Editor’s note: This column is based on the remarks made by Grant Mudge at last month’s opening of the CenterStage performing arts center in downtown Richmond. Mudge is the artistic director of Richmond Shakespeare, one of the nine performing arts groups that now call CenterStage home. Richmond Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is playing through Oct. 25 at CenterStage’s Gottwald Playhouse.

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.

Richmond Shakespeare’s offering for the 2009 Acts of Faith Festival is “Amadeus,“ the 1979 Peter Shaffer drama that won the 1981 Tony award. An exciting choice for the festival, it focuses on divine gifts and the notion of bargaining with God. This fictionalized account of the relationship between Mozart and a contemporary, court composer Antonio Salieri, shows Salieri to be a pious man who’s a mediocre artist. Mozart, of course, is a genius, and in Shaffer’s eyes—based on some historical evidence—he is also a childish, arrogant boor. How, Salieri agonizes, can God give such transcendent skill to the undeserving Mozart, when Salieri wants only to serve God through music?

Richmond Shakespeare’s Grant Mudge first adapted Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a little holiday presentation for his family. Eleven years ago, he and Cynde Liffick expanded the adaptation, and Mudge has presented it yearly to Richmond audiences.