New theater

Last Saturday we went to the open house for the new Harmon Center for the Arts downtown across from the Verizon Center. The Harmon Center is the new second venue for the Shakespeare Theater Company. The company will continue to operate its original theater a block or two away, so they'll have two places for shows. The old theater holds about 450 and the new theater seats about 750.

The new facility is an office building that's been gutted and completely redone to include the new theater, performance space, concessions, patrons' lounge, box office, office space, and gift shop. The upper floors of the building are traditional office space for outside entities. The architectural design opened the building facade to the street and added a series of cantilevered floors that create more space overhanging the sidewalk, then enclosed it with a glass wall so the entire three floors of the theater lobby will be visible to the street.

I took a few photos inside the new theater, but as they were having a constant series of free performances during the day, flash was prohibited, so you'll have to deal with a little bit of blurriness from me trying to hold the camera still in a dark auditorium.



Above is a photo of the stage. It's rather open with no proscenium or curtain—part of the unfortunate modern trend in theater design to eliminate the "distance" between the action and the audience in an attempt to make live theater more "relevant" (whatever that means). In the second photo, you can see the fly space, which really isn't a fly space, as the lights and things are just hanging there out in the open.



Next is a view of the house. The lower level actually has two levels, but I was standing on the side about midway, so you can see the lower seats, which are on a flatter floor. The balcony up above is quite steeply banked; you can see that in the second photo, taken from the back row of the balcony. The view of the stage from the balcony is actually quite good.

Brian was very excited about the new theater facility, since he is considering applying for a year long internship with the company for after he finishes his technical theater degree at Dartmouth next June.