Master electrician Michael Burris helps set up lights for Florida Stage's opening production at its new home. (Bill Ingram / Palm Beach Post)

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Florida Stage is making a bold forward step this weekend by moving to West Palm Beach, becoming the prime permanent tenant of the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse. Yet the former Manalapan theater troupe is singing the blues.

The acclaimed company that specializes in new and developing scripts has surrounded its new three-sided playing space with $200,000 of fresh-from-the-factory blue seats. And on Saturday night it inaugurates its new home with the East Coast premiere of a new musical revue, Low Down Dirty Blues.

Dismantled is the raised stage that touring shows had performed on, replaced by a large rectangular thrust configuration beneath a versatile lighting grid that increases the illumination options and angles. Two hundred-ninety seats ring the stage — 40 more than in Manalapan — yet the back row of the center section is still only 29 feet from the stage.

Louis Tyrrell, Florida Stage producing director at the Kravis Center's Rinker Playhouse on Wednesday, July 14, 2010, in West Palm Beach. Photo by Bill Ingram/Palm Beach Post

“What’s not to like?,” asks producing director Louis Tyrrell, who turns 60 next month, but seems like a kid on Christmas morning as he
shows off the theater’s new digs. “The audience just has to experience this to get excited as well. People who are still sitting on the fence because they don’t like change, they’re going to come and fall in love with this.

“I cannot wait to start directing here,” he says. ‘We’ll be able to pull out the stops technically, in terms of creating the worlds of our season of plays.”

With a 30-foot ceiling, nearly two-and-a-half times higher than Florida Stage had previously, Tyrrell will be able to produce plays with two-level scenic needs and more epic works like Andrew Rosendorf’s Cane, a history of Florida’s water crisis, which will open the company’s subscription season in October.

But first there is Low Down Dirty Blues, a double entendre-filled songfest set in a Chicago night spot in the early morning hours, when blues artists congregate and jam.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the tug of Saturday night into Sunday morning,” says director and co-creator Randal Myler, who also assembled the Tony-nominated It Ain‘t Nothin’ But the Blues 11 years ago. “When the booze is flowing and it’s late at night, it’s low down dirty blues that people want to hear.

This allows them to shake their money-maker a little bit, you know what I mean?”

The show, which just completed a world premiere engagement at the Chicago area’s Northlight Theatre, features a cast of four renowned blues interpreters — Sandra Reaves-Phillips, Mississippi Charles Bevel, Gregory Porter and Felicia P. Fields. “We put them together and watch the fireworks go,” says Myler.

He particularly singles out Fields, who appeared on Broadway in the original cast of The Color Purple, as someone who can test the rafters of Florida Stage’s new home.

“With someone like Felicia, watch out. She may just wade out into the audience and embarrass a few people,” says Myler. “That might help loosen the building up a little bit.”

For Tyrrell, part of the motive to move is to reach a fresh audience in north county. “Just the demographics of the people in West Palm and Palm Beach Gardens is younger,” he says. “For our future, it is so important that we are able to reach out to provide people this new and different kind of theater experience than perhaps they’re used to.”

LOW DOWN DIRTY BLUES, Florida Stage at the Kravis, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Saturday through Sept. 5. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.