The $63 million Crewe Center for the Arts at the University of Southern Maine in Portland is projected to open in August. Named for songwriter and producer Bob Crewe, the center will contain a visual arts gallery, a 200-seat performance space, a music rehearsal space and a multipurpose arts lab for dance or theater classes. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Even now, almost a year from its opening date, the unfinished Crewe Center for the Arts is noticeably quiet despite blustery weather and traffic outside. That’s thanks to elaborate acoustic design baked into the walls – and just about every part – of the University of Southern Maine’s new music and arts center on its Portland campus.

“On a Wednesday night, you could come in here and be looking at art, and the Southern Maine Symphony Orchestra will be rehearsing in there, and you’d have no idea,” said Kyle Nielsen, director of USM’s Osher School of Music, standing in the partially constructed Great Hall Gallery. Its soaring central room has large glass windows and exposed timber beams designed to evoke a traditional wood-framed ship.

The forthcoming center is named for Bob and Dan Crewe. Bob Crewe’s music was a fixture of the ’60s. The songwriter behind many of The Four Seasons’ biggest hits and an accomplished musician and producer, Crewe also produced paintings and sculpture as a visual artist. He settled in Maine at the end of his life and lived in the state until his death in 2014.

Michael Carpentier, senior project superintendent for Consigli Construction, speaks during a tour of the Crewe Center for the Arts on Tuesday. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

His brother Dan has been working to preserve his brother’s legacy for decades, and currently runs the Crewe Foundation, a Cumberland-based arts, music and LGBTQ+ advocacy foundation funded primarily by royalties from the Broadway musical “Jersey Boys,” which portrayed the history of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons with Bob Crewe as a supporting character. The foundation donated $5 million to USM in 2021 for the construction of a new arts center on the university’s Portland campus.

Bob Crewe would have been 94 this week. The building’s green room will house one of his grand pianos, which he used to write his biggest hits, and some of his gold records and memorabilia.

The $63 million center is set to open in August 2025. It will contain the visual arts gallery, a 200-seat performance space, a music rehearsal space and a multipurpose arts lab for dance or theater classes. There are acoustically isolated classrooms and practice spaces, music lockers and offices. The university’s Osher School of Music will relocate to the Crewe Center from the Gorham campus, and the new center will also house the Kate Cheney Chappell Center for Book Arts.

The building also got a funding boost from actor Tony Shalhoub, an alumnus of USM’s theater program, and an outdoor performance space will bear his name.

In a tour Tuesday, Michael Carpentier, senior superintendent with Consigli Construction, showed off the center’s in-progress construction and many complex acoustic details. The walls of acoustically isolated rooms are designed with a “box within a box” format, made of three layers of drywall, double insulated and sitting on rubber pads. Construction of those walls turned the standard construction process on its head.

Officials say that The Crewe Center for the Arts at Portland’s University of Southern Maine is projected to open in August. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

“The building kind of went up opposite of the lot of the ones we do,” Carpentier said. “Typically when we do a project like this you do construction through foundations and concrete, then the steel goes up, then you infill all your block walls. Whereas in this space, we had to do come in, do our foundations, then put our block walls up, then put our steel up.”

But the effect is that once complete, two pianists in adjacent rooms shouldn’t be able to hear each other at all. The building also has no stairs or variation in floor height for smooth instrument transportation, and all of the major doorways are wide enough to fit a grand piano.

A through line of the Crewe Center project is “accessible excellence.”

“It’s really important that this building is being created at a public university,” said Corey Hascall, interim president and CEO of the USM Foundation, which oversaw the fundraising for the construction. “This is a place where there are lots of first-generation students, and lots of students who don’t have a Rolodex, and this is an unheard-of arts facility in Maine.”

One example is the center’s medium-size performance hall, which is designed to create a packed space for student performances. Larger shows can happen in the nearby 510-seat Hannaford Hall. The university also hopes the state-of-the-art facility will attract performers that students would typically need to travel to New York or Boston to see.

“This building is student-focused, and student-first, and human-first,” Nielsen said. “So this is really rooting music as an art that’s for the people.”

Officials say that The Crewe Center for the Arts at Portland’s University of Southern Maine is projected to open in August. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer