Nathan Meyers and his wife, Vicki Righettini, enjoy going to the theatre. Sometimes it’s Nathan who’s in the spotlight, but not on a regular theater stage.

Nathan’s venue is colder:  an ice arena.

He doesn’t play hockey. He’s an ice skater and an ice dancer.

Two days a week, usually around lunchtime, Meyers leaves his job in Wakefield, drives to Lexington, to the Hayden Recreation Centre rink, and sharpens his skating, both solo and with a partner.

Meyers, who is three years past 50, is a member of a team of 30 adult skaters who range in age from 23 to 59 that took gold in national and international competition earlier this month in a relatively new sport:  Theatre on Ice.

“Theatre on Ice is a form of competitive figure skating that is popular in Europe, where it is known as Ballet on Ice,” according to the US Figure Skating website which Meyers pulled up on his laptop during his interview.

His team, Imagica, is one of three teams fielded by the Skating Club of Boston. The team’s youngest skater just entered medical school, Meyers said. Some team members skated as kids, his said; others learned to skate as adults, as he did. One used to play hockey, he said.

Theatre on Ice includes two events, Meyers explained:  a two-minute choreographic exercise, where team members must express given themes, and a six-minute program with music, props, costumes and scenery.

“Like a play,” he said.

Imagica illustrated the themes of cascade, celebration and boldness with a program that recreated winter Olympic events, including skiing, bobsled and luge.

In the longer program, the team told a story involving a mischievous leprechaun and a pot of gold.

Europeans perform Theatre on Ice like ballet, Meyers said; Americans, like theater.

Meyers has been skating for 10 years. Before he moved east, when he lived in Oregon, in Portland, 10 years ago, he went to a mall that had an ice rink. The rink was near his home, and skating looked “interesting,” he said, as dreams of exercise danced in his head.

Some two decades earlier, his college campus was also near a mall with a skating rink. He’s been curious about learning to skate “for years” since then.

For a time, he just watched the skaters at the Portland rink. Once, he put on a pair of rental skates.

“They hurt,” he said.

The rink offered skating classes. Meyers started weekly group classes. He was unemployed at the time, after the “dot(com) bomb” in 2001, and the rink rate was “really good.”

So he skated every day, he said, in the summer of 2001.

About a year later, in the spring of 2002, Meyers got a job offer that brought him to the area. He and his wife have resided in Woburn since 2007.

When Meyers got the job offer here, he started to look for a rink in this area.

For a while, he skated at Burbank Arena in Reading.

This past fall, he became interested in ice dancing. That’s why he moved his skates to the Lexington rink. They have a good dance program there, he said, and his partner, Lisa Rockefeller, skates there.

Three years ago, he joined Imagica. Meyers was at a critical point as a skater:  the intersection, he said, where getting better meets getting older.

“I’ve been at this for 10 years now,” he said. “I want to get better at using my edges."

There’s a big difference between freestyle skating and ice dancing, Meyers said. “Freestyle is about tricks—jumps and spins. Dance is about edges, about skating.”

“Ice dancing is something you can do into old age.”

This year, Meyers was given a role in the Imagica production “with a bunch of dance steps and a partner.” He rehearses with the Imagica team on Sunday evenings at the Skating Club of Boston, in Brighton. The first year he skated with Imagica, he was a cowboy, he said, in a program with a Western theme.

Competitively, “a lot of golds started to appear” for Imagica in 2005, according to Meyers.

A year ago this week, Imagica won gold in the first international Theatre on Ice competition in France, he said, the Nation’s Cup. The team won gold in the second Nation’s Cup in April, in Hyannis.

To compete in this year’s Nation’s Cup, the team won a national competition in Ohio in 2010 and, this month, in Hyannis, qualified for the next Nation’s Cup in 2013, in Spain.

"That gives us two years to save up” to go and compete, Meyers said.

The popularity of the new sport is growing, according to Meyers, and the level of competition is rising, “getting better all the time.”

Meyers said he doesn’t get nervous about competing. He used to do theatre, he said. Before he goes out on the ice with his teammates, “I feel the energy,” he said, not the nerves.

He doesn’t generally talk about his avocation outside his circle of fellow skaters, he said. Too technical.

Looking forward a few months, Imagica will take the summer off, according to Meyers. The Lexington rink will close for the summer, too.

Meyers is already planning on where he'll keep skating, where his coach, Ron Kravette, will be teaching.