Kelley Shanley was not what you’d call a sophisticated performing arts connoisseur as he watched the opening-night curtain come up on a production of “My Fair Lady” from a riser above the stage at his upstate New York high school.
Shanley was many things at the school — athlete, student government buff — but actor was not one of them. He had tried out for the musical with some buddies on a lark, and was as surprised as anyone to get a role.
But as the curtain rose, Shanley realized the world he and his fellow students had created over untold hours of practice and preparation was about to become real for an audience that, from his perch, he could see was buzzing with anticipation.
The “electricity of that moment,” when the relationship between artist and audience is first formed, was a transcendent experience for Shanley, who has spent a lifetime trying to recreate it.
So when a new show begins this season at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale, where Shanley is president and CEO, you will likely find him ducking through a door to stand in the same place: just inside Orchestra Box E, house left, near the stage.
“I can’t count the number of times that I have just stood there for that moment — when the curtain opens, when the artist comes onstage — to see the connection with the audience. It still, today, just gives me chills,” Shanley says.
After nearly 25 years at the Broward Center, the 2023-2024 arts season will be Shanley’s last one at the helm of the venue, with the announcement that he will step down in March.
The decision was Shanley’s, who says good leaders know when it’s time to walk away. Business at the Broward Center is “very good,” and the timing is right for a reset, both for the organization and himself, he says.
“There’s lots of things I want to explore. There’s lots of things I’m curious about, so I’m going to get out and be curious about those things and have some new experiences and see where that leads,” Shanley, 57, says.
He does admit the transition comes with a twinge of melancholy: Life around the Broward Center is all his kids (one in college, one in high school) have ever known. Shanley himself feels like he essentially grew up there, too, going from being the guy with the walkie-talkie checking on B.B. King in the green room to CEO.
“The people, the experiences, the things we accomplished, I’ll be sad that that part of it is over. But, wow, what a great privilege it really has been to be here,” he says.
The Performing Arts Center Authority, the governing board of the Broward Center, has launched a national search for Shanley’s replacement. He’ll be a tough act to follow.
‘A superstar’
Shanley came to the Broward Center from the Coral Springs Center for the Arts in 1999, a decade later becoming president and CEO when predecessor Mark Nerenhausen took a similar post at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.
Under Shanley’s leadership, the Broward Center completed a dramatic $58 million expansion and renovation project in 2014 that added state-of-the-art technology, an education center and myriad hospitality improvements, including a premium lounge and Marti’s New River Bistro, in a new, glass-enclosed building overlooking the water.
Sister venue Parker Playhouse, a cramped and inhospitable concert hall that had opened in 1967, was beautifully modernized with a $30 million remodel in 2021 and given a jazzy new name, The Parker.
Michael Laughlin/Sun Sentinel
Once a cramped and inhospitable relic of the 1960s, The Parker in downtown Fort Lauderdale was beautifully modernized in 2021. (Michael Laughlin / South Florida Sun Sentinel)
In 2018, the new-and-improved Broward Center attracted a remarkable exclusive: the first South Florida performances of cultural mega-hit “Hamilton,” a five-week run that was the show’s only tour stop in the region that season.
Shanley was honored in 2020 with the Carbonell Awards’ prestigious George Abbott Award, which recognizes significant contributions to artistic and cultural development in South Florida. The following year, the Broward Center was among 10 finalists for Theater of the Decade from influential trade publication Pollstar, which rewards “the most commercially and artistically successful” venues across the country.
The 2023-2024 season at the Broward Center will bring Fort Lauderdale premieres of more buzzed-about Broadway shows, including “Funny Girl,” “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Hadestown” and “Clue.”
The Broward Center also just scored a three-night residency with Grateful Dead icon Bob Weir that will include a New Year’s Eve concert. Other headliners on their way to the Broward Center and The Parker this season include Graham Nash, John Hiatt, Judy Collins, Bruce Hornsby, Lukas Nelson, Spyro Gyra and former Police guitarist Andy Summers.
