Northern Stage Builds Housing for Staff and Visiting Artists

Northern Stage in White River Junction puts on five shows a year, ranging from two-actor plays to big Disney productions with 30 actors, musicians, designers, technicians and carpenters. Most of those people are from outside Vermont; managing director Jason Smoller estimates that 70 percent of each show’s cast and crew travels from elsewhere. Staff includes another 34 people.

Where to house all those folks in a village of 2,800? Founded in 1997, Northern Stage has grappled with the housing question for visiting artists and local staff since its permanent home, Barrette Center for the Arts, opened in 2015.

The company just completed its solution by building three new houses of six apartments each, just steps from the theater. Collectively, the studios and one- and two-bedroom units can house 24 people. That’s in addition to three extant buildings that Northern Stage purchased over the past eight years, each with four or five units: two houses on the same street as the new housing and an apartment building around the corner from the theater.

The new build, a project of Bread Loaf Corporation of Middlebury, which also built the theater, echoes the gables and orientation of the adjacent theater-owned houses. It includes landscaping and a pocket park in front that gives the ensemble a “village campus feel,” said Smoller, 38, who recently took Seven Days on a walking tour. The pale yellow and light gray structures looked modern and inviting, with the third still receiving finishing touches from a work crew.

Smoller led me past the fully occupied first building and into the second through a private entrance to a one-bedroom, which was in the midst of being furnished. The units’ layouts are clean and simple, with full kitchens and spacious bathrooms. Rooms are painted white with colorful accent walls. All the buildings are pet-friendly; the stairs are uncarpeted, and the backyard holds a fenced dog park.

The complex sits against a tall embankment to the west, architect Jim Pulver noted by phone, so “What was really critical in my mind was high ceiling spaces and large windows.”

Kyle Brand moved into the new housing when he started his job in company management in July. He is one of 21 staff members who live in company housing. His neighbors currently include the music director, stage manager and two actors in Come From Away, a musical that will open the season on September 24.

“If you’re going to a place for six weeks, the more comfortable you are, the better you can do your job.”
Kyle Brand

Brand, 38, spent 11 years performing and working in New York City after getting an undergraduate degree in musical theater and has acted in, choreographed and directed shows at Northern Stage for a decade. He appreciates the new housing, which he called “rare.”

“If you’re going to a place for six weeks, the more comfortable you are, the better you can do your job,” he said. The short walk to work, he added, means “I can go [home] to lunch really quickly. I don’t have to go out.”

Actors’ Equity Association requires that its members have safe and private free housing while working away from home, which was one pressing reason to build. Depending on the show, actors stay for up to three months; designers and technicians might need housing for a week.

Previously, Northern Stage rented housing, including the structures it now owns and houses in surrounding settlements such as Quechee. The latter setup required providing a car.

“Renting was the concern,” explained board of directors chair Jon Spector of Woodstock, who joined the board in 2020, when the organization was getting ready to launch an $8.2 million capital campaign. “We were thinking that rents are high and going up, and if we had our own housing we could control that. It will cost us less in the long run, and we’ll have certainty.”

Spector started chairing the finance committee in 2022. The capital campaign eventually brought in $8.5 million, of which $6.25 million went toward construction.

“Our management team tells us that every theater is thinking about housing. It’s a problem across the U.S.,” Spector said.

Cristina Alicea, producing artistic director of Vermont Stage in Burlington (see page 38), agreed. “Every theater in every place thinks about it,” she said. It’s a particularly urgent problem in Vermont, she continued: “It’s such a rural state, and there’s very little housing stock here. And, per capita, there are very few artists who live here.”

Vermont Stage is not a full Equity house, as are Northern Stage and a handful of other Vermont theater companies. It focuses on hiring local talent and does guest-artist contracts with Actors’ Equity Association for some shows, housing the visitors in short-term rentals.

Alicea said, “It’s one of my daydreams” for Vermont Stage to buy a multifamily property and sustain it by renting one or two of its units year-round to local residents. The company’s annual budget is $600,000 per year; Northern Stage’s is $4.5 million.

Though Northern Stage itself sits in Hartford Town, which encompasses the villages of Hartford, Quechee, West Hartford, White River Junction and Wilder and almost 11,000 people, its larger catchment area of 80,000 people includes some of the area’s wealthiest towns, such as Woodstock, Norwich and Hanover, N.H. Plaques in the theater lobby commemorating donors for the capital campaign list four families or family foundations that contributed at least $500,000.

Donors “who are really committed” to having high-quality professional theater in the area are one reason the project succeeded, Spector said. The other is a board that works well with theater management. “We know our management team is able to produce a product that people trust,” he said. “In a rural part of the country, that’s a gift.”

Ticket sales for the 240-seat theater confirm that audiences appreciate the high level of productions. Beauty and the Beast ran for six weeks last winter and sold 99 percent of its seats, Spector said, adding that “a drama that people don’t know about might be 70 or 75 percent sold.”

Spector noted that Northern Stage shows impress even veterans of the industry, including a man who helped originate Cats on Broadway, next to whom Spector found himself seated at Northern Stage’s Beauty and the Beast.

“He turned to me and said, ‘How can you do this in the middle of nowhere?’ This was someone who knows intimately the way Broadway works,” Spector recalled. “People here understand this is pretty unusual, and they want to keep it going.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Full House | Northern Stage opens new housing for staff and visiting artists in White River Junction”