The curtain rose earlier this week on the newest performance stage in Princeton.
The McCarter Theater Center dedicated its recently finished Roger S. Berlind Theatre Monday. On Tuesday, the first performance, starring former NYPD Blue actor Jimmy Smits, was held in the new venue.
McCarter and the University will share the theater, which includes a 360-seat performance space, two rehearsal rooms, a classroom, offices and stage support spaces.
"Berlind Theatre provides Michael Cadden and our teachers and students in the Princeton Program in Theater and Dance with a magnificent and much-needed new facility for expanding our academic endeavor in the . . . performing arts," Tilghman said. "Now, too, our students will have increased opportunities to work side by side with theater professionals associated with McCarter — writers, actors, directors, dancers — and to learn directly from them."
She also predicted the theater would attract students interested in the performing arts to Princeton.
The Berlind Theatre is named after Broadway producer and former University trustee Roger S. Berlind '52, who donated a third of its $14.1 million cost. Berlind's resume includes more than 45 plays, 11 of which won Tony awards.
The theater's inaugural production, Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prizewinning play "Anna in the Tropics," began on Tuesday and runs through Oct. 19. The play features actor Jimmy Smits, who starred in the television shows "L.A. Law" and "NYPD Blue." Berlind and Daryl Roth hope to bring "Anna in the Tropics" to Broadway. Those who spoke at Monday's dedication ceremony included Joann Mitchell, president of McCarter's Board of Trustees; Marvin R. Reed and Phyllis L. Marchand, mayors of Princeton borough and Princeton township, respectively; President Tilghman; Michael Cadden, director of the University's Program in Theater and Dance; Emily Mann, artistic director of McCarter Theater; and Roger S. Berlind. Dr. Paul Muldoon, Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities, read a sonnet titled "Lines on Raising the Curtain of the Berlind Theater" that he wrote for the occasion.
Designed by architect Hugh Hardy '54, the theater is smaller than McCarter, which seats between 999 and 1,078, the stage is not as high, and the palette in which the walls, seats and carpets have been done is deep and rich. All of these make the Berlind Theater more intimate and less formal than McCarter. Hardy's firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates LLP, has participated in renovations at Radio City Music Hall and the Lincoln Center Theaters.
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