
While the Alley’s work of the past few seasons has been solid, it has lacked the daring of earlier years.
Companies that originate productions that move onto Broadway get the accolades, like the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., with its recent revivals of “Porgy and Bess” and “Pippin.”
The Alley’s reopening as a theater with expanded capabilities surely is the company’s cue, and challenge, to reclaim that excitement.
