Curtain ready to rise on youth theater troupe’s venue
Mesa’s Actor’s Youth Theatre finds a new location in Gilbert
A new stage — and a new type of drama — debuts soon in Gilbert.
Actor’s Youth Theatre, formerly of Mesa, opens its longplanned Tuscany Theatre in the Gilbert Tuscany Village, at Higley and Guadalupe roads, on Dec. 14. On the bill: melodrama.
“They are just the funniest melodramas you’ve ever seen,” said Marcus Ellsworth, co-founder of the non-profit community theater and head of drama at American Leadership Academy in Queen Creek.
Ellsworth, a descendant of southeast Valley Mormon pio- neer Edmund Lovell Ellsworth, hails from an artistic family. He and his siblings, he said, were “dragged all over the state performing and acting and dancing and singing.”
Now that he’s grown and settled with three children, Ellsworth, together with his sister Julie Clement, a co-founder of the youth theater, is looking to continue on the same path.
Their mother, Elaine Ellsworth, wrote five seasons of melodrama shows for a theater they ran in Snowflake years ago. Those shows are to be part of the bread and butter of the Tuscany Theatre, under the banner of the Black Mustache, Old Fashioned Melodrama Co. It will start with “The Pithy Plight of Poor, Penniless Pauline,” in which Ellsworth plays a villain trying to wrest a ranch, which sits on a gold mine, from an unsuspecting young woman named Pauline.
With just 120 seats, the 5,000square-foot, piazzalike Tuscany Theatre is intimate.
“There’s not a bad seat in the entire place because you’re close to the action,” said Ellsworth. “It feels like the actors are right there with you and you’re involved in the action.”
Ellsworth and Clement, together with members of their extended have raised funds for years to build the theater. They saw a need for youth drama in the southeast Valley and established Actor’s Youth Theatre a decade ago in an elementary school in Mesa. For years after, they were renting studios in the vicinity. Their last home was at Ballet Etudes in Gilbert.
They wanted to be close to Mesa and Gilbert, home to most of their students. However, it was difficult to find a suitable place that was central and also visible, and could be turned into a theater.
After a long search, they found a shopping plaza that had space for a new addition. They negotiated with the owner, Whitestone REIT, who agreed to lease the space and give them a building allowance of $150,000.
With about $75,000 in the kitty, they began the project, but still need about $25,000 to complete everything.
An ongoing fundraiser is the sponsorship of the seats. Members of the public may buy a seat for $100 and have their name engraved in a plaque on the back of it.
Apart from the theater, the venue includes rehearsal space, a backstage area, classrooms and a lobby.
“It’s like a dream come true for us. It really is. It’s living our dreams,” Ellsworth said.