Friday will be a bit like Christmas Eve for the directors of the nine resident companies of Richmond CenterStage. The next day, the performing-arts complex in the core of downtown Richmond will finally open with a smattering of performances from each of them, signifying a victory that naysayers claimed would never occur.

“The possibilities are just unlimited,“ said Keith Martin, managing director of the Richmond Ballet, one of nine groups that will be resident companies at CenterStage. Martin speaks from experience: Before moving to Richmond, he worked on the launching of six performing-arts centers, in North Carolina and elsewhere. He predicts that with higher visibility and “cross-pollination of our audience base,“ the nine groups will experience double-digit increases in attendance, at least in the year after the opening.

Bootleg Shakespeare. A true story about a radium-poisoning scandal. A black comedy whose characters include a talking apartment and a ghostly Justin Timberlake. Those are some of the enticements that Richmond-area theaters will present in the 2009-10 season. Firehouse Theatre Project artistic director Carol Piersol might have been speaking for many company leaders when she said of her play-selection process, “I make a pile of plays that hit me in the gut - and then I try to get variety.“

It has been a tough year - but a transformational one - for African American Repertory Theatre, the Richmond troupe whose current production, “From the Mississippi Delta,“ runs through June 14 at Pine Camp Arts and Community Center. In October, the company’s founding artistic director, Derome Scott Smith, suffered a stroke that left him temporarily unable to talk. The medical crisis struck while AART was gearing up for the 2008-09 season’s first offering: August Wilson’s “Fences.“ Smith had been scheduled to stage the show, which had to be canceled.

One thing that is perfectly clear is that Endesha Ida Mae Holland was a determined woman. There are times in her life story, told as a series of overlapping stories and vignettes in an autobiographical two-act play, when the author lapses into self-aggrandizement, and times when even the clarity of the actors’ speech stumbles over the muddy thickness of Mississippi Delta axioms.

Building on its strengths, Derome Scott Smith’s African American Repertory Theatre revived the 1980’s off-Broadway to Hollywood hit “Steel Magnolias” with, apparently, few major changes since its last appearance in 2006. The all-female cast—which is true to the original 1987 production—is primarily focused on Shelby and her mother, M’Lynn, the former a young diabetic who determines to have a baby against medical advice, and her somewhat overbearing but truly loving Southern mother. But there are no stars in this tragicomedy; it is an ensemble effort with strong performances and meaty characters for all six of the cast members. If nothing else, this production proves that Southern is a culture and not a color.

African American Trailblazers,“ a series of vignettes about native Virginians who left a lasting legacy to the world, would have been the second production of the 2008-09 season for the African American Repertory Theatre. But the company’s production of August Wilson’s “Fences,“ scheduled for last November, had to be canceled because of the sudden illness of founding director Derome Scott Smith.