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Eric Paradis has seen a lot of development in New Bedford’s arts sector.
And some of it he’s directly responsible for.
For 20 years, Paradis has made contributions to the city’s arts community in multiple ways. Whether it’s his passion for the theater, bringing quality jazz to the city, or functioning as a board member on a pair of vital local cultural organizations, the 49-year-old Paradis is using his skills and experience as a businessman to complement his love of the arts. And today he finds himself to be an active participant and a proud witness to the role of the arts in the New Bedford renaissance.
From local stages to local boardrooms, Paradis’ trajectory of achievements is mirroring that of the city he devotes so much of his time and energy to.
For two decades, Paradis has been a part of the local drama troupe, Your Theatre. From his modest stage debut to his contributions behind the scenes, today he is a major player with the organization, not only as an actor and director, but as a board member. To date, he has directed or acted in more than 30 productions and contributed to dozens more as a set designer, stage manager and lighting technician. Today he is also in the role of community liaison for Your Theatre.
Your Theatre recently took a significant step with the opening of the Steeple Playhouse in New Bedford’s downtown, and Paradis played a prominent role in making the transition happen. Located in the building that once housed the First Baptist Church, the facility will go beyond theater to include concerts, recitals, fundraisers, weddings and more. The Playhouse was recently the site for the New Bedford Film Festival and this summer it will host the New Bedford Festival Theatre’s production of “Nunsense.”
In 2012, Paradis was the founder of the New Bedford Jazz Fest, an annual event held downtown that features both national and local talent.
Traditionally held in the summer, the event has relocated to the Steeple Playhouse and for the foreseeable future will be held in the fall and/or spring, while Paradis has the vision of an expansion for the event to include similar genres of music.
Paradis has also contributed his mental energies and insights to two prominent arts and culture organizations — The New Bedford Creative Consortium and the AHA! Night Steering Committee. The New Bedford Creative Consortium is a group of local cultural figures tasked with spearheading the creation and follow through of the city’s 10-year Arts & Culture Plan, which was launched in December 2018. Paradis’ current role is on the Public Art & Facilities team. As a member of the AHA! Night Steering Committee, Paradis is playing a significant role in the revitalization and refreshing of the event’s place in the city’s culture.
A graduate of Syracuse University with a degree in finance, and Apponequet Regional High School in Lakeville, Paradis has been a financial advisor since 1996 and is currently the owner of the Massachusetts Financial Group in Dartmouth, where he focuses on holistic financial planning and investments. Today he lives in Fairhaven with his wife of 12 years, Caroline.
Paradis spoke with the Light about his varying roles with Your Theatre, the establishment and future of the Steeple Playhouse, the current and future state of downtown New Bedford, and how being a businessman of 28 years goes into assisting arts and cultural organizations in the city, particularly nonprofits.
New Bedford Light: How did you get involved with Your Theatre?
Eric Paradis: I was cast in a show there 20 years ago, and my 18 profound words in that show really compelled me to become more involved in the organization. It started from that role, and then it went to “Hey, let’s help build a set,” because I like stagecraft. I like working with my hands and I know my way around tools so, “I can help with this.”
And then we started a volunteer committee and I’ve been on that committee for 20 years, and then I moved onto board roles and board committees, and continued acting and then I started a path to becoming a director. Five years ago I began directing shows. Over the last 20 years I’ve been involved as a director and an actor in about 30 shows at Your Theatre, so it’s been truly a privilege.
And then 10 years ago — Your Theatre has always been a bit of an orphan — it’s 78 years old and it’s never had a home of its own. So teams were put together to find a permanent home and I was part of those teams from willy nilly in the beginning and have been a big part of the teams that do a lot of the work around birthing the Steeple Playhouse.
In the last couple of years the board found fit to call me the “community liaison” for Your Theatre and Steeple Playhouse. Because I’m involved with AHA! and the New Bedford Creative Consortium, I go to a lot of meetings and gatherings around the arts community and I get to know a lot of people. And a lot of people think that I run Your Theatre, which is far from the truth.
