Dormant Foothills theater at Mercantile Center awaits new tenant's casting call

WORCESTER – Behind double doors and down a few flights of stairs off Commercial Street, a 349-seat stage theater below the Mercantile Center hails from a time when the well-rehearsed lines of thespians or the applause of a full attendance often filled the afternoons and evenings of many theater lovers.

Once home to Foothills Theatre Company, a production company, the venue will soon mark 15 years since a play was last held on its stage.

While the world around it has swiftly modernized with fresh concrete and newly carved buildings where the Worcester Center Galleria once bustled with business, the theater waits for a tenant, according to broker agency Kelleher & Sadowsky.

The theater was acquired in 2015 by Charles “Chip” F. Norton Jr., who then bought the Mercantile Center towers at 100 and 120 Front St. for $32.5 million.

Voices talking about its past and future on its stage Thursday echoed with the same freshness of productions put together by Foothills starting in November 1987, when the theater made its stage debut with “The Foreigner,” a two-act comedy by playwright Larry Shue.

A photograph from the play’s opening day shows two ticket holders donning their wardrobe’s finer and warmer clothing as they enter the theater’s glass doors on Nov. 12, 1987, a Sunday.

The future audience members walk through the freshly shoveled ground following those wintry days’ share of a few inches of snow as above them, “HOORAY FOR WORCESTER, FOOTHILLS OPENS" glows on a marquee.

Since then, Foothills staged eight to nine full productions a year in the theater, with children's theater shows during school holidays.

“The Foreigner” was Foothills’ own new beginning, having often moved from its original location at 6 Chatham St., since its founding by Marc P. Smith in 1974.

The company almost made it to its 35th season before shuttering for good in 2009 as the faltering attendance, long-standing debt, lack of grants and general interest in theater led to its demise.

Falling short of its efforts to raise $200,000 to survive, the theater’s last official day was May 10, 2009, by dint of — as a Telegram & Gazette reporter put it — “’a perfect storm’ of bad economic confluences that hit Foothills all at once last winter and spring.”

Broken floor tiles or drop-ceiling panels almost shredded by water damage are time’s work on the empty theater. Screws and bolts strewn about the top of a desk near the theater’s kitchen where a worker may have tried to fix a cupboard or a counter looked like a hopeful sign that the theater might have almost made a comeback.

The control booth, the box office space, the dressing rooms and even the green room are still there.

Under the seats’ armrests, lights still glowed orange on Thursday, perhaps once helping spectators see their way through as they exited for the last time, when "Doubt: A Parable" by John Patrick Shanley gave the theater its last working day.

The play, a 90-minute show with no intermission, told the story of a nun headmistress of a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx in 1964, trying to run a tight ship with a tyrannical hand.

A prop used in the play, a portrait of Mary holding Baby Jesus painted to look like stained glass, was still on the stage.

“Perhaps there could be a happy ending to light up the sky after all,” wrote a reporter in 2009, a play of words on Foothills’ first production in 1974, “Light Up the Sky,” by Moss Hart.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Dormant Foothills Theater Worcester Mercantile Center awaits a tenant