In Northport, a star is reborn

Mary Ann McGee dodges into Manhattan every couple of weeks to catch a Broadway musical - recently, it was "The Pirate Queen" - or to check out a dance troupe at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea.

A Greenlawn resident, McGee usually makes her excursions with a girlfriend. She almost never attends a performance with her husband, an accountant who works in Manhattan and wakes up before sunrise to catch a 7 a.m. train. "To go to a Broadway show and then get home at midnight? He just wouldn't get enough sleep," McGee says.

With the opening this month of the $2.5-million John W. Engeman Theater at Northport, veteran theater professionals Kevin O'Neill and Richard Dolce are hoping to keep stage buffs like McGee closer to home, at least for one night every other month or so. The pair are betting that consumers will pay up to $55 a ticket to enjoy a "Broadway-caliber" production without the nuisances of a night in Manhattan, such as traffic jams, crowded parking garages and rushed dinners.

Broadway on Main Street

When it opens June 28 with "Smokey Joe's Café," the venue, a memorial to O'Neill's late soldier brother-in-law, will become the first theater on Long Island to employ professional actors on a year-round basis since Long Island Stage went belly up in 1991. A gala Saturday will introduce neighbors to the space, where - note observers of the Island's theater scene - the duo's biggest challenge will be convincing potential patrons that the Broadway quality is there, right on Main Street, a few blocks from Northport's bucolic harborfront.

"The stigma of professional theater on Long Island is that it's not Broadway, that anything we have here is not professional," says Paul Allan, producer of the Gateway Playhouse in Bellport, which like the Engeman operates under a modified Actors Equity union contract. To make it, in Allan's view, O'Neill and Dolce must cultivate a large enough customer base to support their investment. And "they have to overcome that stereotype."

O'Neill and Dolce acknowledge as much. To lure theatergoers, they have devised a plan that focuses on production values: The budget for their sound system alone came in at about $350,000. But their game plan also pays particular attention to creature comforts not usually available on Broadway, including liquor and ladies' lavatories.

At the Engeman, patrons purchasing a Scotch and soda at the bar during intermission can bring it back into the theater, where all the stadium-style chairs have cupholders. It's an improvement, says Dolce, over the "chug at the chime" on Broadway.

During its 70-year life as a single-screen movie theater - anyone who grew up in the 1980s has memories of it as the 99-cent house - the onetime Northport Theater had three women's-room stalls to accommodate the 688-seat capacity audience. The renovation will boast nine ladies'-room stalls, serving a theater with a capacity of 402. (The boys come out ahead, too: The two stalls and two urinals in the balcony have been supplemented by a ground-floor men's room with two stalls and three urinals.) There is also a handicap-accessible restroom.

All told, the seven-month renovation, which began Dec. 1, involved roughly 100 workers.

O'Neill and Dolce also plan to offer valet parking and a coat check, as well as pre- and post-show entertainment with a piano in the lobby. To familiarize nonresidents - especially groups - with Northport, O'Neill and Dolce are creating discount packages for Thursday, Saturday and Sunday matinees, which will include a meal at participating restaurants.

No number of bells and whistles (or bathrooms) will compensate for any even remotely amateurish production - not when consumers can attend a bona fide Broadway musical for a few dollars more (the average ticket price for a Broadway musical is $72, according to the most recent figures available from the League of American Theatres and Producers).

After "Smokey Joe's Café," three more musicals and three plays are scheduled for the Engeman in the next year, mostly revivals of chestnuts, including "Barefoot in the Park," "Jekyll & Hyde," "A Wonderful Life," "Lend Me a Tenor," "Always Patsy Cline" and "Other People's Money."

As an Equity theater, the Engeman will pay actors a contractual minimum of $350 a week. By contrast, standard Broadway minimums are about $1,500. Actors will be cast through open auditions and agent calls, and will be shuttled to and from Northport nightly in a 14-passenger bus, which will do pick-ups and drop-offs at three locations in the city. Look for it on the Long Island Expressway, the theater logo emblazoned on its side.

