Key to Success at Tough Theater Job Was Extreme Teamwork
Contractor Jeffrey D. Wagner calls the $84-million AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre “far and away the most challenging” job in his 21-year career. The senior project manager in the Dallas office of McCarthy Building Cos. Inc. also speaks in superlatives about the design team responsible for the most unorthodox little theater in Dallas, in Texas or perhaps anywhere. He talks that way even though the building is packed inside and out with tough-to-build systems.
Wagner attributes his management success to serious team-building and cross-disciplinary collaboration among the multiform theater’s designers, suppliers and builders. “My job is to set the tone,” he says. “The key is to get everybody pulling the rope in the same direction.”