Theater revival
The floor is just gravel, the bathrooms don't have any fixtures and the walls are still covered in dirty orange paint, but in about another eight weeks all that will have changed.
Box seats will flank a balcony above hundreds of main-level seats, chandeliers will hang in the lobby and a new wooden stage will be in place. The Buskirk-Chumley Theatre (formerly the Indiana Theatre) will have come to life. And the Bloomington arts community, which has filled the Waldron Arts Center to capacity in the past six years, will have another vital performing arts venue.
Principal renovation of the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre should be finished by the end of February. A grand opening is now being planned for April.
About $300,000 is still needed for the Buskirk-Chumley project, said Frank Young, executive director of the Waldron Arts Center and one of the organizers of the renovation.
Donations of between $30,000 and $35,000 came in at the end of 1998, but more money is needed to pay down the debt the project has incurred.
The theater, owned by Nova and Harry Vonderschmitt, opened in 1922. It was used for small-scale vaudeville entertainment and movies. In 1933, the theater burned (smoke damage to the brick is still evident in some places). The theater was re-built after the fire and was used for movies by both the Vonderschmitt family and later the Springfield, Ill.-based Kerasotes chain, until 1995 when Kerasotes closed the building. The company later donated it to the Bloomington Area Arts Council.
Of the many donations that have come from the community for the renovation, a significant one came from the family of Roy Hays. Hays was the Indiana Theatre's first projectionist.
Another important donation to the renovation project came in December. The theater was renamed the Buskirk-Chumley in September in honor of two longtime Monroe County families. The Chumley children, who grew up in Bloomington, gave $600,000 toward the renovation. George Buskirk, a Bloomington founding father, was their great-great grandfather.
The total cost of the renovation is about $2.5 million. The new theater will seat about 600. On a tour of the theater earlier this week, Young pointed out the year's worth of work that has been done on the historic building.
"It's amazing for me to see the transformation of this," Young said, gesturing towards the old gray brick that has been partially replaced in the theater's basement. "This was all like this."
The contrast is stunning, said Young, who also oversaw the renovation of the Waldron, which opened as an arts center in 1992."This is twice the size of the Waldron in cost and the extent of the work," Young said.
With the help of old photographs, historic preservation consultants Cynthia Brubaker and Duncan Campbell are working to make the theater's design and decor as close to the original as possible. That means the laminated Art Deco-style wall decoration in the lobby will stay and the colors of the interior walls, seats and carpet will be in red tones that are as close to the original colors as possible.
"In the area surrounding the stage, you can began to see the decorative elements of what the stage will look like," Brubaker pointed out. "We've taken that from old photos. And with the balcony, we've used pictorial evidence to bring the wings out to actually have two rows of seats."
Sometimes, guesses have to be made, however."
There will be new, big chandeliers in the lobby here," said Don McMasters, chairman of the building and grounds committee for the restoration and a $25,000 donor to the project. "Nobody knows what the originals looked like, so we'll have to go with something that fits in."
Other work on the theater included:
Shoring up the balcony and other areas near the stage with new steel.
Adding a pit to make a deeper area on the side of the stage. This was necessary for there to be adequate depth to run the scenery and lighting up and down.
Tearing out the burlap fabric that covered the walls in the main theater area. "I think that fabric was on every movie theater in the country," Brubaker joked.
Changing the slope of the theater's seating area so that wheelchair users can more easily negotiate the theater.
Installing a double spring floor, with three-quarters of an inch of pine on top, on the stage. "It will probably be the best dance floor in town," Young said. "There is the potential to have a community ballet production.
"There were also, of course, a few snags along the way. The biggest one involved a slab of concrete that made the addition of an orchestra pit impossible. "There was nothing we could do about it," Young explained. "It would have been a quarter of the total cost of the project to replace that."
Features of the renovated theater include:
Adding box seats on either side of the balcony. Each side will hold between 12 and 14 seats.
Three dressing rooms, two general dressing rooms downstairs and a wheelchair accessible one upstairs. Each of the downstairs dressing rooms are designed to accommodate 12 people. "If we have a handicapped performer, they can have a stage-level dressing room that they will be able to get to unassisted that will have a bathroom and a couch or chair," Young said.
There will be a 12-foot extension on the end of the stage that can be deployed when the stage is being used by large groups or retracted when it is being used by smaller groups.
Upstairs and downstairs bathrooms.
A street entrance that leads to the back of theater so that performers won't have to go through the house to get to the stage or dressing rooms.
Office space upstairs.
The upstairs hallway will be used for a small art gallery. Rose Textillery gave money for that, Brubaker said.
The old Indiana Theater video store space that is east of the main theater will be used as a gallery and gift shop. The Waldron Arts Center's gift shop will be moved into this space.
The old Indiana Sweet Shop space will offer goodies once again as Schwab's Fudge of Nashville has agreed to lease the space.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Theater revival