“Through Kelley’s leadership, the Broward Center has become one of the premier performing arts centers in the world. That was not by accident,” says former Sen. George LeMieux, chair of the Broward Performing Arts Foundation, who calls Shanley “a superstar.”
The arts, and the cultural venues that offer them, bring energy and a “gravitational pull” of people and dollars to an area, Shanley says. The investments at the Broward Center, on the west side of downtown, and The Parker, adjacent to Flagler Village and Searstown, anticipated an explosion of commercial and residential growth — each venue is now ringed by ongoing and future construction.
The Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, an economic development group, puts the local economic<<<sometimes it’s just the best word, repetition be damned! But financial impact of the Broward Center at $130 million a year, but Shanley’s influence goes far beyond that number, says Bob Swindell, GFLA president and CEO.
“Kelley is a sought-after voice on the intersection of the arts and business and how the arts can effectively be used to advance broader community goals. When I think about leaders who have most influenced how Fort Lauderdale has earned its reputation as one of the nation’s most desirable emerging 18-hour cities, Kelley’s is one of the first names that comes to mind,” Swindell says.
Everyone is an artist
Shanley is uncomfortable being singled out in that way, deflecting the spotlight back on the board, donors and staff who made revitalization of the Broward Center and The Parker possible.
He points out that the Broward Center has been defined by a visionary spirit since it was built three decades ago in a then-empty pocket of downtown Fort Lauderdale, with stage specifications, technology and seating capacity that anticipated major Broadway tours — before those tours had even become a thing.
The venue opened on Feb. 26, 1991, with the inaugural national tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” — a first-of-its-kind production that had the scale and all the razzle-dazzle of Broadway. After leaving Fort Lauderdale, “Phantom” would be greeted by “Hamilton”-like fanfare around the country.
“Broadway was reinventing itself on the road. To be designed at the moment when this change was taking place, prepare for it, host ‘Phantom’ and then suddenly just establish the (Broward) Center as the place in South Florida where these major tours would go, was a bit of a stroke of luck and a bit of good looking down around the corner to figure out what’s next. That was really important to the Broward Center’s future success,” Shanley says.
If you want to pin Shanley down on an accomplishment at the Broward Center that he takes personal pride in, he’s likely to point to performances most patrons do not see.
They take place in the back of the property, in the Rose Miniaci Arts Education Center, a multistory attachment of classrooms, studios and a small performance stage that opened in 2014 as part of the Broward Center expansion.
A collaboration with Broward County Public Schools, the center is home to one of the largest arts-in-education programs in the United States, serving more than 130,000 students annually, with demand increasing each year. The classrooms also host an equally popular menu of arts instruction for adults.
Adding the extra expense of including an education wing at the Broward Center was not a decision that came easily when the project was on the drawing board as Shanley took his leadership role in the wake of the 2008 recession.
But 15 years later, he speaks with particular satisfaction about nurturing young students from different demographic backgrounds that he describes as the lifeblood of the community. Shanley does not expect all to become performers or arts patrons necessarily — but he believes exposure to the arts will encourage them to be more innovative thinkers and creative in their own way.
It’s a relationship that lasts a lifetime, Shanley says, noting that in a recent adult class in tap dancing, a 93-year-old woman in a wheelchair slipped on a pair of tap shoes and stood up to perform a brief, impromptu soft shoe.
“We all don’t think of ourselves as artists, but there is an artist in everybody, somewhere, wanting to come out. You just have to find what that is that resonates with you,” Shanley says. “You should appreciate what you can create. That’s the one thing that I have discovered, talking to artists and being around artists all these years, is the importance of that. …
“There’s something inside all of us that, when it comes out, it’s going to make us feel good and it’s going to make us feel like a human being.”
Staff writer Ben Crandell can be reached at bcrandell@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Instagram @BenCrandell and Twitter @BenCrandell.