Keeping the plates spinning
Capital projects for arts organizations are often described as once-in-a-generation opportunities. For many organizations, especially those that operate performing arts venues, they’re also once-in-a-career undertakings: technically complex, deeply public, and demanding enough to compete with the work of running the organization itself—a reality familiar in many arts organization building projects and performing arts facility planning efforts.
That tension is just the beginning. A performing arts organization can’t pause its mission while it plans, designs, and builds.
The work of making performances still needs to happen. External stakeholders – program participants, patrons, funders, and more – need to remain connected, which requires time and energy from the staff and board. Steady leadership is critical. And all the while, the building effort needs to stay on track – or even accelerate. This requires timely decisions about budgets, space, schedule, governance, and risk that most organizations don’t make every day, a common dynamic in large arts organization building projects.
In short: the show must go on, even as the organization envisions and creates the facility that will define its future.
AMS Planning & Research deeply understands that reality when we partner with our clients. We help organizations find the capacity—in time, structure, and confidence—to realize a capital project while continuing to deliver on mission.
In interviews with two long-time AMS theater partners, leaders of these companies described this support not as a “nice to have,” but as essential. And they described it in terms every delivery team recognizes: clarity, translation, alignment, discipline, and readiness.
Where organizations get stuck: knowledge gaps and discipline
Performance venues make for uniquely complex buildings. They’re not just performance spaces. They’re a convergence of technical systems, acoustics, backstage logistics, public assembly requirements, patron experience, artist amenities, operational realities, and fundraising desires—all expressed through hundreds of interdependent decisions. In many cases, the buildings that house theaters also must house a range of other activities: rehearsals, meetings, educational programs, food service, and more.
For most leaders, the challenge isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s the fact that they need to cross a knowledge gap quickly: learning the language of design and construction while also running an existing organization. They’re asked to prioritize investments and weigh details—materials, seating capacity, loading access, door hardware, maintenance, durability—that will affect the organization for decades, all while navigating the arts organization construction challenges that often emerge during performing arts facility planning.
In complex projects, knowledge gaps are only half the problem. The other half is project discipline: the ability to move decisions forward, hold scope steady, and keep many stakeholders aligned through an environment of uncertainty and risk.
When discipline is missing, projects drift. Decisions are relitigated. Scope expands without a shared rationale. Costs become a moving target. Internal trust erodes. Leadership risks becoming overwhelmed trying to do everything at once.
AMS’s role is to close those gaps by building understanding, creating structure, and strengthening the client’s ability to lead a sophisticated project without being swallowed by it.
Owner’s counsel as “doula”
AMS Planning & Research serves as Owner’s Counsel. We are a partner embedded alongside client leadership through the arc of a capital project, often starting before design. In one interview, Joel Markus, COO and Managing Director at Gulfshore Playhouse in Naples, Florida, describes what organizations need in this process as a “doula” for building a building.
Most organizations haven’t done this before. They need someone who has—someone who can help them anticipate what’s normal, recognize what’s not, and ask the right questions at the right time. As Markus puts it, they need someone who can say, “This is totally normal,” or “No, this is not normal.”
The metaphor works because it clarifies what AMS does—and what AMS does not do. A doula doesn’t take over decision-making. Instead, the role is to support, guide, and strengthen the client’s ability to lead. That support tends to show up through four consistent elements:
Define success early. AMS helps clients articulate what success means in a way that can guide decisions throughout design and construction. This is more than a vision statement; it’s a practical framework that keeps the project grounded when tradeoffs are required.
Translate complexity into shared understanding. In theaters, translation is not optional. Stakeholder groups carry different vocabularies–staff and artists, board members, donors, architects, theater planners, builders, and city officials all bring their framing to the table. AMS helps translate between those worlds so that the people responsible for decisions can understand what they’re deciding and why it matters.
At Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, this translation was central. “We didn’t speak those languages,” says Kate Lipuma, Executive Director. “We talk theater.” She described AMS as a go-between who could help shape an operational need into language the architect could respond to, and help convert technical decisions into a story that donors could support.
