Outside, young professionals are walking at a clip, heading home to their piece of sky among the towers of Olympic Village. They have no idea that inside the new BMO Theatre Centre, there’s a flurry of near-constant activity: the air is still choked with that fresh-paint smell, people in hardhats traipse past yellow tape across unfinished floors, and, in one of the four rehearsal halls, Colleen Wheeler is leading a group of actors in a hilarious song-and-dance number, two large, blue, sparkly fans strategically covering her body.

“Are we mermaiding?” somebody asks. “Okay, we’re mermaiding!”

This is Peter and the Starcatcher, the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical that imagines the early life of the boy who would become Peter Pan. The musical is carefully designed to maximize the perception of improvised, creative chaos.

“It really is a perfect piece of theatre, and I think the craft is in the execution as opposed to in the dazzle,” says Starcatcher director David Mackay. “It’s an homage to all things theatre: it is not a passive art form and it’s an active engagement, similar to how kids play and how adults want to play as well.”

That engagement is one of the primary goals of the BMO Theatre Centre, which gets its official unveiling when Peter and the Starcatcher debuts on its Goldcorp Stage. Once upon a time, the centre was supposed to be the new home of the much-mourned Vancouver Playhouse, which ceased operating in 2012. Now it’s a collaboration between the Arts Club and Bard on the Beach, exactly where the Playhouse’s production centre used to sit, well before the Wall Financial Corporation bought the land for condo development. When the city began searching for a replacement, Bard and the Arts Club applied. The city accepted the application, provided the companies could raise the money.

“It was a $20-million project,” Arts Club artistic managing director Bill Millerd says, standing with Bard on the Beach artistic director and founder Christopher Gaze just off the shared boardroom still under construction, overlooking the large bar and two-storey atrium below. “Seven to eight million was the Wall Centre giving this [space] as a shell. That’s what they were going to provide for the Playhouse and for that they got bonus density, probably in these two towers [Wall Centre False Creek].”

And, Millerd continues, “we’re debt-free here. We raised all the money that needed to be raised. Of the 12 to 13 million left, seven million came from the City because it’s their facility, two-and-a-half million came from [Canadian] Heritage, and we raised more than we initially needed, which is going to allow us to have a capital-reserve fund, because in 10 years there will be things that need to be done.”

The 48,000-square-foot space was designed by Proscenium Architecture & Interiors. The top floor is occupied by the Arts Club and Bard offices and the Bard costume shop. The main floor is home to the 240-seat Goldcorp Stage. Beyond the bar and down a tangle of concrete hallways are four rehearsal spaces and dressing rooms. Both companies have separate costume-storage facilities onsite, with floor-to-ceiling, rolling racks that look like they require a fireman’s ladder to reach the top. The shared lounge is already fostering community, just as Millerd and Gaze hoped.

“To see right out here in the artists’ lounge, where the actors in [Gateway Theatre’s] The Wizard of Oz can meet with the actors from The Starcatcher right here and have their lunch and get to know each other—it’s really important, it really mixes things up, and it will be a good thing for the arts,” Gaze says, beaming.

When the Starcatcher cast wraps rehearsal for the day, Wheeler can’t stop raving about the new digs.

“The fact that there’s now a hub of four rehearsal spaces, a beautiful theatre, and at times there have been three shows rehearsing here and we all meet and it’s this cacophony of artists in one hub in the middle of this beautiful area—” Wheeler breaks off and grins. “It’s pretty fantastic. It’s a big deal.”

There have also been equal levels of panic and excitement, Mackay says with a laugh.

“We’re working frantically to get things together and get this up to speed, and we know that the same thing’s happening with the theatre as well, so that’s unique,” he says.

“With the buzz saws and people walking in and out, it feels exactly like it should be, the first show opening here, a creative process,” says Benjamin Wardle, who plays Peter.

“The illusion of this play is that everything is being created in the moment,” Wheeler adds. “Even though that sounds easy, it’s really not.”

Turning the impossible into the possible is something of a Mackay specialty. Wheeler never thought she’d be in Starcatcher, since the cast is typically 11 men and one woman. Mackay not only cast Wheeler as the key villain, Black Stache, but his Starcatcher features six men and six women, and the group is a diverse assembly of people of colour and varying body types.

“It was my plan to be ahead of Trudeau,” Mackay jokes when Wheeler salutes him. “I knew it was 2015 at the beginning of 2015.” But in all seriousness, he says, changing up Starcatcher’s traditional casting is “absolutely important to me because it’s a play about the child’s imagination, and I think at that age you should believe everything is possible, and I think you should see everything is possible. That’s why I did it.”

With this approach, the Arts Club’s Starcatcher might be the boldest, most creative, and truest interpretation of the musical’s themes yet—and a fitting show to kick open the doors of a new theatre venue.

“The show is a mirror of a child’s imagination,” Mackay says. “How we played as kids, it’s a direct mirror, and it uses theatre as the medium. It’s a perfect parallel of how we played and how we all play. It’s quite brilliant that way.”

The Arts Club presents Peter and the Starcatcher on the Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre from Thursday (November 26) to December 27.