It’s an amazing team of dedicated people that have put in a lot of time around Your Theatre, so I am certainly not the person who runs that place. I am one of a very talented and dedicated leadership team that runs that organization, from a volunteer standpoint. We’ve got an incredible part-time business manager, and we’re proud to announce that on July 1 the newest member of the team, our full-time executive director [Tener Wade], is going to be added to the Steeple Playhouse, to really help bring us to the next level.
NBL: How has your business background and experience contributed to your roles with the arts community?
EP: I have become focused. A lot of my efforts are focused around the business of non-profit, in helping Your Theatre become more organized from a business perspective. And even AHA! I’m always known to make my comments around the life of AHA! and the creative economy and Your Theatre through the lens of a business. As much as Your Theatre is a volunteer-run organization, at its core it’s a business. And treating it like that is really important for its survival. And so whether it’s AHA! or Your Theatre or Steeple Playhouse, treating it like a business but also a people-driven volunteer organization has always been important to me. So serving on the finance committee and helping with the annual budget and doing pro formas for the eventual opening of the Steeple Playhouse has been a huge part of what I do with the organization. So budgeting and understanding the importance of cash flow and cost controls have always been a big part of the effort that I put forth when I’m working with a nonprofit or any of the organizations that I help to advise.
NBL: You put a lot of time and effort into a production. How does it feel when you take a bow or do a curtain call after the completion of a show? Is it joyfully cathartic?
EP: It is joyfully cathartic (laughs). In January I was privileged enough to appear for the first time on the Your Theatre stage at the Steeple Playhouse in a show called “A Doll’s House, Pt. 2.” My wife was the lead and I played her husband in the show and, in fact, it was a really special production because 15 years ago Caroline and I played the same roles in the original “A Doll’s House” production by Henrick Ibsen, and the play “A Doll’s House, Pt. 2” was written at the request of the Ibsen estate. They hired a playwright to write a sequel, and the sequel actually took place 15 years after the original play, from a content and script standpoint. So it was a really interesting turn of events that the play became available to us. And James Sanguinetti was the director who suggested the play and then we were very fortunate to have been cast in the same roles exactly 15 years later in real life, so it was life imitating art, or art imitating life, I’m not sure which one (laughs). But it was incredible, and the ability to take that bow, plus the long work that went into creating the space. It was quite special.
NBL: In 20 years, how much growth have you seen in New Bedford, and economically what does the arts and culture community contribute to the advancement of the city?
EP: It’s very clear to the arts and culture community how much of a role that we have played in the growth of downtown. Essentially, the way I look at it, is a three-prong effort. It’s got the business owners who have invested in the bars and eating establishments and art galleries, and the connection to UMass and BCC in the downtown area have created a confluence of financial energy that have helped to make New Bedford a place that everyone is really proud of right now.
NBL: What are the challenges for the city moving forward?
EP: Certainly right now housing is a big issue, there’s a housing shortage. But that’s not just New Bedford’s problem, it’s a problem throughout the country right now frankly. That’s being worked on. There’s so many great projects going on in downtown and outside of downtown that are going to help keep housing costs down and provide a more vibrant city.
I think the biggest challenge right now is to make New Bedford, especially downtown, more of a bedroom community. Once there are more people living and relying on downtown as a primary place to live and do business, more businesses will survive, more businesses will pop up. That energy, it’s kind of like a circular energy, where one piece of the economy feeds the other, and the creative arts are a huge part of that.
We’ve seen our audiences grow already at Your Theatre just because we’re downtown, we’re more accessible, and people are seeing us now. The New Bedford arts community has gotten a lot of credit for how deep the rivers run in the visual arts, and again, largely because of UMass Dartmouth’s participation in that over the decades. And I think now we’re seeing the performing arts take a bigger part of that stage.
