Gloria Estefan will open Foxwoods’ new theater next weekend.

KRT

The opening of a new venue next weekend marks Foxwoods’ entry into the big-name casino-entertainment game, which has been dominated in recent years by the Mohegan Sun, in Uncasville. But with its new venue, Foxwoods is thinking small — relatively.

The MGM Grand Theater will seat 4,000 people and host concerts, sporting events and off-Broadway shows. It opens with a three-night run of concerts by Gloria Estefan Friday through next Sunday.

The new venue is part of the MGM Grand building at Foxwoods, which includes a hotel, a spa, meeting rooms and several restaurants, one of which converts into a nightclub in the evenings. (Celebrity DJs such as Sky Nellor, DJ Skribble and Rhode Island’s own DJ Chachi will inaugurate the new room next weekend).

Gillian Murphy, senior vice president at Foxwoods and general manager of the MGM Grand, says that the idea behind the new facility was to bring a new demographic to the casino, which she says attracts 40,000 to 60,000 people a day.

“The idea was not to . . . [distribute] Foxwoods customers over a larger area,” Murphy says. They’re looking to bring in people who are roughly 24 to 50 years old, “youthful in what they like to do,” and Murphy says the MGM Grand and the acts that will come into it is comparable to the 5,000-seat Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Murphy speaks glowingly of the intimate nature of the MGM Grand Theater, a 4,000-seat venue in which, she says, no seat is more than 126 feet from the stage, and the lighting and sound will be excellent.

Bigger isn’t always better, she says, and the point is “to give the community other options than a Mohegan Sun arena. This is a different experience.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Paul Munick, senior vice president of sports and entertainment at Mohegan Sun, sees it differently.

“A 4,000-seat theater can be much more intimate than an arena,” he says, “but it can also limit what you can do, in terms of pricing and what you can get on the stage. . . . I think you’re not going to get all the acts that you really want to get.”

Munick, who worked for 18 years at Madison Square Garden, in New York, says that the arena can, and has, curtained off portions of the floor and changed the configuration of the stage for a different feel. The 10,000-capacity building has gone down to 1,500 for certain shows, he says. “It’s still a high ceiling, it’s not ‘intimate,’ but the fans are getting a lot closer to the act. Do we miss it? I’m not sure . . . sometimes I wish we had more seats. We’re not even considering” a venue along the lines of MGM Grand, he says.

Bringing a performer who can sell out a 10,000-seat arena into a 4,000-seat theater raises questions of ticket prices, Munick adds. How can you bring in the money you need from 40 percent as many seats as an arena, without charging exorbitant prices?

“I think it’s going to be competitive,” Murphy says. “Obviously, one’s looking at what one’s paying the performer,” as well as prices at other venues in the area. “A customer who’s looking for a theater experience, this is probably good value.”

She also mentions the free tickets that preferred gamblers will get, and implies that it will all even out in the end. “We have a different way of measuring the theater, rather than just cash ticket sales. It’s a casino world.”

One thing Murphy and Munick agree on, however, is that casinos’ future includes the kind of expansion into the entertainment business that MGM Grand represents. Murphy says that only 50,000 of the 2 million square feet of the MGM Grand tower is devoted to new gaming facilities.

“We’re looking at the non-gaming revenue opportunities,” Murphy says. When asked whether the shops, spas, restaurants and venues could turn Foxwoods into as much of a mall or a public square as a casino, she says “I would hope so, actually.”

“Some people just come here to walk around,” Munick says of Mohegan, which announced this week the next phase of Project Horizon, a tower with a hotel and a 1,500-seat House of Blues. “. . . They walk the place early in the morning like they walk their own neighborhood.” Foxwoods, he says, is still “from pure gaming numbers, bigger than we are. But that’s the blueprint for us: What else?”How many seats?

Mohegan Sun Arena: 10,000

Foxwoods’ MGM Grand Theater: 4,000

Providence Performing Arts Center: 3,100

Tweeter Center: 19,900

Dunkin Donuts Center: 9,000 to 10,000, depending on the stage setup