Citi Performing Arts Center plans to reopen Colonial Theatre

By Laura Collins-Hughes, Globe Staff

The Colonial Theatre on Boylston Street.

The Citi Performing Arts Center, which already operates the Wang and Shubert theaters, plans to add another member to its downtown family: the 110-year-old Colonial Theatre, which has been dark since July.

Under the terms of a deal whose final details are still being worked out, the Citi Performing Arts Center would take over the Colonial on July 1, 2012. It would lease the property from Emerson College and program it in tandem with Broadway in Boston, whose management of the Colonial ended last month with the expiration of a 10-year lease it had wanted to renew. The theater closed after failed negotiations between Emerson College and Broadway in Boston.

The agreement on a new three-year lease is “99 percent done,” said Josiah A. Spaulding Jr., the Citi Center’s president and CEO, who called the three-way partnership with Emerson and Broadway in Boston “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”