By Joseph Garaventa
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2007

The Bethesda Theatre opened with fanfare in May 1938 with the movie "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," starring Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert. The theater remained a landmark, but time, redesigns and modern ideas about the way cinemas should look rendered it all but obsolete.

But in a project that began in 2001, the one-time movie house on Wisconsin Avenue has been restored to its art deco glory. It reopened its doors Oct. 4 as the region's newest home for live theater. The theater's rebuilt stage will offer the smaller musicals and plays typically found off-Broadway, beginning with "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change."

"I Love You" is a four-person (but many-character) musical by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts about the ups and downs of dating and marriage. It's still running in New York after 11 years, and theater executive director Ray Cullom says the musical's track record and audience appeal made it an ideal choice.

"Nobody has tried to do this in the Washington market before, to do extended runs of smaller titles that normally sit off-Broadway or in smaller theaters in Chicago or San Francisco," Cullom says. "It's quite exciting and also a little nerve-rattling."

Bethesda Theatre is owned by the nonprofit Bethesda Cultural Alliance and operated by Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment. The restoration idea took root when the developer of the property, Tom Bozzuto of the Bozzuto Group, built high-rise apartments above the theater and agreed to restore it.

"His first inclination was to make it a movie theater again, but movie theater architecture has changed," Cullom says. "It's now stadium seating and fewer seats. Then he was going to turn it into a public gallery space. He had many ideas, until he finally hit upon the idea of live theater. He then cast about for someone to run it."

Robert Nederlander Jr. says his company had been looking at the Washington area as a possible testing ground for developing a circuit for off-Broadway shows outside New York. Nederlander came aboard the Bethesda project in 2003.

"We identified Washington as a market that wasn't well-served with the kind of shows we are looking to tour," Nederlander says. "Washington is a great theater town. In Bethesda, we might work with a partner to produce shows that will then tour to the other smaller theaters we operate. There is a bigger picture here."

Cullom says the theater itself, idle since its previous life as a cinema and draft house in the 1990s, is "the best thing we have going for us."

"The community holds this building in such high regard," he says. "Every day, people show up and look inside, and they remember having a first date here, or a bar mitzvah. It's like a magnet. It opened in 1938, but by the '50s, the design had been changed, and it was rather shabby. For the draft house, there was a gut-out renovation. So what we're doing is restoring it to the way it looked in 1938, which most people have never seen."

Nederlander adds: "A tremendous amount of effort and millions of dollars went into restoring the original design. Now, we have the best of both worlds: the original feel of the theater and state-of-the-art equipment."

There will be two other shows this season: Steve Solomon's one-man comedy "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish and I'm in Therapy," and the musical "Smokey Joe's Cafe," a revue of classic '50s and '60s songs.

Cullom says he envisions attending the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next year and visiting other theater centers in the hope of bringing back the next "hot title" to fill the theater's seats. He stresses, however, that the operation is strictly not-for-profit.

"Once the building is up and running, the bills are paid and we start making a profit, that money goes to the Bethesda Cultural Alliance's support of the arts in Bethesda and Montgomery County," Cullom says. "This is not a cash-generating enterprise for anyone."