In recent years regional theaters across the USA have undertaken a building boom. While providing more space and pizazz this has also led to increased funding needs.

Enter the Boosters, Bearing Theaters
The NYT tells us that...

It’s also good news that the buildings, as objects of architecture, are more successful than those built 20 or 30 years ago. They abjure the industrial aesthetic of that generation of theaters and the smug grandeur of many newer cultural centers. These theaters are voluptuous, albeit sometimes in the manner of a blingy trophy wife. Several even feature a private intermission lounge for high rollers. The Shakespeare’s transparent cantilevered mezzanine lobby, like the Roberts’s undulating walls glowing with hidden halogens, means lucrative rentals for corporate events and nontraditional bar mitzvahs.

Providing party space and winning architecture prizes are not among the founding goals of the regional theater movement. In building their temples, theater companies risk losing some of the old-time religion — the reliance on local resources, the seat-of-the-pants aesthetic — that gained them adherents in the first place. But the companies are stuck in an economic bind. Reasonably enough, directors want the opportunity to stretch their imaginations with the latest technology, performers want dignified work conditions, and audiences want seats whose springs don’t threaten to give them tetanus. If the theaters don’t address these issues, they will stay small. If they stay small, they have to raise their prices; if they raise their prices, they risk losing new audiences; if they lose new audiences, they don’t have a future.

The new buildings are the only way out, even if they make tangible the institutions’ contradictions as well as their aspirations. With enough Harmans and Wylys and Robertses, though, those contradictions can be papered over almost inconspicuously. Mr. Kahn pointed out that he did not have to open his new theater with “Hello, Dolly!” in Elizabethan clothes or some other desperate attempt to pay the mortgage at the expense of the mission.