February 21, 2010

The Civic's next move
Grand 1,000-seat theater could be showplace

By Keri Brenner
The Chronicle

     Major performing acts, statewide singing and dancing competitions, Broadway musicals and national acclaim could all be possible for The Dalles if the Civic Auditorium’s massive 1,000-seat theater were restored to its circa-1921 grandeur.
     That’s the dream behind a new campaign to find grants, donors, volunteers and all other types of community support to get the theater back on its feet. An estimated $3 million is needed to do a complete restoration on the otherwise acoustically superior performing venue.
     “It’s a wonderful facility that is not being used to its full potential,” said Dennis Morgan, board president of The Dalles Civic Auditorium Historical Preservation Committee. “We are really poised to go to the next level.”
     Board member Steve Lawrence said the committee has secured a $5,000 planning grant from Roseburg-based Ford Family Foundation to create a capital construction plan for the theater and a companion plan to show how The Dalles community will sustain operations for the long term.
     In addition, this month Lawrence is finishing up details for a 501 (c) (3) foundation that he hopes will secure $1 million in tax-exempt donations, bequests, matching grants and gifts to invest and generate interest income for running the theater as a viable business operation.
     “We’ve been told that if we ever build up the theater again that we’d never be able to sustain it,” Lawrence said. “I don’t believe that.”
     Instead, Lawrence said, he believes that if the Civic’s theater could be restored to accommodate large events, it would generate customers for area restaurants, hotels and other visitor services and “enhance the economy of the whole Columbia Gorge region.”
     Immediate plans call for hearings in late March to review prior citizen focus group findings about the future of the Civic. Also, a series of monthly fund-raising events will kick off March 13 with a “Crazy Hat Party,” featuring a marimba band, and “Night at the Opera” on May 22.
     “We’re also going to bring back the ‘Pig Roast Pigout’ in June,” Lawrence said. A beerfest featuring gorge microbrews and workshops on home-brewing is also planned for September.
     Morgan, a founding board member of the Theater Company of The Dalles, said the last show at the theater before the seats were removed to install sprinklers and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems was “The King and I” in 2000. Almost 700 people – or the entire main floor not including the balcony – came out to see “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1997, he added.
     The Civic’s theater is a building I feel very passionate about,” said Morgan, who has acted in and directed plays at the theater and did volunteer and paid construction work on the east wing of the Civic. “I love it.”
     Lawrence, an attorney who returned to The Dalles to retire in 2008 after almost 40 years in Portland, said he also has fond memories of the Civic when he was growing up in The Dalles.
     “When I was in high school, I used to go Friday nights to the kids’ night dance called ‘Harmony Hangout,’” he said. “We even had Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Kingsmen come and play for the dances.”
     An earlier fund-raising campaign where people purchased seats in the theater and had their names put on them was halted after the seats were removed and put in storage. Lawrence said he doesn’t want to sell any more seats until “I can promise that people will be able to sit in their seats sometime soon.”
     Other restoration work will include shoring up the theater balcony, removing view-killing poles on the main floor, and leveling out the grade at the theater entrance.
     Morgan said he and other theater supporters are seeking to renew community enthusiasm for the project after a messy accounting problem stalled Civic Auditorium restoration efforts in 2004. An estimated $37,000 discrepancy in accounting for an Oregon Housing and Community Services grant halted restoration on the east wing of the Civic until the committee raised enough money to pay OHCS back.
     After that, OHCS reinstated the remaining $165,000 of the grant so that the east wing restoration projects continued, but the public relations damage had been done, Morgan said.
     “The whole project got a black eye in the community,” Morgan said. “There was no intentional impropriety with the money – but the committee should have had more oversight.”
     Still left to do on the east wing of the Civic Auditorium is installing acoustic buffering in the ceiling of the gymnasium to muffle noise between the gym and the impressive ballroom upstairs. Once that buffering is in place — at an estimated cost of about $60,000 — the Civic will be able to hold simultaneous events in the gym and the ballroom, Lawrence said.
     “The ballroom, which holds 400 people, has one of only three floating dance floors in the West,” Lawrence said. “Two are in The Dalles — the other being the one at the Elks Lodge — and the third is in Portland at the Crystal Ballroom.”
Another key venue at the Civic is the smaller Fireside Room, which is used for acoustic music performances and rented out for group meetings and family events such as birthdays or anniversary dinners.
     In another initiative, Lawrence said he is talking with the American Legion and other veterans groups to see about holding regular veterans events at the Civic, such as veterans dinners held in the past. The Dalles is expecting to welcome back troops from Iraq in March and April, and Lawrence said he wants to set up a plan to offer them community support via Civic Auditorium gatherings
     “The Civic was built in 1921 to honor World War I veterans, and then later rededicated for all veterans,” he added. “I want to reinvigorate the connection to veterans.”
     But ultimately, although the east wing is already popular for gatherings and performances — generally something is booked there at least once a week, according to Lawrence — it is the Civic’s theater that captures people’s imagination in a big way.
     At one point, some citizens wanted to tear it down because of its disrepair. The city brought in experts, who disagreed, Lawrence said.
     “We had Angus Bowmer, founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, come here to assess the theater,” Lawrence said. “He said it should be rehabilitated; he said it should be saved.”
     Bowmer, who died in 1979, started the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1935 with a makeshift stage. The festival now has three performing venues, including one dedicated in 1970 as the Angus Bowmer Theatre.
     According to Lawrence: “Angus Bowmer said the acoustics at the Civic’s theater were some of the finest in the Northwest.”

On the Net:
www.thedallescivic.org