Inside the New Tampa Performing Arts Center
The rapid growth of the suburbs in north Hillsborough County, Keith Arsenault believes, made the county-owned New Tampa Performing Arts Center necessary.
Arsenault, who manages the state-of-the-art, 20,000-square-foot venue just north of Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, says there was a built-in audience base there, of music and theater fans who didn’t exactly love hopping on one interstate or another to catch a show in far-off downtown Tampa.
New Tampa is the designated name for an area that’s part Tampa and part unincorporated Hillsborough. Temple Terrace is to the south, Lutz to the west, and the region itself is populated with gated communities, modern apartment complexes, golf courses and leafy green nature preserves.
“The zip code 33647, which we’re in, is the largest population zip code in the entire Tampa Bay area,” Arsenault boasts. “There are 78,000 people.”
And those people needed a really nice, small theater to call their own, reasoned county commissioners, who built the New Tampa Performing Arts Center for $7.5 million in 2023. The New Tampa Players, a large and diverse community theater group founded in 2002, was there in the beginning with commission support, lobbying for a permanent performance space.
Other groups, professional and amateur, wanted in on the action.
The New Tampa Performing Arts Center. Photo provided.
Hiring Keith Arsenault was a no-brainer. At the time, he was in his 15th season as manager of the performing arts facilities at Hillsborough Community College in Ybor City. He’d arrived there in 2007, after spending years as a professional lighting designer, stage manager and production, management, design and consultant.
To date, he has designed the lighting for 50 St. Petersburg Opera productions at the Palladium Theater.
He served on the staff of the Joffrey Ballet, the Opera Company of Boston, Palm Beach Opera and Nacional Ballet de Colombia. Arsenault’s work took him to 45 states and across Canada and Latin America.
But his heart belongs to Tampa.
In New York in the 1950s, Mom was a dancer, Dad a dancer and actor. “My parents met doing Gilbert & Sullivan in Greenwich Village,” Arsenault says. “I was born there, and they decided they didn’t want to raise a kid in New York City.”
He was 6 weeks old when the family relocated to Tampa. His mother went on to found the Tampa Ballet, and the dance program at the University of Tampa.
According to Arsenault, the County sent out an RFP (Request For Proposal) for a nonprofit to manage the new center, but received no satisfactory applications. The decision was then made to operate it under the auspices of Hillsborough’s Parks and Recreation Department.
The 350-plus seats are retractable. Photo provided.
The stats on the New Tampa Performing Arts Center are impressive. The 354-seat multipurpose theater has seat rows that retract into the wall; The Florida Orchestra likes to rehearse there, with conductor Michael Francis and the 70-plus musicians spread out on the main floor, enjoying the room’s acoustics.
There’s an orchestra pit, dressing and rehearsal rooms, a fly system, a 16,000 lumen, high definition video projector and a 21-foot screen that lowers in front of the curtain for films and other presentations. A massive cyclorama runs the full width of the rear stage, and can be specially lit and manipulated for dance productions.
Every light in the building is LED. There are no incandescent bulbs.
The entire facility – including the sound and light booth – is ADA compliant.
It’s available for rentals – not only for performances, but for dinners, banquets and the like. It’s equipped with a catering kitchen.
The Tampa Bay Symphony performs regular concerts at the venue; the New Tampa Players, and their Ampersand Theatre group – for adults with disabilities – call it home. There are jazz shows, pop shows, film screenings and other special events.
“People will ask me, who’s your audience?” Arsenault says. “Well, we have audiences, plural. Depending upon what we’re doing. We have certain groups who rent the space, and the come with their own audience. They go wall to wall and sell the place out.”
The 2024 Fall Festival, Sept. 12 through 15, will feature performances from Opera Tampa, Powerstories Theatre, Tampa Repertory Theatre, Tampa Brass Band, Outcast Theatre Collective, Countdown Improv and others. There is no admission charge.
Upcoming ticketed events:
Thursday, Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m.: The Florida Orchestra Chamber Orchestra Series. The Intimate Mahler: Symphony No. 1
Saturday, Sept. 28 at 8 p.m.: New Tampa Jazz Nights: James Suggs: A Tribute to Miles Davis
Sunday, Sept. 29 at 3 p.m.: New Tampa Unplugged: The Lint Rollers
Sunday, Oct. 27 at 3 p.m.: New Tampa Unplugged: WAHH World Fusion Band
Monday, Oct. 28 at 8 p.m.: New Tampa Jazz Nights: Tom Brantley – J.J. Johnson Centennial Celebration
Friday, Nov. 8 at 8 p.m.: Tampa Bay Symphony Fall 2024 Virtuosic Adventures
Nov. 1-3: Tampa City Ballet’s Carmen
“There’s a lack of venues on both sides of the bay,” Arsenault observes. “We have a number of first class performing arts organizations that just can’t find a suitable home. We are not the solution to that, but we are certainly part of the solution.”
The New Tampa PAC, he stresses, is very much a work in progress. “We are still growing, and learning what our audiences want.”
New Tampa Performing Arts Center website.
The Florida Orchestra in rehearsal. Photo provided.
