Lyric Theatre has long story to tell
The streets of Logan are a fascinating view. Each building has a story, a transitive narrative of what they were, are and will be. One such building, located on Center Street just west of Main, has had a recent mishap in its colorful history.
According to Dennis Hassan, the current artistic director of the Old Lyric Repertory Theatre, The Caine Lyric Theatre was established in 1913. The building was built in the 1880s but had served as banking offices and a publishing house of the Utah Herald. It was transformed into a theatre because of the needs of the Thatcher Opera company when their theatre, the Thatcher Opera house, had burned down the previous year and they saw the building as a temporary performance space while the new stage, the Ellen Eccles Theatre, was being built.
Hassan said over the course of 10 years, the Thatcher Company performed in the Lyric until the Eccles’ construction was complete. During that time, the Lyric became the most reputable theatre ticket in the region.
“It really became the place that took care of the theatre community in Logan,” Hassan said. “It’s one of the oldest buildings in town and the facade of it has changed several times over the years to suit its purpose.”
Hassan said after the Eccles Theatre was finished, the focus shifted away from the Lyric and it was eventually transformed by other businesses. It became a movie theatre and had a large movie marquee attached to the front of it by the 1960s, when business took a turn for the worse and the space was scheduled to become bowling alley. At that time, W. Vosco Call purchased the building and adapted it once more to a space for staged theatre. Hassan said Call recently received an award from the Old Lyric Repertory Company for his lifetime contributions to the establishment.
According to the Caine College of the Arts website, Call opened the theatre in 1961 with a production of “Hamlet” in which he played the title role. A few years later, he began the summer repertory theatre, now known as the Old Lyric Repertory Company. In addition, Call helped establish an endowment fund for the company and began to engage the first professional equity actors to work with young students.
Since Call’s renovation of the Lyric in 1961, it has come under the control of the university and has many close ties to the arts departments here on campus.
Jarrod Larsen, director of Production Services for the Caine College of the Arts said with all of the different transformations the building has undergone, it’s hard to know how old certain elements of the construction are. This is where certain difficulties have recently come into play. As of August 2010, Larsen said the Caine Lyric Theatre’s rigging system was condemned by safety inspectors; the stressed state of the rigging components and the outdated system itself were deemed too dangerous to remain installed.
“As the engineer was discussing the shape of the space to us he explained that he felt the environmental load, or the load the building takes just as existing as a building, was fine, the building would be able to support itself safely without a problem,” said Larsen. “The rigging load was considered an immediate threat to life; so much so that he moved the meeting off the stage so we could all be safe.”
Hassan said the inspector was up in the rafters over the stage taking pictures of when he got to the beams of the fly system, saw how bad the situation was and how twisted and warped they were, and took pictures and ran off of the stage, they were so compromised.
“The next day we ripped out all of the lighting instruments, the ropes, beams and pulleys and essentially gutted the whole system in a couple of days, leaving an empty shell over the stage itself,” Hassan said.
Hassan said this particular removal and replacement of the system is not going to hinder the quality of the Lyric’s productions, in the short term. It may get in the way of design and logistics within any one production, but the audience will probably have a hard time noticing if the designers do their job well. The concern for the replacement is in the perspective of the long term needs of the Lyric. They can make do for a while without the proper system in place, but not long.
“Survival of the lyric is going to depend on a lot of sponsorship from the government, community, university … .” Hassan said. “Everyone putting in a little is what is going to make it survive. With the economic downturn we took a great loss, like many others, and with the proper support we should be able to recover.”
Larsen said they will accept anything they can.
“It works really well for what we need; intimate performances of good theatre. There are 380 seats, all of which are close to the stage so that the audience is right up there with the actors or singers. It really is something quite important for us to fix and we’ll be doing all we can to make that happen,” Larsen said.
– jess.wallace@aggiemail.usu.edu