Salt Lake County unveils new style in downtown’s historic theater
Grande Dame’s $6 million makeover is just first step in the city’s ongoing cultural opera.
By Ellen Fagg Weist - The Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/entertainment2/57163805-223/theater-capitol-building-says.html.csp
(Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune) After six months of renovation, the Capitol Theatre (now called the Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre) will be opening for the first Nutcracker performance on Dec. 6.
After a six-month intermission, a remodeled Capitol Theatre will open this week for its next act.
"She’s a grand woman," says Shar Quinney, who only uses female pronouns to refer to the newly renamed Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre building. "I’ve been in theaters all over the world, in some of the grandest and beautiful theaters, and she holds up."
The $6 million renovation is the first phase of a $33.4 million project that includes the construction of the adjacent Jesse E. Quinney Ballet Centre, scheduled to open in October 2014. "In the long run, it’s kind of a minor remodel in terms of what’s going to happen next," says Larry Holder, the theater’s head electrician...
New finishes on historic bones »
As Ballet West opens its 50th-anniversary run of "The Nutcracker," you’ll enter the theater through a newly carpeted, expanded lobby, with reconfigured spaces for the box office and patron services. A temporary concessions area will be in place until the new building opens.
Designers wove contemporary touches into the historic building, and historic influences into the design of the new building, says Emir Tursic, HKS vice president.
In the house, you’ll be guided to your seats with new aisle lighting before settling into newly upholstered seats — dressed in Champagne Currant crushed velvet — complete with cushions that have lumbar support.
"Immediately noticeable," says Melinda Cavallaro, associate division director for the county’s Center for the Arts.
"The seats are exquisite," adds Shar Quinney, who was head of Ballet West’s capital campaign.
As the show begins, dancers will be performing on a stage that was raised 6 inches to offer better sightlines. And you should be able to hear the orchestra better, thanks to a system of "adjustable acoustics" that allows sound to be projected differently for different performances, says consultant C. Russell Todd, of Akustiks a Norwalk, Conn., company.
You probably won’t notice how the room is tuned, with new acoustic panels in the orchestra pit, on the pit’s railings and under the box seats in the theater, which can be set differently for ballet, opera, or jazz or Broadway shows. For example, the ballet requires more natural sound, with more of the orchestra’s sound projected into the audience, while for operas, the sound of the pit musicians has to be balanced so it doesn’t overpower the singers onstage.
In addition, groups of musicians, such as the string section, can be positioned at different elevations on pit lifts to help balance the way their sound is projected into the house.
"The main change people will notice in the house is that we’ve dramatically reduced the mechanical system noise, particularly up in the balcony," Todd says. That’s thanks to new heating and cooling systems, which are different for the front and the back of the house — so it will be easier to keep the temperature for dancers near 72 degrees, as required by the performers’ union contract. "That’s always been a challenge in a 100-year-old theater," Currey says.
How the pit will be configured for opera performances
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New orchestra pit rail panels will be closed — or “reflective” — to strike a balance between stage performers and musicians.
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New adjustable rear wall panels in the pit will be set to “absorptive.”
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Two new orchestra pit lifts will be raised in a stepped configuration, but positioned at a slightly lower elevation than the ballet setting, to balance sound between the orchestra and singers.
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New theater side panels will be opened to balance the sound of singers and orchestra players and to project out into the audience the sound of the singers. “We love the clarity coming out of the pit,” says Utah Opera artistic director Christopher McBeth, who attended the tuning session. In addition, musicians say they can hear themselves and their colleagues “1,000 times better.”
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