New Bedford Festival Theatre has been a big part in that. Smaller groups like the Collective and Reverie have picked up the mantle as well and are doing new creative works. Your Theatre has always done new work and fostered playwriting and new works, but those smaller groups are a real indicator of how strong the arts have become. And we’re all helping each other as well, and it’s great to see because we all have our niche. We don’t look at it as competition, we see it as a rising tide lifts all boats. There’s a great amount of energy that comes from having strong visual and performing arts in the community. And that goes hand-in-hand with how many talented musicians there are. Let’s not sleep on that. It’s an exciting time to be a part of the downtown culture.
NBL: What personal value do you derive from your contributions to the arts and culture community?
EP: There’s a great deal of value in community theater in general. It provides a platform for nonprofits to express themselves onstage and being a part of Your Theatre and helping Your Theatre continue to grow has been extremely rewarding. Your Theatre is the youngest, oldest nonprofit organization in New Bedford. We’re going into our 78th continuous season of producing community theater for nonprofits. And at the same time, even though there aren’t any nonprofit theaters older than us, we still feel like we’re an infant all of a sudden again because of the Steeple Playhouse and what that brings to the table for the future of Your Theatre.
So community theater is extremely important because it gives a voice to so many people to have a creative outlet, and that creativity brings people together. You get to know people that you would never otherwise get to meet. Worlds come together that surprise you sometimes. You build friendships and relationships that would not have necessarily happened before. And in today’s society of media consumption …the importance of performance art, I think, is essential to us continuing to flourish as a society and to interact with our neighbors. And without that there’s a big hole. … And to be able to be part of an incredibly growing and creative team of people, not only at Your Theatre but the arts community in general, is not just a privilege and an amazing amount of fun and rewarding, but it’s necessary.
There’s the importance of bringing young people into this world, the world of the arts. They can very easily fall into the trap of not being social in an in-person way and consuming their art through TV or a personal electronic device. And theater provides a way for everyone, kids and adults, to interact in a very personal and a very real way.
I had a friend describe going to a show at Your Theatre say it’s like watching live TV. It’s like watching a live movie. … We do a lot of theater that’s funny and fun to go to and fun to watch, but we do a lot of theater that makes you think and challenges your ideas of society and morality sometimes and that’s exciting to be a part of. Next season I’m creating a show called “Admissions,” and it’s about the challenges of Affirmative Action. So it’s not just about doing theater that’s fun to do and entertainment. So doing shows that challenge your mind and make you walk away asking questions and that progress, I think, is integral to society.
NBL: How did the New Bedford Jazz Fest get started?
EP: It started because I had this idea of putting together a jazz show because there was so little jazz happening in New Bedford at the time. There were some pockets that were doing Monday night jazz, some jazz during dinner, but it wasn’t consistent and I knew that there were a lot of fabulous musicians in our area and that it was a shame.
And Your Theatre never really had a major fundraiser other than an annual gathering of members at a dinner. So I thought, “Maybe one day we’ll do a jazz festival or at least a jazz concert where we’ll try to raise some money for the organization.” We had an opportunity to split the cost of a tent with Downtown NB Inc., and Jazz Fest was born.
I really enjoy doing it because a lot of jazz festivals tend to drift in their musical presentation. For example, the New Orleans Jazz Festival, as it’s popularly known, is the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Music Festival. Nobody remembers the “Heritage” part and they really promote and produce less jazz than any other art form, because it’s more of a music festival than a jazz festival.
So I’ve always been trying to emulate … the idea that jazz is popular enough to present on its own. And now we’re doing New Bedford Jazz Fest at the Steeple Playhouse and it’s extremely exciting because we get to use our new home in a really creative and fun way.
I’ve got two ideas for this year. This year, one of the close cousins to jazz is funk, and we’re talking right now about doing a funk version of Jazz Fest this fall, and then next year bringing Jazz Fest back in the spring doing a two-day event — Friday funk and Saturday jazz, something like that. We’re going to test out the waters with jazz’s close cousin, funk, and hopefully expand the event and make it a bigger, more festival feel.
