Capitol Centre set to celebrate silver anniversary

With files from Patrick Roy/Special to BayToday.ca.

From Harry Belafonte to Tom Jones, from Howie Mandel to Andrea Martin, from Saturday Night Fever to Bye Bye Birdie, for the last 25 years the North Bay Capitol Center has been delivering the best entertainment the world has to offer.

As the Capitol Centre heads into a weekend full of celebrations to mark the quarter century milestone, staff and board members are also reminded it hasn’t been an easy road to travel.

Like any arts organization the Capitol Centre faces insurmountable challenges filing a season with top notch shows the public will want to see while meeting budget constraints.

Technical Director Mike Glussich, who has been with the centre 16 years, says one of the biggest challenges to keeping the Capital Center open is filling the seats.

“It’s like anything else it’s clientele,” he tells BayToday.

“You want to put on a product that you’re going to have the most patrons for so one of the things is that you don’t want to (do is) throw a party and have nobody show up.”

“So we’ve sculpted and programmed our seasons to be as open and popular as we possibly can.”

Other challenges audience members never see are on the technical level.

The old theatre full of charm and character gives Glussich a run for his money on a regular basis.

With no wing space to move and or store set pieces off stage, the size of the wings also prove to be a challenge for the crew to mount big Broadway Musical productions, in fact the staff at times have utilized the parking lot at times even setting up tents to accommodate the need for space.

“Our backstage space is about 50 percent of our on stage space … you compare that to any theater that was built after 1970, their backstage space is about 200 percent of their on stage space because they have to accommodate for all these huge set pieces. So having no backstage space really limits us in what we can bring on.”

“If I could do anything in that theater, I’d knock out both side walls and make it another 50 feet longer. Just so I could put on the larger shows and put on all the content that I could.”

So far this season shows have been relatively easy to load in and out but all of that is about to change when Riverdance arrives this Saturday for two shows, Glussich has been scouting the building for weeks looking at how they are going to utilize every corner of the building in order to fit the enormous production.

“This is going to be one of the largest challenges to put into this theater,” he says.

“It is by far the largest show technically as far as the volume of equipment that we have to bring in. This is a show that’s designed for arenas.”

“We’re using parts of this building the theater never uses. We have to create dressing rooms in other parts of the building just because of the stunning amount of costumes they have. Two of their trucks so 110 feet of their trucks are just costumes. So that’s massive.”

“These are shows that this building was never... when they first built it and said we’re going to put on shows back in 1926, this show was out of their scope of vision to try and put on something of this size so it’s going to be challenging. It’s going to be a very long day but at the end of the day you’re going to have a great show on stage which is the important thing.”



He also notes that for the past 25 years the Capitol Centre has been and excellent training ground for technicians turning out superb backstage talent, but as their talent grows so too does their want to go off to bigger and more challenging markets.

“There’s no other theaters for us to draw crews from … It’s not like being in Toronto where you have a labour body that transfers between so many different venues.”

“I’ve had technicians that have graduated to Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and then the challenge is to find someone else to fill that position and train them as fast as you can and as comprehensively as you can, so they can do as good a job as we expect them to do and as good a job as our patrons expect.”

Glussich says regardless the size of challenge when the lights dim, a hush falls over the audience and the curtain goes up he knows all the issues of the day were worth every second of panic he and the crew faced.

“One of the things that never gets old for me is being backstage and looking at the audience and just seeing 400 people, 500 people 1000 people enraptured by what’s happening on stage and knowing that you made that happen.”

“You know (you are) behind the scenes still but you did something that focused 1000 people in a theater on a stage and they’re enjoying it. One hopes they’re enjoying it but their attention is there.”

“When I was working at Stratford, the technicians there said ‘It’s great to be able to build a dream.’ Because that’s what we do … we build something for the day and it’s a dream to a certain extent and then the dream goes away.”

“But just to see those people’s faces just looking all in one direction at a singer or an actor or even a movie and going -- I helped make that happen … that’s a nice feeling to have.”

Marketing and Administration Coordinator Heather Johnston encourages everyone to get involved with the celebrations starting this Friday, March the 30th.

Celebrations kick off Friday morning with a live broadcast from the Capitol Centre with the Fox’s Mitch & Vicki followed at 11:00am with the theatre and volunteer garden dedication to Betty Speers and other volunteer leaders who were the driving force in establishing the centre 25 years ago and rounding out the day will be a free hip hop showcase at 7:30pm.

“The SuperNaturalz crew from Toronto are coming up.”

“To accompany this occasion there will also be historical tours, we’ll be showing a film, light lunch will be served as well. And then on April 1st there’s going to be a $5 concert which is the Northern Voices showcase that has five local bands.”

Visit capitolcentre.org for full details.