Did you know there's a slice of Baroque Europe in downtown Milwaukee?
Take a walk down Broadway, and right before the street ends in Catalano Square, there's a theater on the east side of the street.
It’s the Skylight Music Theatre. Its outside façade is unassuming: a brick building with long narrow windows and accents the color of oxidized copper. It fits right in to the Third Ward.
But Brian Casey of Whitefish Bay wrote in to Bubbler Talk concerning a rumor he’d heard about the theatre, which mainly puts on musicals.
"I had heard that the Skylight Music Theatre in the Third Ward was designed after a theater somewhere in France," he says. "And I was curious to know more.”
Inside the Baroque-style theater in Milwaukee's Third Ward
WUWM's Katherine Kokal went to find out. Susan Varela, Skylight's executive director, opened the doors to the Cabot Theatre to reveal a world that doesn't look like it exists down the block from a pilates gym and a Sweetgreen.
Rounded Baroque-style balconies with classical light fixtures overlook seats for 349 people in the audience. In the theater world, 349 seats is considered an intimate space.
“What you see here on the inside is not at all what you think you’re going to see on the outside," Varela says.
Varela explains that a founding member of Skylight Music Theatre visited a theater in Rochefort, France and loved it so much that he brought the design for the space back to Milwaukee and tried to re-create it.
Rochefort is about five and a half hours southwest of Paris, right on the ocean. Around 23,000 people live in the town, which was established around 1665 as a place for the French Navy to re-supply.
The French theater is called Le Théâtre de la Coupe D’Or, which, if you can believe it, was first established in 1766. Staff there said they were delighted to learn that their historical theater had une petite soeur – a little sister – in the United States.
There are a few main differences between the Coupe d’Or and the Skylight.
“This swag curtain that you see above our proscenium arch is a practical curtain. It’s a real curtain. Theirs is painted on," Varela says. "However, they have an actual dome (ceiling), whereas ours is painted on. And their seats are red where ours are Skylight blue.”
So we know whether the Skylight theater had been created to resemble a European model. But, why the theatre in Rochefort?
How a theater design crossed an ocean
For that, we turned to the man who did it.
Colin Cabot is one of the founders of the Skylight Music Theatre. He started working at the theater in 1974 and became the managing director in 1981.
You may remember Cabot because the interior theater now bears his name.
In the late 1980s, Cabot was on a mission to find a European theater design he liked and could replicate in Milwaukee.
Skylight's interior theater was next on the list in a capital campaign that meant it was slated for renovations. He wanted to make it stand out among the bigger Milwaukee venues like Riverside and Pabst.
Cabot and his family were trudging through western Germany touring theater after theater. But the path of enlightenment truly began — as it often does — over a plate of Italian food. Cabot asked his waiter at a restaurant in Offenbach, Germany whether he knew of any theaters in Europe.
"He said, 'I’ll tell you that the most beautiful Baroque theater in all of Europe is in Rochefort-sur-Mer, on the south of the Atlantic coast. It’s an Italian theater,'" the waiter said.
Cabot was stunned. He asked how the waiter knew of the theater in Rochefort.
"He said ‘Well I’m from Morocco, but I worked for the RAI, which is the Italian radio station. We did a program on how to paint Baroque theaters,'" Cabot remembers.
A quintessentially European experience: Learning about a theater in France from a Moroccan person who worked in Italy and is now serving you as a waiter in Germany at an Italian restaurant.
With full bellies and a recommendation in hand, Cabot and his wife Paula set off to Rochefort. Sure enough, he fell in love.
Cabot used a digital ruler to take the measurements of the space and photographed every last inch so it could be recreated.
The Skylight underwent its renovation in 1992. Cabot worked there until 1997, when he moved to New Hampshire.
But to this day, the little slice of Europe stands out in Milwaukee.
It reflects a dream that crossed an ocean and now stands in celebration of the talent that graces the Skylight Music Theatre stage.
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