Kirmser Ponturo Group Launches Theatre Fund

Kirmser Ponturo Group announced today the formation of Kirmser Ponturo Fund.  The Fund was created to invest and support multiple theatrical productions across seasons. The Fund was conceived by Fran Kirmser and is helmed by Fran Kirmser and Tony Ponturo and made up of a group of limited partner investors including Quinvita Enterprises LLC.

This 2012-2013 Season, Kirmser Ponturo Fund is invested in plays Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Glengarry Glen Ross, as a limited partner producer.  The Fund is also represented in the musical Annie.

Kirmser Ponturo is the team that conceived, developed and produced sports plays Lombardi and Magic/Bird.

Ponturo, who also is a producer of the Tony Award winning musical Memphis, is one of sports and entertainment’s most innovative and successful marketers, leading the meteoric growth of Anheuser Bush for over 25 years until his return to New York in 2009 to pursue his joint passions of sports and theater.

Kirmser built a career working with artists developing their work to stage by producing, promoting, and fundraising for non-profit and commercial theater projects including the Tony Award winning musical revival Hair, August Wilson’s Radio Golf, and in 2002 launched The Biography Project, a series of non profit Off Broadway plays that told the stories of artists in an effort to recognize their voices, better archive their work and explore their influence on culture. 

Together they share a common vision that in this world of technology it is a particularly exciting time to attend the theater. Exciting and powerful to turn off all of the gadgets, and share a human and communal experience that is the theater. The two strive to support theater, build new, original plays and musicals and to build a wide, diverse audience of theatergoers, initially combining the drama of sports and entertainment through Kirmser Ponturo Group. Lombardi and Magic/Bird were the first two products of that vision. Kirmser Ponturo Fund hopes to continue further their mission.

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