BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Exploring the Van Wezel from the Art to the Stage
Before the house lights dim, a theater has already begun its work.
By Edit Sarasota Staff
Before the house lights dim, a theater has already begun its work. There is the architecture that gathers an audience, the artwork that gives a lobby its character, the stage machinery waiting in the wings, and the quiet choreography that turns an empty room into a place of shared attention. At the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, those elements are unusually visible—and unusually worth considering.
“BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Exploring the Van Wezel from the Art to the Stage” offers a closer look at the Sarasota landmark beyond its familiar role as the city’s great welcoming room for music, dance, theater and conversation. The event invites audiences to think about the hall not simply as a destination for performances, but as a living piece of Sarasota’s cultural identity: a building with its own visual language, backstage story and connection to the artists who pass through it.
For generations of Sarasota residents, the Van Wezel has been a kind of civic living room. Its unmistakable purple exterior, rising beside Sarasota Bay, has made it one of the region’s most recognizable buildings. Opened in 1970, the hall was designed by William Wesley Peters of Taliesin Associated Architects, with a sculptural form often associated with a seashell. Its name honors Lewis and Eugenia Van Wezel, whose philanthropy helped bring the project to life.
That history matters because the Van Wezel is now part of a larger conversation about how Sarasota preserves, reimagines and shares its cultural spaces. A behind-the-scenes exploration creates room for the details that a typical performance night can obscure: the relationship between art and architecture, the practical demands of presenting live work, and the people whose expertise allows a production to arrive seamlessly before the curtain rises. It also offers a fresh way to see a building many locals know by silhouette but may never have truly entered.
The evening should appeal equally to devoted patrons and the simply curious—to anyone who has wondered what happens beyond the auditorium doors, or how a beloved waterfront theater continues to hold its place in a changing city. “BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Exploring the Van Wezel from the Art to the Stage” takes place Monday, September 21, 2026, at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota, bringing the hall’s art, history and working life into view.