gulfshore playhouse anything goes
Photography by Christina Bankson

BTS Exclusive: Inside Gulfshore Playhouse’s Historic Naples Debut

Follow founder Kristen Coury's race to opening night as she perfects a Broadway-caliber show while debuting the troupe's $72 million theater—turning a 20-year vision into Southwest Florida's newest cultural destination.

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Sequined hemlines and pocket squares lift and flutter as throngs of well-heeled guests gather around the promenade at Gulfshore Playhouse’s new Baker Theatre & Education Center. The windows are darkened, and the doors of the sleek, bowing construction, which evokes a lapping tide or the flow of a musical score, are cordoned off by a cobalt ribbon tied in a bow. It’s a cool, windy October evening, the year’s first true fall day, and the crowd is buzzing with excitement. This evening is 20 years in the making.

In a flash, the lights flip on, revealing the marvel behind the glass: a lobby blending modern and Art Deco design—a collaboration between local interior designer Lisa Kahn Allen and Gulfshore Playhouse founder, CEO and producing artistic director Kristen Coury—flanked on one side by an elegant bar and on the other by a grand staircase that crests at the chandelier-adorned Founders’ Lounge. With a pair of giant scissors and generous donors by her side, Kristen cuts the ribbon and welcomes the theater’s first guests inside. Later that night, during a variety show to preview the mainstage, Kristen waxes poetic about the next chapter of her grand vision. She speaks of a future where Gulfshore Playhouse joins the League of Resident Theatres, where they win the Regional Theatre Tony Award, and where Broadway shows don’t just tour through the facility but begin there. 

The preceding weeks have been a whirlwind of late nights, phone calls, construction delays, last-minute equipment tests, donor dinners and rehearsals—a seemingly endless string of top-priority to-dos that tested the troupe’s mettle time and again. The theater’s inaugural performance, Anything Goes, opens on November 1, and the ribbon-cutting’s performance includes a handful of the production’s stars, with tap-shoe blistered feet and sore muscles disguised in a glittering veneer befitting the evening. 

Well before the Baker Theatre hit the first of many construction snags—including a five-month setback when Hurricane Ian toppled the structure’s 65-foot-tall cement walls in 2022—Kristen had her heart set on bringing the massive, 90-year-old musical comedy to the stage. This was how she wanted to reintroduce Gulfshore Playhouse to Southwest Florida, with all of the tap-dancing magic of musical theater that was simply too big for the Norris Center stage. 

And so, amid the chaos of ongoing construction delays and complications, another hurricane that sent the cast seeking shelter and planning for the momentous October 17 ribbon cutting, Kristen embraced the task of directing Anything Goes. “Directing is my favorite thing,” she says. “It was such a balm to the soul to be able to focus on joy for two hours and then go focus on stress again.” Kristen would glide into the sun-drenched rehearsal room and set to work perfecting the scene at hand. “What if we moved Lord Evelyn to stage right so he can address the audience more directly?” she might say to Broadway-tenured choreographer Sara Brians. Within minutes, the director would gracefully excuse herself to adjust the signage in the theater’s front garden or consult with the construction crew about partitions in the bathroom that weren’t quite right. “I’m sure she was putting out a thousand fires,” says Kilty Reidy, the man behind Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, the leading lady’s hapless yet charming betrothed. “But when she got in the [rehearsal] room, it was like she was in the eye of the storm. She was calm, and she protected her performers from [those challenges].”

As a director, Kristen’s approach sits on a razor’s edge. On the one hand, she is collaborative and malleable, iterating on a scene while allowing her actors the space to experiment with lines and movement, adding sparing, perfectly timed interventions. “Lots of directors hold the show and the characters so close that they want utter control over what you do,” says David Baida, who returned to play banker Elisha Whitney after working with Kristen on last season’s closing show, She Loves Me. “Kristen’s the opposite. She gave us this freedom to play.” On the other hand, her attention to detail is precise and unwavering. In one scene, two passengers try to shoo a nosy socialite by claiming the ship is sinking. The woman returns soon after, panicking and running around in an oversized life vest festooned with all her precious jewels. Kristen knew the get-up had to be over the top for the joke to land. “Kristen really kept pushing,” lead costume designer Mary Folino recalls. “She was like, ‘It needs more [jewels], it needs more!’ And when it finally got the laugh, we were like, ‘Oh, that’s it!’”

There could be no half-measures—from choreography to music. “It was important to Kristen that the show really danced,” Sara says. Costumes had to embody a sense of movement as much as era accuracy; every song and interaction had to exude musicality. In addition to the show’s expected ensemble dances, Sara choreographed original dance numbers for duets like “You’re the Top” and trained the cast to move as if the scene were set to music, even when none was playing.

