Mainstage Center for the Arts

Mainstage Center for the Arts provides a creative, vibrant, and nurturing environment for youth and adults. Using the performing arts as a catalyst for individual expression and growth, Mainstage enriches the quality of life for its South Jersey community.

They are dedicated to providing South Jersey youth with arts experiences that lead to: positive interactions with others, a greater sense of self-worth and self-esteem, community involvement, exposure to professional arts & entertainment not readily accessible, recognition of personal strengths & talents and career opportunities in the arts, and a deep and abiding appreciation for the performing arts.

Mainstage Center for the Arts, began in 1989 when Founder, Edward P. Fiscella, Jr., a teacher at the Glen Landing Middle School in Gloucester Township, answered the plea of his students to create a theater program that would encompass their long summer vacation. With the help of co-founder, Joseph Bretschneider, also an educator, the Gloucester Township Board of Education, and the Department of Recreation gave Fiscella the go-ahead to create a Summer Stage program in Gloucester Township, based on the tremendously successful Summer Stage program in Upper Darby, Pa, where Mr. Fiscella worked the previous 10 years as a show director and Children’s Theatre Producer.

Summer Stage became so successful that it spawned demands for year-round arts programming for youth and families. Mainstage Center for the Arts was incorporated in 1994 as the Gloucester Township Center for the Arts, a 501 (c) (3) private non-profit. In 1997, they began to recognize that their organization had a large regional impact and that their audiences and participants were coming to them from all over the South Jersey area – not just Gloucester Township – and so they renamed themselves “Mainstage Center for the Arts”. They then rented a Studio at 100 South Black Horse Pike in Blackwood, NJ, and began to offer dance, voice, and acting classes. They had never owned a theater, and have hence formed mutually beneficial partnerships with the Gloucester Township School System, Camden County College, the Washington Township School System, and others, in order to have access to performance venues.

Mainstage is very proud to be recognized by their community as “one of the best-performing arts centers in South Jersey,” by the readers of the Courier Post Newspaper.