“There’s Room Enough to Grow Beneath the Northern Sky…”

Strang, Inc. architect Peter Tan presents design renderings for Northern Sky Creative Center to company staff, board and committee members on the County A&F property. Submitted photo.

Northern Sky is entering one of most ambitious and pivotal chapters of our long and rich history. Beginning soon, the company will kick off a capital campaign to fund the realization of two critical projects: our new creative home base being planned for the property on the southeast corner of highways A and F, and several long overdue improvements to our summer home – the amphitheater at Peninsula State Park.

This past week our Board and senior staff met extensively with our project architect, Peter Tan from Strang, Inc. out of Madison. Peter presented design plans for the “Stella” creative center at a gathering on the property itself. He spent the evening at the park amphitheater taking in a show and attending the post-show campfire. The next day Peter and about 20 Northern Sky staff, Board and Building Committee members took a tour of the magnificent new Cook-Albert Fuller Center at The Ridges.

One of the wonderful things about the Door County nonprofit community is how generously the different organizations support and root for each other. The Ridges executive director Steve Leonard has been enormously helpful and gracious in sharing useful information about his organization’s recent capital campaign and building experience. By the way, if you haven’t seen the new nature center yet, I highly recommend a visit. It’s really quite beautiful – a striking gateway to the natural wonders just beyond.

These are exciting times indeed. A respected businessman and friend of the company summed up the encouragement and support we’re getting from our fans, business partners and peers throughout the county and beyond – essentially, “You’re kind of the last piece of the puzzle when it comes to major important Door County nonprofit organizations reaching institutional maturity. People will get that. You have to find a way to tell this in your story – it’s your time.”

We survive and thrive on the creation of original musical theater. We craft our shows for you! Our success depends on satisfying an ever-increasing public demand to produce new material. How can we do more, and do it better? How do we better position the company to carry out its mission, not only in the near future, but also for the next generation of creative artists and their fans? How do we manage our responsibility for building the next generation of theatergoers?

The essentials of Northern Sky’s day-to-day operations are scattered about the county. While the park will always be our summer performance venue, our behind-the-scenes operations take place in a host of rented facilities spread all over the county. We rent offices in Ephraim, shop and costume space in Baileys Harbor, rehearsal space in Egg Harbor, storage space in Fish Creek, and various town halls and the Door Community Auditorium for fall performances. The rehearsal space we used for years (a converted barn room we only half-lovingly referred to as the “chicken coop!”) was not climate-controlled and had no dedicated bathrooms. We still often find ourselves not knowing if a venue will be available to rent for our purposes, making it difficult to map out long-term plans for development of the new works that are vital to our future.

The consensus here is that the primary tool we’re missing is a place to create, a place that is customized for doing what we, and only we, do. We need a facility that stimulates and supports creative experimentation and play – a professional facility that we control. All that’s missing is a home base of operation – a place of serenity and solace, a place in nature to nourish the creative spirit and conceive the original musical theater that is our product – an attractive, harmonious place to call home-sweet-home!

This new “creative campus” will…

• Centralize all of our support operations

• Increase our efficiency exponentially, which will increase our creative capacity and output.

• Enable opportunities to share our creative process and increase our outreach capacity and program offerings.

• Create and control a customized musical theater “incubation” center that will enable us to effectively and efficiently develop new work year round.

• Re-dedicate current rental expense to in-house operational expense.

• Ensure the future stability and health of the organization.

As for the park, we also want to do everything possible to improve the “Northern Sky Experience” – the myriad of things that influence the memories our fans take home with them after seeing a show at the park amphitheater. Our real summer stage home is, after all, in the most beautiful natural performing arts center in Wisconsin: Peninsula State Park, in an amphitheater among the pines that features the northern sky and stars. We love and cherish our performance home there, and we have enhanced and plan to continue to nurture our location there for many years to come. It’s who we are…it’s where we belong…it’s our birthplace.

We’re planning important upgrades to things like company safety and efficiency, our sound and lighting systems, and patron comfort (read: improved restrooms) and friendliness – upgrades that are essential and probably overdue.

With a few strategic tweaks and renovations, we can make some dramatic improvements to the overall Northern Sky experience. Some you will greet with a “wow!” and some you won’t even notice – but they will all strengthen the impact of the experience without changing what you love most about our “theater under the stars.”