PlayhouseSquare, Cleveland's theater district, has won high praise from lofty arbiters such as The Wall Street Journal and the National Endowment for the Arts.

But although it has gorgeous historic buildings and draws a million visitors a year to roughly a thousand performances on 10 stages, it has never looked as lively and successful as it is said to be. Nor has it attracted the year-round street life it covets.

That’s why the nonprofit PlayhouseSquare Foundation plans to spend $16 million over the next year to pepper the district with bright new signs, gateway arches and digital displays, big and small.

The idea is not to mimic the glitz of Times Square in New York but to make the district’s artistic vitality visible day and night on its streets and sidewalks.

"All we really need to do is pull the inside out," said Danny Barnycz of Baltimore, the design consultant hired by PlayhouseSquare to devise the plan for the new lighting, signage and display panels.

“We’re incredibly excited about this project,” said Art Falco, president and CEO of PlayhouseSquare since 1991. “We believe it will be transformational.”

Signature elements of the plan include:

- A 24-foot-tall glass crystal chandelier that will hang over the intersection of Euclid Avenue and East 14th Street, echoing chandeliers inside the district’s historic theater lobbies.

- Four gateway signs in gold-colored aluminum that will span entry points to the district.

- A large “Playhouse Square” sign that will rise above the Cowell & Hubbard and Woolworth buildings at East 13th Street and Euclid Avenue.

- New lighting, seating walls and a fire pit will be added to Star Plaza, along with a 28-foot-tall digital display panel that will replace a bland, tubular steel sculpture that towers above the park. Star Plaza’s pavilion will serve food.

- Fresh architectural lighting that will show off details of historic buildings in the district, such as the 1922 Keith Building.

The goal of all the digital displays is not simply to promote PlayhouseSquare productions and generate ticket sales, but to pump artistic programming into the district’s public spaces, Barnycz said.

For example, art students from Cleveland State University could link to the display panels via Apple iPads and project billboard-size images of sketches made on the small, handheld screens.

Musical performers will also be able to access a new loudspeaker system in Star Plaza via simple computer hookups.

“Everything that’s being developed is to create a more dynamic environment,” Falco said. “That’s why [we have] the plug-and-play system on the stages.”

The new elements will replace the lighted vinyl banners PlayhouseSquare uses to promote shows inside its theaters. The now antiquated-looking video screens installed on the Hanna Building and the Wyndham Cleveland Hotel in 2001 will come down.

The Baltimore-based Barnycz Group has worked on large-scale digital displays around the world for locations in Times Square, the Dubai Mall and Chicago's Crown Fountain at Millennium Park.

For the hugely popular fountain in Chicago, Barnycz helped artist Jaume Plensa of Spain and the architecture firm of Krueck and Sexton create a pair of towers of light that project giant close-up images of people’s faces that appear to spit water.

Barnycz is hoping that at PlayhouseSquare, sold-out performances could be projected on screens outside the theaters for passersby to enjoy.

Falco said the project will be funded through a 60-40 private-public partnership. He said Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have both expressed a “firm commitment” to their shares, and that the remainder will be raised through philanthropic donations or naming rights.

Medical Mututal has committed a seven-figure sum for the project, which is enough to get started, Falco said. He said he’s confident he’ll raise the rest before the scheduled completion of work in April 2014.

Normally, PlayhouseSquare would have waited until it had all the money in hand before announcing such a project, but Falco said that the organization needed to go public now because it will soon seek approval for the project from the Cleveland City Planning Commission.

Construction on Star Plaza will start this summer, but Falco said the goal is to avoid disturbing the popular Labatt Blue Light concert series and Summer Excitement, a collection of concerts, fitness classes, outdoor movies and free lunches.

Civic activists, architects and PlayhouseSquare managers have dreamed for decades of adding glitter and outdoor vitality to the theater district. But none of those efforts seemed to get the job done.

Many theater patrons use a large garage nestled behind PlayhouseSquare’s main buildings and an overhead walkway to enter theater lobbies without setting foot on Euclid Avenue.

Architect Peter van Dijk, who devised plans that fueled a civic movement to save the PlayhouseSquare theaters from demolition in the 1970s, envisioned creating a gleaming “Museum of Light” in the district to give it a jolt of outdoor vitality.

In the early 1990s, planners Jane Thompson and Benjamin Wood of Boston envisioned improvements that led to the construction of Star Plaza, but their vision of sprinkling the district with billboards, rooftop spotlights and neon signs never came to pass.

In 2002, Cleveland Public Art, now LAND Studio, used Star Plaza as a delightfully creepy nesting spot for a trio giant bronze spiders sculpted by artist Louise Bourgeois, but the outdoor display was only temporary.

This time around, with Barnycz, PlayhouseSquare hopes finally to do the trick.

Falco said the outdoor project is part of a larger capital campaign for the theater district that will probably last five years, but he declined to give any other details.

He said the project will also boost efforts to attract more residents to live downtown, and to broaden PlayhouseSquare’s appeal as a destination for everyone including students from nearby Cleveland State University, which lacks the kind of entertainment strip often found in college and university towns.

Despite not having raised the dollars needed to pay for the new lighting and amenities, Falco said the project will be finished on schedule.

“When we announce something, we complete the project,” he said. “We have a very good track record of completing things, whether it’s a theater renovation or a redevelopment of properties.”