With its 10th anniversary approaching in 2024, Boca Stage is moving on up. The local theatre company, which has been operating out of the 70-seat Sol Theatre in Boca Raton for the past five years, is migrating just a bit northward for its 2023/2024 season, which will be produced for the first time at the Delray Beach Playhouse. The move will see the company increase its seating capacity to 140.
“I don’t want to be so arrogant to say we had sold-out runs [in Boca], but we had sold-out performances,” says Co-Artistic Director Keith Garsson, who inked the deal with the Playhouse this summer with his partner, Genie Croft. “Maybe a third, sometimes half of the performances were sold out, and we easily could have sold another 50 percent, maybe even 100 percent.”
The ability to sell more tickets, coupled with the savings Boca Stage will absorb by utilizing the Playhouse’s existing infrastructure, will provide a major boon for a company whose financial resources, like those of many regional arts organizations, were stretched thin. “They already have a marketing machine, a box office,” Garsson says. “We can use their set people, their lighting people, their equipment, and have bigger capacity. I killed two big birds with one stone.”
The timing was a bit of kismet. It so happened that the Playhouse was looking to mount a series of off-Broadway plays in its underused black box space, while continuing to devote its main stage to community-theatre musicals. By presenting plays with entirely paid actors and designers, Boca Stage (which will change its name to Palm Beach Stage in future seasons at the Playhouse) will lend professional cachet to the historic venue, which will celebrate its 77th year in 2024.
Boca Stage’s Delray Beach Playhouse series begins Oct. 26, just in time for Halloween, with an updated 2013 version of Frederick Knott’s 1966’s thriller “Wait Until Dark,” running through Nov. 5. The season continues with the classic French farce “Boeing Boeing” (Jan. 18-27) and concludes with Ken Levine’s showbiz comedy “America’s Sexiest Couple” (April 18-27). If the titles seem a bit more mainstream than the edgy fare on which Boca Stage staked its claim, there was intention behind this decision.
“We made a conscious attempt to go a little more commercial, even though we thought we were going to stay at the Sol Theatre,” Garsson says. “The new works coming out are still drip, drip, drip, whereas before COVID they were coming out left and right. So we thought, in order to give the new playwrights time to catch up, and to get a wealth of new plays, let’s have a fun commercial season. It just so happened to dovetail nicely into the kind of thing that Delray Beach Playhouse likes to do.”
Subscription packages for Boca Stage’s season are available now. Call 561/272-1281 or visit delraybeachplayhouse.com/subscriptions-2.
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