Simply casting the show was an arduous hunt for perfection. Prior to auditions, Kristen delved into various versions of the script and movie adaptations, identifying where and how to put her spin on the show while staying true to the classic characters. “I really thought that Reno wanted to be older than the typical 30-something,” she says of character Reno Sweeney, the musical’s powerhouse showgirl-meets-preacher, who graces the cover of Anything Goes’ glossy playbills. “She’s a tough, brassy dame who’s been around for a long time and can control the room.” It took months of successive auditions to find the right Reno, but Kristen finally found her ideal casting with Sarah Bowden, a Broadway alum triple threat with a career goal of filling Reno’s heels. Likewise, Kristen saw fox-hunting, Zeppelin-riding debutante and romantic lead Hope Harcourt (played by Sara Esty) as older than the standard 18-22 casting. “In 1934, that read like a full-fledged woman, but nowadays, it doesn’t,” the director says.

On opening night, as guests file into their seats, any hint of chaos has vanished. The stage lights hit their mark, and the live performance from an orchestra positioned a few rooms away flows into the theater seamlessly, despite the fact that many such systems were completed mere days earlier, leaving precious little time for preparation. The behemoth set—an idealistic construction of the show’s S.S. American built directly onto the stage by some 50 local artisans—seems as though it has simply sailed into the theater. And, as each cast member brings their character to life with Vaudevillian flair, Kristen and her team take their first half-breath of relief. The curtains close 2 hours and 45 minutes later to a rapturous standing ovation.

But, before the finery, the performance and the fulfillment of a long-held dream, there was a journey far longer than a cruise across the Atlantic. Let’s rewind.

Kristen arrived in Naples in 2004. A theater-obsessed New Yorker with big ambitions and an unstoppable will, she identified the region as ground zero for her vision. “I went to this lawyer friend who was also a Broadway producer and said, ‘I’m moving to Naples, and I want to start a professional theater. I don’t know anybody, I don’t have any money and I don’t have a name for the place, but is it too soon to start?’” Kristen recalls.    

There was no bankroll, no salaries, and, for the first five years, no home for Gulfshore Playhouse. Kristen bootstrapped performances together anywhere that had room, from parks to community buildings, and doggedly pursued sponsors and donors to cover expenses. Where many Neapolitans saw a meager budget (a new board member once joked that the theater’s $130,000 budget in 2010 was no more than the price of a car), Kristen saw a mountain to climb.  Soon after the Great Recession hit in 2008, Gulfshore Playhouse found a home base with the Norris Center at Cambier Park, a jewel box-sized theater with wings so small that actors had to exit and circle the building just to go from stage right to stage left. But the visionary founder knew she couldn’t get too comfortable. “My eye was always on the prize: a building,” she says. 

Always bright and hopeful on the surface, Kristen found herself plagued by doubt in the quiet of her apartment. Why was she constantly chasing something that might never happen? From her Bayfront home, Kristen would gaze across the abandoned grassy patch next door, manifesting, prophesying. “I would stand on my balcony, close my eyes and imagine a theater just growing out of the ground,” she says.  

For years, Kristen had peppered the idea for a brick-and-mortar home for Gulfshore Playhouse into conversations with philanthropic powerhouses Patty and Jay Baker, who were longtime sponsors of the theater. She even wrote an unsigned $10 million check from the Bakers to Gulfshore Playhouse and hung it on her bathroom mirror as motivation. In 2015, not long after Kristen sat down with Jay to formally pitch her hopes for a theater, Patty approached the founding director during a performance intermission and handed her a single dollar. “It’s a down payment,” Patty said coyly. Soon after, the Bakers pledged a $10 million matching gift toward the construction of an entirely new theater—the first major step in bringing the long-awaited dream to life. With the Bakers on board, additional donations followed from other big names in Southwest Florida philanthropy, like Akin, Moran and Struthers, as well as other members of the community who, together, brought the $72-million theater to life. 

A month after the ribbon-cutting, the transformative moment springs back into Kristen’s mind. It’s November 13, and Gulfshore Playhouse is holding two matinee performances, one of Anything Goes and the other of Every Brilliant Thing, an interactive, emotional one-man show that opened the previous week. Alongside director of education Steven Calakos, Kristen conducts a corporate speech writing course (part of Gulfshore Playhouse’s Drama-Based Corporate Training and Team Building program), jets over to dinner with the creative team from Every Brilliant Thing and leads a post-show talk in the boardroom. From there, she can hear the youth ensemble rehearsing “Blow Gabriel, Blow,” part of preparations for a youth performance of Anything Goes. On her way to greet guests in the lobby, she passes the Anything Goes pre-show discussion and pauses to listen to the orchestra’s warm-up. After a quick speech to the audience, yet another youth ensemble files into the rehearsal room for an upcoming performance of The Wizard of Oz. “That was the day the dream was realized,” she says. “It was never just the building. It’s always what we would build with the building.”