Six months after abruptly losing artistic director Michael Bush, Mamaroneck’s Emelin Theatre today announced Lisa Reilly as the performing-arts center’s new executive director.

“The Board is excited that Lisa is joining the Emelin as its executive director,” Board of Trustees co-Presidents Mark Ettenger and Seth Kaplan said in a media release. “She brings a successful track record running performing arts centers and we are impressed with her enthusiasm for learning about and becoming a part of our diverse community.”

According to the release, Reilly was the managing and artistic director of the College of Staten Island Center for the Arts (CFA), a five-theater complex. For more than a decade, she was the executive director of the Earlville Opera House, a historic theater and arts center upstate. She was also executive director of Westbeth, an artists’ housing project in Greenwich Village, and taught at Syracuse University.

Reilly has also been a consultant for community arts organizations and in the specialty areas of marketing, fundraising, board development, grant writing, executive searches, and curriculum.

All of those skills would seem to be needed at the Emelin, which has endured a rocky 18 months.
In early 2007, shortly after announcing a $10 million capital program to more than double the venue’s usable space, managing director John Raymond left abruptly, followed soon by the theater’s publicity director.

In September 2007, the Emelin’s board of trustees announced the appointment of Bush as the theater’s new artistic director, in what was seen as a major step in securing the future of the 250-seat Equity house that was home to legitimate theater, a cabaret series, a bluegrass series and a film club.

The former Manhattan Theater Club advisor had big plans for the tiny venue — and kicked them off with a Glen Island party in September 2007 starring Leslie Uggams — to start the drive for a $10 million expansion of the site. He programmed a “Theater in Concert Festival” that he considered a tasting menu of where he wanted to take the theater. There was cabaret, theater and music.

Bush staged “Murderers,” a play he helped develop with playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, but then had to postpone a May production of “Pure Heaven: A Party with Kay Thompson,” when its star, Ruth Williamson, developed throat problems in previews.

Within a month, on June 11, Bush was out — after just nine months on the job.

The $10 million “Next Stage” project would expand the theater’s stage and seating capacity (from 250 to 399), add a film-only theater (allowing for an expanded film series), and a 60-seat “black box” experimental theater. The complex will go from 9,000 square feet to 36,000 square feet.

It is unclear whether the venue will once again produce theatrical events or whether it will follow the performing-arts-center model of presenting rather than producing works. Reilly’s title is executive director, not artistic director, which suggests a more administrative job description.

Stay tuned.