New Crosstown Concourse theater, and all that Jazz
When Jazmin “Jazzy” Miller was a kid and falling in love with the arts, her first acting role was in a Germantown Community Theatre production of “James and the Giant Peach,” the strange story of a young orphan befriended by several human-sized bugs.
“I wanted the spider, but I got James’ mom,” says Miller, remembering the disappointment of her casting assignment.
Now, Miller has a realm of her own to manage. It’s not a spider’s web, but Miller nonetheless will be tugging on threads, so to speak, and hoping the vibrations lure Mid-Southerners of all types into the embrace of a new artistic vision.
Miller, 31, is the director of the recently completed $12 million Crosstown Arts theater, a large multi-purpose venue tucked on the north side of the still-developing
Crosstown Concourse city-within-acity complex in the former Sears warehouse at Cleveland near North Parkway.
The theater has been named “The Doll House,” in something of a nod to Henrik Ibsen’s once scandalous 1879 play about — in the words of a Crosstown Arts press release — “self-discovery.”
But the theater name mainly is an homage to the late Ruby “Doll” Wilson, who was the mother of the late Holiday Inn founder, Kemmons Wilson, and the grandmother of developer McLean Wilson. Still essential to the development of Crosstown, McLean Wilson was a leader in the $200 million effort that transformed the 14 stories and 1.5 million square feet of the long-empty 1927 Art Deco landmark into a “vertical urban village” that feels like a landmark of modern adaptive design and realized imagination.
A project of Crosstown Arts, the organization that preceded Crosstown Concourse and helped re-develop the Sears property, The Doll House won’t open officially until late January.
Starting Monday and continuing through 2018, however, the theater will host a series of what Miller calls “practice round” or “mic checks” — events intended to acquaint the public with the venue and to help Doll House staff work out any kinks.
The first event is a screening of the 2017 horror film “Get Out,” a perhaps counterintuitive choice because the purpose is to encourage people to get into the theater, to experience its 36by-19-foot screen, its state-of-the-art sound design and its Barco 4K projection system (the same technology used by Malco).
Nominated for Best Picture, Director and Actor and winner of the Original Screenplay Oscar, “Get Out” screens at 7 p.m. Monday, and admission is $5.
Subsequent 2018 events will be live performances, including music and theater. “Please come and help us celebrate the theater,” said Todd Richardson, co-director of Crosstown Arts, along with Christopher Miner.
A native Memphian and global traveler who is now among the 400 residents of Crosstown Concourse, Miller is the daughter of two family physicians, Logan and Rosemary Miller, who are longtime owners of the Miller Family Medical Center in Whitehaven. (Miller’s name, Jazmin, is not a reference to a fragrant flower but to her father’s love of jazz music.)
When Miller was in middle school, the family moved from Whitehaven to East Memphis, and “Jazzy” become interested in the “guerrilla troupes” of budding actors and theater artists that would “improvise” and “sculpt” plays at her new school, Houston High, and the nearby Germantown Community Theatre.
After her graduation from Houston in 2004, she earned her undergraduate degree at Rhodes College and her Master of Fine Arts degree in theater direction at the University of Memphis.
Because she wanted to stay busy as an actor while maintaining a Memphis home base, she created her own touring one-woman show, “The Journey of Truth,” in which she portrayed 19thcentury abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.
Thanks to “The Journey of Truth” and the volunteer mission trips that became a regular part of her life after the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, Miller embarked on her own very purposeful journey. For close to five years, she traveled all over the U.S., Central America and Africa, sometimes performing outdoors in the shade of a tree in Africa while also helping with various mission projects.
“I’ve been on the Kenyan Serengeti in a tent camp,” said the statuesque Miller, who stands 6-foot-1 — a height that was no novelty among Kenya’s Masai people, who are, on average, about 6-3. Remembered Miller: “They all said, ‘You are Masai, you are Masai!’ ”
Back in Memphis, Miller became a volunteer with Crosstown Arts, the busy contemporary arts organization that is both a tenant and founding partner of Crosstown Concourse, having revitalized several spaces along the east side of Cleveland prior to the redevelopment of the old Sears property.
Becoming increasingly active and invaluable as a Crosstown children’s theater director and organizer, Miller was the logical person from among Crosstown Arts’ 55-person staff to become director of The Doll House, Richardson said.
Designed by the Memphis architecture film LRK (Looney Ricks Kiss), with Los Angeles’ Spatial Affairs Bureau and other consultants, the 28,000-squarefoot The Doll House is intended to fill the gap in terms of capacity between the 361-seat Halloran Centre and the 2,100seat Cannon Center.
A large free-standing building, the theater is reached most conveniently by walking in the front door and out the back door of the main atrium of Crosstown Concourse. So far, it has no identifying signage, the better to help it “integrate” with the rest of Crosstown, Miller said.
Inside, The Doll House is essentially “a fancy black box,” said Miller, using “black box” in the theatrical sense, to mean a relatively unadorned performance space with flexibility in its seating and staging.
The Doll House fits 425 in its theaterstyle seats, but the “telescopic” floor seats can be retracted to create more floor space, to accommodate an audience of about 600 for live music shows. In addition, the slanted floor can lift to be level with the stage.
The theater’s most distinctive practical design element can be found along its interior walls, including the one behind the stage.
These are “papered” with 9,500 wavy wooden blocks, created by artist Ben Butler to diffuse the sound in the auditorium. From a distance, the blocks resemble undulating fabric curtains, creating an ingenious optical illusion with an acoustic purpose.
Richardson said The Doll House will book national touring acts in addition to local events — film, music, dance and so on.
The venue is nonprofit, but, of course, it needs revenue, so it already has booked many weddings and other private events for 2019, Miller said. (Crosstown Arts’ annual budget is about $3.5 million, Richardson said, derived from earned revenue, donations and support from various foundations.)
The theater also will be kept busy serving the Crosstown community, hosting the weekly meetings of the 225 employees of the now Crosstown-based Church Health Center and providing space for plays, debates and other events for Crosstown High, the new public charter school that eventually will have 500 students.
Serving Crosstown aside, The Doll House is intended to “prioritize film and music,” Miller said.
“The space is both technologically and acoustically really dialed in for live music performances,” Richardson said.
Also, “One thing we don’t have in Memphis is a dedicated art house movie theater,” so The Doll House should supply a ready venue for “independent and local film,” he said.