When I first started photographing for Zach Theatre we called it, Zachary Scott Theater (named after a Hollywood actor) and it consisted of two pretty small, brick buildings each of which had smallish theater spaces. One seated about 150 while the other one, in a pinch might seat 180.
Right in the middle of the economic downturn the board of Zach Theatre embarked on a capital campaign aimed at building a first class performance space, complete with a "fly tower" and stage trap doors as well as (my favorite) two spacious bars, one on each level.
The theater design followed one production which was done in a refurbished musical hall. The sound in that rented space was atrocious even though it was supposedly built from the ground up as a performance space. The board learned just how important sound quality in a space is and spared no expense to make the Topfer Stage one of the best sounding auditoriums I have ever worked in or seen a live performance in. It absolutely blows away the main theater at the UT campus, the 2500 seat Bass Concert Hall.
Lately, the area around the theatre complex has become my beginning and end point for my walks around downtown. Mostly because of the parking and the free bathrooms (yes, I have a name badge....).
Just thought you'd want to see an exterior shot of a place in which I spend a lot of time and energy working with cameras, lenses and actors.
4 comments:
Zach Theater must be an amazing place. Not just for the size, quality, and complexity of its physical plant, but also for the endless stream of new productions it undertakes and the work it provides for actors, musicians, and other creative types.
Want one of those Xth-degree-of-separation stories? When I was a little kid going to the Saturday morning movies (the weekly ritual form of entertainment for children in the pre-TV era) I knew of Zachary Scott as an actor in Westerns. It was a brief phase in his career. At the same time, my mother was a friend of Elaine Steinbeck, widow of author John Steinbeck. Had I known when tagging along to visits in Elaine’s New York apartment that she was also the ex-wife of Zachary Scott the very young me would have been very much impressed. The guy with a six gun and a horse would have outranked just one more writer by an order of magnitude.
Zach Theatre is a very interesting and wonderful place and it's grown up well. We're producing Terence McNally's latest play and the director and Mr. McNally are re-writing and re-working it right up until opening night on the 20th. We have four buildings on the campus, one is a huge rehearsal space (which used to be Austin's biggest bike shop) and also house a full prop and scene shop with an industrial scale wood shop and painting facility. The administration building houses the original theater which is "in the round" (but square) as well as one of the two costume shops and all the marketing, sales and management offices. This theater and one in an adjoining building (which is theater only) get a lot of kids plays. We provide children's plays during the school year, on an extreme sliding scale and serve about 55,000 Austin kids per school year. In the Summer we have drama camps as well as dance and music for kids from kindergarten through high school.
The new, Topfer stage cost $24,000,000 to have designed and built and we raised the money during the great recession. The building has a big lobby with bars upstairs and down. Audience members can bring their drinks into the theater if the drink cups have lids on them and straws to drink with. The theater seats about 440 and there is not a bad seat in the entire house.
Downstairs are dressing rooms, break rooms, a green room, a full costume shop and a full make up shop. The HVAC is physically separated from the auditorium to kill noise and vibration. It's really a first class facility and one of the few regional theaters that adopted LED stage lighting early on.
The audio engineer is amazing and uses the latest wireless microphones and support gear. We can mike up to 50 actors on separate channels and we're talking gear like Lectrosonics and Countryman.
We've been a launch facility for Anna DeVere Smith's (recipient, MacAuthur Genius Grant) new work as well as Suzan-Lori Parks (Pulitzer prize winner) and Terence McNally (Five time Tony award winner). Our Artistic Director, Dave Steakley is recognized in theater circles as one of the most innovative theater directors in the U.S. working today.
I'm proud to have played a part in moving theater forward in Austin by providing free photography when budgets were tight and discounted fees now that we're finally on everyone's radar. I still support the kids programs with donations of time, gear and photos. it's fun to be part of a very big and very talented second family. Theater shows us what it is to be alive and part of a community.
They didn't think about installing a thunder machine, did they? When a rather old theatre in England was being renovated (I *think* it was the Bristol Old Vic, but I could be wrong), they exposed these long, wooden troughs. It turned out that in the distant past, canonballs of different sizes were rolled along these to produce the sound of thunder as they rumbled down. Rather than ripping them out, they renovated them and used them in at least one modern production (presumably after a lengthy health and safety process).
Zachary Scott usually played cads, alternating with George Sanders. So you're not going to tell us how he got a major regional theater named after him?
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