PHOTOS BY GLE NN TRIEST
mess
Left:
Theater director Jeff Nahan has the ticket.
DETROIT JEWISH N EWS
Above:
The Millenium Theatre in Southfield.
LLI
hen Jeff Nahan stands on the
•• stage of Southfield's Millenium
Theatre, he looks as if he owns
the world.
At 41, Mr. Nahan has ar-
rived, although he repeats (with
a glitter in his eye) that show
business is not at all glamorous. It's about
meeting promoters' demands, measuring
seat-to-production cost ratios, advertising
the shows and otherwise spending a ton
of money up front.
But around him are the colored lights
and cascading curtains that have turned
what was once an elegant movie house into
a bona fide center for the performing arts.
Mr. Nahan, the loquacious director of the
Southfield-based Actors Alliance Theatre
Company, seems perfectly content to be
in the midst of it all.
He was hired by Southfield's Downtown
Development Authority in early 1992 to
run the Millenium, which took over the
once-grand Northland Theatre in the Nine
Mile-Greenfield area. Mr. Nahan is a
Philadelphia native who lives in Ferndale
with his actor wife Annette DePetris and
9-year-old son Matthew.
He is connected with the Detroit Festi-
val of the Arts, the Screen Actors Guild,
the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists, and serves as the first pres-
ident of the newly organized Michigan Al-
lied Professional Theatres, which supports
and services professional and non-profit
theatre groups like the Jewish Ensem-
ble Theatre and the Purple Rose Theatre.
He came on board with the Millenium
after the DDA obtained a $300,000 loan
from the city of Southfield to renovate the
theater, which is owned by nearby Prov-
idence Hospital. Mr. Nahan's job was to
figure out how to transform a cinema that
had been split into two screens into a per-
formance theater.
He hired a Chicago architect to draw up
a master plan. Sketches of a stage that
could be raised or lowered, box_seats_filled
Center
~ aa e
The Northland Theatregets a new lease on
life as the Millenium.
JULIE EDGAR STAFF WRITER
with polite patrons and a "stage house"
that could be opened from above to ac-
commodate sets, still hang in the expan-
sive inner lobby.
But the DDA simply couldn't afford to
go with the glitz, which Mr. Nahan said
would have cost between $9 and $12 mil-
lion.
So, Mr. Nahan did what he could with
the money he had. He gathered theater
professionals from all over Detroit to eval-
uate the space. Then he replaced the roof,
painted the floors, added a stage in one of
the theaters, removed a few rows of seats,
installed a backdrop screen on which
35mm and 70mm movies and videos can
be shown, refurbished the heating/cooling
system, made the bathrooms wheelchair-
accessible and put down new carpet
The second theater is filled with stage
props and dust; when there's money, it will
become a studio theater for smaller pro-
ductions.
"We're running black ink, but we don't
have enough black ink to renovate The-
ater B," Mr. Nahan said.
Many folks who have attended any of
the 300 or so productions that have been
mounted since March last year in the ren-
ovated, 500-seat theater wax poetic about
the old Northland Theatre, Mr. Nahan
said. Built in 1966, the 1,000-seat movie
house drew big crowds with year-long runs
of musicals like Fiddler on the Roof. A
bronze statue of a kneeling lady holding a
missing dove by the sculptor Betty Jacob
still sits in front of the raised lounge where
patrons sank in leather chairs to have a
rooms still feature roomy stalls that are
each outfitted with a sink and their orig-
inal mod wallpaper.
While no production is under way, the
air carries a palpable electricity, a tremu-
lous silence anticipating song or speech.
Or, in the case of the next act, the plain-
tive sound of a shofar.
The Downtown Synagogue has rented
the Millenium for its High Holiday ser-
vices for a second year because it's big
enough to accommodate congregants.
Mr. Nahan jokes that last year the air
conditioning went out during Yom Kippur
services, prompting a few complaints from
the packed crowd about suffering just a
bit too much.
But the Millenium's Class E liquor li-
cense, full concession stand and Ticket-
Master office make it a natural for secular
events.
In October 1993, the Millenium pre-
sented its first production, Life's a Beach,
which Mr. Nahan wrote. Since then,
groups ranging from the Detroit Produc-
ers Association to a tap dance festival to a
comedy revue to the Detroit Dance Col-
lective have rented the theater for their
productions.
The film Sankofa, by Ethiopian film-
maker Haile Gerima, ran at the Milleni-
um for nine weeks this year, and the
theater hosted the area premiere of Robert
Altman's Pret A Porter.
Mr. Nahan noted that the Millenium is
centered at the crossroads of Wayne and
Oakland counties, a fitting place for a the-
ater that has something for everybody. He
said he wants it to be "prescriptive" for oth-
er businesses considering locating in the
area.
The Downtown Development Authori-
ty subsidizes the theater — this year it
gave $45,000, $6,000 of which went toward
debt retirement — but revenues are climb-
ing steadily.