Dolce considers the Engeman a new opportunity for actors who, even if city-based, will be able to return home every night, yet still earn stage time toward their minimum requirements for union health benefits. (The Gateway, Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor and John Drew Theater in East Hampton are also Equity playhouses, though none is open 12 months continuously. Popular Long Island companies such as the Broadhollow, Theatre Three in Port Jefferson and the Smithtown Center for the Performing Arts all pay their actors, but not a union-established minimum.)

Neither Dolce, an attorney, nor O'Neill, an investor in a prominent theater-marketing firm, is a novice in this game. Dolce, who carries the title of "producing artistic director," lives in Hauppauge and is the scion of the Broadhollow Theatre Company dynasty. It opened in 1971 as a dinner theater and is still run by his mother and stepfather, Pat and Jerry Zaback, with locations in East Islip, Lindenhurst and Elmont. If there are any overtones of "Hamlet" about continuing the family legacy in what amounts to a competing business, Dolce doesn't let on.

Putting up the cash

O'Neill was a founding investor in and major shareholder of TheaterMania.com. The Lloyd Harbor resident met Dolce last year on a sales call to Broadhollow. At the time, the Northport Theater was up for sale and O'Neill thought Broadhollow would make an excellent tenant, so he tried to play matchmaker. When that didn't pan out, O'Neill and his wife, Patti, put up the cash to purchase it. Dolce signed on as artistic director.

As O'Neill and Dolce were hammering out their deal around Mother's Day weekend of 2006, O'Neill received word that his brother-in-law had been killed on duty in Iraq. Chief Warrant Officer 4 John William Engeman had performed in theater while a student at Holy Family High School in South Huntington and, though O'Neill didn't know it at the time, had also acted in a theater festival while stationed in Germany. O'Neill decided then to name the repurposed theater for him.

Each show at the Engeman will run at least five weeks, with performances every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, plus a Sunday matinee. Thursday and Saturday matinees will alternate week to week.

The opening gala will introduce the space to potential subscribers; a season ticket costs $355, and about a quarter of the capacity already has been sold. O'Neill likens the early opportunity to become a subscriber to owning Yankees season tickets behind home plate: "You got in early and passed them down through your will."

O'Neill likes to say that if you could put a theater on a flatbed truck and drive it all around Long Island, there "isn't any place better you could put it than an affluent, culturally involved community like Northport" or the surrounding towns and villages, including Huntington, Cold Spring Harbor and Dix Hills.

"There are a lot of people like me who are in a position, financially, to spend $125 on a show, plus the parking and the babysitter and all the other things. But logistically, it's just not practical to do it, so we don't go to Broadway as much as we would like," O'Neill says. "If we deliver from the caliber standpoint we're talking about, then we will have the following here, because the area is starved for it."

Ladies and gentlemen, construction highlights

Lobby frames for "Coming Soon" posters, a terrazzo floor and six damask murals are the last remnants of the Engeman Theater's near-century as a movie palace.

Hoffman Grayson Architects of Huntington Village and Mara Brothers Commercial Construction in Northport were the building designer and contractor behind the $2.5-million renovation that began in late November with the removal of 58 tons of debris from the theater roof - enough trash to fill 35 Dumpsters.

Among the construction highlights:

The old projection room is now a tech booth, home to amplifiers, processors and sound boards. Once accessible only through the top-floor men's room, it has been relocated to allow for, as the new owners put it, "the possibility we'll have a female stage manager."

As required by the Equity contract, four new dressing rooms with showers and baths have been added: two for chorus members and two private rooms for stars.

An exit from the stage has been dug below ground. Before excavation of the so-called "celebrity hallway," the only route of departure from the stage - not essential in a movie house - was through the audience or via an outside alley.

A new proscenium stage has been built with a four-foot thrust - an apron of playing space that extends toward the audience - and room beneath for an orchestra of eight to 12 performers.

The theater, built in 1932, has two sister playhouses by the same architect, John Andrew Everson, that have also been converted to live performance venues: the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center and the Smithtown Center for the Performing Arts.

Because of sentimental attachment to the old Northport Theater sign, the new marquee was designed to incorporate the same stainless-steel letters, plus the signature of John W. Engeman.

The box office of the John W. Engeman Theater can be reached at 631-261-2900 or through its website.