Mid-sized venues boon for arts groups

Singapore will soon add two new venues to its clutch of theatre spaces. Wild Rice's new home at Funan mall has met with construction delays, but the 360-seat theatre is scheduled to open in August. The Esplanade broke ground last week for its new 550-seat space, which is scheduled to open in 2021. Some may wonder about the need for more theatre spaces, given the multiple state-of-the-art venues already available. But the new smaller venues are a godsend to the increasing number of medium-sized performing arts companies in Singapore.

Arts groups have come a long way in the past 20 years. But it is a struggle for most to leap from developing small studio shows for 200-to 300-seat spaces to the larger halls, which usually accommodate about 2,000 people. Mid-sized spaces bridge that gap and allow arts groups to produce more commercially viable works for longer runs without having to overextend their resources.