“We've got right much more room here,” said Thalian Hall executive director Tony Rivenbark, showing a visitor through the facility's newly expanded offices. “But we're still living in a state of chaos.”
Not for much longer.
With grand reopening galas scheduled for May 14-15 to be followed by a series of public events, the historic and revered Wilmington theater built in 1858 was buzzing with activity last week, as it has since its main stage was closed for renovations at the end of September. As laborers finished up work on the $3.6 million project – painting, installing carpets and rebuilding the bathrooms, among a dozen or more other tasks – Rivenbark moved between Thalian's three floors, overseeing it all.
“1999 is when we began the planning for this,” Rivenbark said.
While giving his visitor a tour, one of the first things Rivenbark showed off was a line of skyward-facing windows above the stairs leading to the balcony. The windows delineate the original stage house, the exterior wall of which has been on the inside of the building since Thalian's 1990 expansion, from the lobby.
“We tried to give a better feeling for the fact that you're going into an older building and this is a newer lobby,” Rivenbark said. “But the real work is inside the auditorium.”
Passing through an area with a revamped box office and concessions booth, whose locations have been switched in an effort to create better patron flow through the lobby, Rivenbark came to the newly created “idea of a portico” that now marks the entrance to the main stage.
Inside, newly installed seats await under plastic covers. They're comfortable, with considerably more legroom than in the previous seating arrangement, which caused patrons to squirm, making the 35-year-old seats squeak. Watching a movie or play at Thalian Hall in recent years was rarely a comfortable, or quiet, affair.
A new seating configuration has dropped Thalian's capacity from 675 to 645. (One hundred of those seats are in the third-tier “gallery” area, which is seeing minimal renovation and is used for overflow seating.) Most of the 30 seats that have been lost are in the second-floor balcony, Rivenbark said, but he contends that the new arrangement makes for more “good seats” in the center sections.
Another improvement is the new hydraulic orchestra pit lift, the excavation for which sparked headlines in December when human bones, possibly from a 17th-century burying ground, were found beneath Thalian.
The pit lift, which Rivenbark calls “a stunning piece of equipment,” makes the stage more flexible. In its fully raised position it's a stage extension; when fully lowered, it's an orchestra pit. And while the lift isn't designed for use during productions, it can be fixed in any position, creating, say, a level between the stage and the floor, if that's what a particular production calls for.
Elsewhere in the auditorium, Wilmington artists and artisans John Sharkey and Chappy Valente finished up decorative painting work on the balcony's iron support posts, baseboards and a few other places. If you stand at the base of the stage and look straight up, you can see a “sky,” adorned with clouds and cherubs, the duo painted on the ceiling behind the proscenium arch.
These once-in-a-generation renovations to one of Wilmington's most significant buildings are Thalian Hall's first in 20 years.
That renovation, completed in 1990, closed the entire theater for nearly two years. This time around Thalian's staff was able to use the studio theater for movie screenings, and they moved the Main Attractions performance series into the ballroom, which is also used for Wilmington City Council meetings. (Thalian Hall and Wilmington City Hall are in the same building.)
The '90 renovation was mainly focused on the stage house itself and an expansion that included the current lobby. Very little was done to the main stage space at that time, and the current renovation “is really finishing up the work that began in '75,” Rivenbark said, when Thalian had to be restored after a fire damaged the theater.
Funding for the 1990 project fell short, so “some of the things we're doing (now) were planned in 1990,” Rivenbark said, including the construction of a new, energy-efficient main entrance and, perhaps most grandly, the installation of a $75,000 chandelier designed to look as if it dates from the mid-19th century.
The chandelier, which arrived last week and will likely be installed sometime this week, is a nod to history; a chandelier formerly hung in the main stage space.
As of last week, Rivenbark and Cole Marquis, who is Thalian Hall's production manager, were still waiting on the arrival of new sound and light boards, as well as on new spotlights and “top of the line, brand-new JBL speakers” that just came out earlier this year, Marquis said.
A new lighting plot and better equipment will add more lighting positions, said house technician Dallas LaFon, who also designs lights for several Wilmington theater companies.
Keeping Thalian Hall a state-of-the-art facility while paying homage to its past has been a lifetime mission of sorts for Rivenbark, a Duplin County native whose first experiences with the building came when he was a student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the mid-1960s. He's been Thalian Hall's executive director for more than 30 years and has spent at least half of them planning one renovation project or another.
A plan still exists to add a new, 200- to 300-seat theater to Thalian Hall that would fill what is now a parking lot adjacent to North Fourth Street. But considering the difficulty of raising money for the current renovation – the project was delayed several times – the future expansion of Thalian Hall remains, for now, an ambitious idea.
“It's all planned and permitted, so we've not thrown out the idea of expanding the theater,” Rivenbark said. “But we're getting through this section first. I'm not planning to start on that next week.”
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