What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/959991
8 WHAT'S UP! APRIL 1-7, 2018 COVER STORY 'A Little Bit Of Everything' 'Once' just the beginning for TheatreSquared LARA JO HIGHTOWER NWA Democrat-Gazette T he mood was high on March 11 at Fresco Restaurant, right off the square, as Fayetteville's TheatreSquared celebrated the announcement of its 2018-19 season with donors. And why wouldn't it be? The theater will move into its 13th season with a momentum few regional theaters ever imagine reaching. If those in attendance at the festivities were to walk a mere three or four blocks west, they would be standing at the site where TheatreSquared's new $31.5 million dollar facility is morphing slowly but surely into the gorgeous glass, concrete and wood- beamed building it's destined to become in time for the 2019-20 season. The building-in-progress is a testament to the fans the theater has won in a little over a decade: the faithful patrons who number over 40,000 these days; the city of Fayetteville, which believes in the organization enough to grant a 25-year no-cost lease on the property where the new building is going up, a $3 million contribution to the building fund and a $3 million award through the Advertising and Promotion Commission; granters that include the Walton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Arts; and national theater organizations like the American Theatre Wing, which recognized T2 in 2011 as "one of the nation's 10 most promising emerging professional theaters" and featured the theater in a documentary last summer. On the cusp of its last season in the Nadine Baum Studios, T2 finds itself in an indelible moment. For one last season, the theater will have one foot in the past and one foot planted firmly in the future. "Not in my wildest dreams would I imagine that we would be building our dream theater at the scale that we're building it, with the extraordinary team of designers and architects that we have on board, with the kind of support that we're getting from every sector and region," s ays T2 Artistic Director and co-founder Bob Ford in a conversation two weeks after the season announcement. "In the very beginning, we did say that