“We need a doula… somebody whispering in our ears and saying, ‘We’ve done this before—here’s what you need to know.'”
— Kate Lipuma, Writers Theatre
Keep stakeholders aligned and clients empowered. Capital projects move as fast as an organization can make decisions. AMS helps clients maintain forward motion while keeping stakeholders aligned, even when priorities compete or emotions run high. Just as importantly, we help leadership enter decision rooms with confidence.
Markus described how AMS’s presence helped at Gulfshore’s Board meetings: “When [Steve Wolff] said it… it came with a little more weight.” That legitimacy can be the difference between prolonged uncertainty and timely, confident decisions. This risk of uncertainty doesn’t signal a failure of leadership. Most often, it signals just the opposite: exceptional diligence among the staff and Board, in the midst of new, complex decisions. AMS’s decades of experience navigating capital projects — over $16 billion in new and renovated facilities — helps cut through the noise and clarify the path forward.
Prepare for opening—and beyond. A central AMS premise is that opening day is not the starting line or the finish line. It’s the start of a new operating reality: new staffing needs, new budgets, new systems, and often a new scale of work. AMS helps clients plan for that transition so the organization is ready to operate the building, not simply celebrate it.
Two projects, one model
That’s where AMS served as the “doula” and Owner’s Counsel—supporting Gulfshore’s leadership as they navigated a complex stakeholder environment and major disruptions, including COVID shutdowns and Hurricane Ian. AMS’s role extended beyond opening as well, supporting the planning and budgeting that helped the organization scale into its new facility.
“Producing theater is a full-time job… and adding on designing the building and building a building and managing the construction was not realistic.”
— Joel Markus, Gulfshore Playhouse
At Writers Theatre, the story stretches longer: from a 50-seat space in the back of a bookstore, through multiple found spaces, and into creating a permanent home. Here, AMS helped craft a message that balanced ambition with continuity: “a little bit bigger, but a whole lot better.” The building did not abandon intimacy; it protected it while solving constraints that were limiting growth.
Writers’ Board of Trustees also built discipline into the financial strategy, inserting fundraising milestones and deliberate pause points before advancing. The organization’s right-sizing decisions proved durable. The 250-seat theater faced early criticism for not being larger, but Lipuma reflected that it was “fortunate in hindsight,” particularly after COVID reshaped attendance patterns and subscription behavior.
Both organizations describe AMS not only as a planning partner, but as a stabilizing force, helping teams stay aligned and decision-ready while continuing to run the company through the arts organization construction challenges that often accompany performing arts facility planning.
Gulfshore Playhouse, Naples, Florida
Right-sized and resilient over time
The ultimate test of a capital project is whether the building remains appropriate as the organization grows and changes.
In both interviews, leaders pointed to the value of planning that helps an organization envision a facility that is the right size for current work, and resilient enough to remain suitable as the organization evolves. That right-sizing is not a purely architectural question—it’s strategic, rooted in program, audience, earned revenue, staffing, and long-term operational realities, and is central to effective performing arts facility planning.
For Writers Theatre, the 250-seat scale proved durable after COVID shifted attendance patterns. For Gulfshore, the new facility has supported growth beyond early projections. In both cases, AMS’s counsel helped align aspiration with reality, creating buildings that can serve their missions not only in the first season, but across many seasons of change.
The long view
Capital projects in the arts are never simply construction projects. They are organizational transformations, carried out in public, under pressure, alongside a performance season in the moment. They require both design excellence and technical coordination, and the capacity to make decisions, keep stakeholders aligned, and prepare an organization to operate what it builds.
AMS Planning & Research partners with clients through that transformation—acting as Owner’s Counsel, translator, and a doula: helping organizations deliver one of their most sophisticated works with clarity, discipline, and confidence. The result is more than a building. It is a facility realized by an organization prepared to thrive within it.
