William Gibson wrote the play The Miracle Worker. Barbara Stein lives its title.
When Shear Madness opens Friday at Actors’ Playhouse in the Miracle Theatre, art (well, a raucous interactive murder mystery set in a hair salon) will wait in the wings as Stein does her thing, as she has before every opening since her company moved into the Miracle nearly 10 years ago.
The chic, just-turned-60 executive producing director will stand center stage in the spotlight, thanking everyone for being there.
Then, one by one, she’ll call the show’s donors up to the stage to receive a plaque, a hug and an opening-night photo, expressing her gratitude for what each one has done to help make Actors’ one of the biggest success stories in South Florida theater over the past decade.
Yet her many admirers would tell you that the biggest ”thanks” should go to Stein herself.’
‘If it’s the Miracle Theatre, Barbara has lived up to and surpassed the name,” says Rhoda Levitt, former chairperson of the Florida Arts Council. “She created the real miracle.”
Truth be told, both the city of Coral Gables and numerous people — from Stein’s husband Lawrence, a Kendall dentist and the theater’s board chairman, to artistic director David Arisco; from architect John Fullerton to plumbing supplier Mike Kurtz — helped save the Miracle in the mid-’90s when the deteriorating 1948-vintage Wometco movie theater looked like it was headed for rebirth as a retail space.’ But it was Stein’s drive that made the $7 million transformation of the Miracle a reality.
”She’s achieved monumental [things],” says Coral Gables Mayor Don Slesnick, who had seen what Stein could do at company’s first home, a far more modest former movie theater in Kendall.
“I can’t conceive of another not-for-profit theater that could take over a crumbling, aging building; raise the funds to renovate, renew and restore it; fund it in an ongoing way, and put together a product that has far exceeded expectations.”
Architect Fullerton, who says restoring the Miracle to its Art Deco-Art Nouveau glory was ”like an exciting archaeological dig; it was there, and we just uncovered it,” did his work pro bono — for Coral Gables, for history and for Stein.
”Barbara is very persuasive,” he says. “It’s her energy and enthusiasm. I’ve never seen her sad or downhearted. Her attitude is infectious.
”Despite the many and ongoing hurdles she has cleared, even Stein is “amazed at how well it happened and how fast. We just followed through.”
Stein, an achiever since before she was named Dade County’s ”Outstanding Teenage Citizen” in 1962, got into theater after she and her husband helped to found Miami’s Temple Bet Breira. They started Actors’ Playhouse in Kendall in 1988 with Man of La Mancha and a $250,000 budget.
Today, the company is the second-largest professional Equity theater in Miami-Dade County (only the Coconut Grove Playhouse is bigger), in the black with an annual budget of nearly $4 million and a dazzling 45 Carbonell Awards (the majority for musicals) to its credit. It has a 20-year rent-free lease, with two 10-year renewal options, on the city-owned facility, which it is contractually supposed to rent out to other groups — though that doesn’t happen as often as Slesnick would like. Last season, the theater scored its first pre-Broadway tryout when Little Shop of Horrors came to town.
‘Barbara is tenacious. She’s a dreamer. She refuses to accept that the word `impossible’ exists,” says Rem Cabrera, chief of cultural development for Miami-Dade’s Department of Cultural Affairs.
Indeed, Stein raised more than $3 million of the $7 million it cost to renovate and create three theater spaces in the Miracle by persuading professionals to donate materials and services.
”She just has a way with the words,” says Kurtz, whose plumbing company has donated materials and maintained the Miracle’s restrooms. ‘There’s not a bathroom in that theater I don’t know — even the pretty ladies’ room.”
Mariano Fernandez, senior vice-president and operations officer for Ocean Bank (which will sponsor this season’s production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast), agrees with Kurtz that Stein has a generous personal touch.
”Barbara has a knack for appreciating people. She goes out of her way to take care of her sponsors,” he says. “We take our employees there as a morale-booster, [including] people who previously weren’t exposed to live theater. Now, it’s first-come, first-served for tickets. It’s building audiences.”
Arisco, the man responsible for the artistic growth of Actors’ Playhouse, acknowledges that he and Stein have had their volatile moments. But he’s glad he can create theater while she shoulders so many other responsibilities.
”`Just when I start thinking I’m the hardest-working man in show business, Barbara is here after me and in the office before me,” he says.
Stein’s husband agrees that his wife could probably have done anything she set her mind to, from starting and running a company to spending her time shopping (which she adores). But what she has done, he says, is so much more important.
”It would have been a waste for her to spend her days in Marshall’s,” Larry Stein says. “She’s giving back so much.”
And that’s what keeps his wife going.
”We have our own money invested in this theater,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights. It’s pretty sad when the hurricanes are coming toward your house, and all you think about is the theater
…But when you see that you’re making a difference in people’s lives, that’s the greatest feeling.’