There’s a lot of great events that go on already in our community and the surrounding communities in the summer and I don’t want to compete with them. We’re bringing Jazz Fest indoors now. I want to let the rest of those events shine and not get in the way. So we’re moving away from the summertime slot and hopefully we can showcase something great for people to do and fun in the months that are a little colder.
This fall, late summer at the earliest, probably more like late fall or early winter. And then picking up the momentum from that and going into a two-day event in the early spring.
NBL: What is the quality of jazz that you’re bringing to the city with Jazz Fest?
EP: We’ve always tried to make it a mix of national acts and local acts so that we’re showcasing what we have to offer as a jazz community and also bringing in talent that has either traveled the globe or nationally. Give our jazz audience an opportunity to see something that they wouldn’t ordinarily get a chance to see in New Bedford.
So it’s really a mix — we’ve got Grammy Award winners on our roster and we’ve had kids from Global Learning Charter School performing jazz and everything in between. So the quality is always there and the excitement that people have for the local jazz musicians is palpable. People are always pleasantly surprised to see how much talent there is locally.
NBL: How can the city maintain the progress it’s seen in the past two decades and can the city continue to grow and develop?
EP: The continued progress of New Bedford is dependent on continuing five things.
Make it easier to do business, make new businesses, and continue doing business. Red tape kills ingenuity, progress and investment. Responsible growth needs rules but it needs flexibility and consistency.
Foster the arts. The arts are a huge part of what got us here. Let’s continue to see it through by supporting policy that supports creativity!
Continue to expand our restaurant scene. It is the key ingredient that is common among all successful small cities that you see around our region and around the country. Inventive and interesting food, that is fresh, attracts people and keeps them in your city.
People living downtown. There is a lot of development in that area right now. It’s encouraging. Without people who live and walk in the downtown arena, it’s hard to keep businesses that rely on foot traffic open.
Waterfront use for retail is key. It attracts tourism. For the amount of waterfront that we have, too small a percentage of it attracts consumers and/or tourism. Commercial fishing is vital to our economy. That being said, we need to find more ways to make use of our waterfront views and waterfront access to cater to individuals and the community at large.
Too many storefronts are empty or closed on the weekends, or vacant entirely. There is so much unexploited potential in New Bedford. I see a lot of growth left to do!
NBL: What does the future hold for AHA! Nights?
EP: With the retirement of Lee Heald, AHA! is looking to refresh and renew its brand and activities — making sure that the community is part of that process. The AHA! team has been working to brainstorm potential changes that will benefit the relationship that New Bedford has with AHA!, and is asking for input from the community to make sure we hear what people want so that we can be sure to sustain AHA! for the next 20 years. One of the big reasons downtown has rebounded these last decades is partly due, in many people’s opinion, to the effect that AHA! has had on bringing people to downtown. We are trying to steward that along, all the while continuing programming.
NBL: How is the New Bedford Creative Consortium contributing to the city?
EP: Under the attentive management of Margo Saulnier, NBCC has achieved many of its goals, including grant programs, a website and creative directory, and supporting and creating public art projects and policy. We also identified the need for the city’s systems that manage the application and use of city property for events and projects needing modernization and streamlining.
Since NBCC does not have control of the multitude of departments involved, we are hopeful that the city officials in charge of this area will continue to act on our suggestions and causes for concern so we all may benefit more from the public areas that are used by its residents, and non-residents, to enrich the city with nonprofit and for-profit activities.
And a really big concept NBCC is working on is the creation of “the business of art” center or program. This is an exciting opportunity to bring resources and education to the creative community, being careful to not duplicate services that exist but instead to supplement and support, while creating new ones.
NBL: What’s on your bucket list? What would you like to achieve?
EP: This may sound odd coming from a financial planner, but I don’t really set fixed goals for the future. However, I would love to see Steeple Playhouse become a self-sufficient business with several employees that operate it as an active performing arts center. Our new executive director that starts July 1 is a big step toward that goal. Personally, I live to the fullest each day, month and year, do the best I can with the opportunities that cross my path, treat people I interact with as best I can, and hope for the best outcomes for all involved and the organizations that I touch.
Sean McCarthy is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
