♪
Newberry is very well known. Not only on the national stage but
on the international stage for what it does. It's only four
hundred and twenty six seats that it that's a small house
compare to some of its contemporaries. The theatre was
built in Eighteen Eighty One. Newberry at the time was twenty
five hundred people. They decided to spend thirty thousand
dollars to build a multi purpose facility and it is of a
Victorian look. It's very brick, it's very heavy, It's got that
beautiful detail but it again it with multi purpose and a time
period where that was somewhat new. So downstairs, when they
finally opened the doors in Eighteen Eighty Two after
completing it was the jail, was the fire house, was the
courthouse, was the city council chambers. It was thriving and
bustling and upstairs was the opera house. So after a five
million dollar restoration and it really wasn't a restoration,
it was a rehab. Let's bring her up, let's bring this old woman
up to to really show her personality in the modern age.
We got the lobby, we had this space up here. Which we
reconfigured to be more of the original Eighteen Eighty,
Eighteen Eighty Two look and we started having world
class events, just like we had. Our facility is small. Our stage
is small but we get major acts. We have
Wynton Marsalis coming up from the Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra. That's huge and that's because were known on the
world stage. We have had Willie Nelson as we talked about. We've
had, we have Jane Lynch coming up
from Glee. People know about us. We've had our own stars
from the ballet guilds and from the schools. Those are stars
that are born here, too. So this building has become more
of a community center in the last twenty years, twenty one
years. That it really was when it opened in Eighteen Eighty
Two. Why are these performances
important historic theaters? Because historic theaters are
the repositories for memories and emotions that have happened
time and time again. There's this thread, that is woven
between the generations and that's what historic theaters
do. They provide the backdrop for an amazing tapestry of
emotions of experiences. It's a performance. It's going home and
talking about it and having that adrenaline rush.
That's what historic theaters do.
♪
There's a lot that theater
accomplishes beyond just being an entertainment for an
audience. It's the only artform that really connects the actors
to the audience. The doors of the Abbeville Opera
House opened on October Tenth, Nineteen Oh Eight and at that
time a lot of road companies were coming out of New York
City and one of the most popular tours for the Vaudeville circuit
was from New York to Richmond, Virginia and then from Richmond
on to Atlanta. So from the Eighteen Eighties on, ever major
road company was coming through Abbeville
on the way to performing in Atlanta and the community
decided, if we had a theater facility here we could sponsor
a lot of these New York shows. So they wrote to New York to the
Keith circuit, which is one of the popular Vaudeville circuits
at the time and told them about what they were thinking about
the Keith circuit sent them the ground plans to a theater,
where a lot of Vaudeville shows were produced and eight years
later, the historic Abbeville Opera House opened its doors.
The Abbeville Opera House though, will remind you of a lot
of the Broadway theaters that you see in Manhattan to this
day. It's seventy five feet to our
grid. Another twenty five or thirty feet to the ceiling. So
this wonderful seventy eight hundred square foot stage back
there. When you add that together and consider that that
stage floor is on the second floor and we have a costume and
storage area beneath the stage floor. That makes our back wall
one of the largest freestanding brick walls left in the country.
The Abbeville Opera House was first restored to its original
turn of the century condition way back in Nineteen Sixty
Eight. An it paved the way for the restoration and the
revitalization of the entire Abbeville county. About eighty
five percent of our attendance comes not just from outside
Abbeville, but outside the state of South Carolina as well.
We have tour buses from North and South Carolina, Georgia
Florida, Tennessee who come here on a regular basis to see many
different shows here that we do at the Abbeville Opera House.
It means so much. I mean as
long as it's been here in the entertainment and the way it's
affected the community, and drawn people from all over the
upstate counties, we need to keep it going. The creativity,
watching the play come together, watching everything form, it's
just a wonderful experience. And you bond with the cast members.
It's a great time. To sit in the audience and
watch a show here, you're actually part, the actors on the
stage and the audience. The interaction between them in a
theater this size is just amazing. It's really something
to watch. People have been coming to this spot for almost
three hundred years to have performances, musicals and
chamber music. The first theater in America was built on this
site in Seventeen Thirty Six. It was called the Dock Street
Theatre and it opened with the recruiting officer, which is the
first play in America and then it disappears. Probably burned
down. We don't know exactly what happened to it. They built
a hotel on the site about Eighteen Hundred and in
the Nineteen Thirties the WPA, a Federal works project, took
over the building and inside of the shell of the old hotel they
built a new theater called the new Dock Street Theatre,
which opened in Nineteen Thirty Seven. Although they made it
look like a theater, that was built in Seventeen Thirty Six.
They gutted the hotel
room area, which is what we're sitting in now and then rebuilt
a seventeen hundred theater in it's
place. Four hundred sixty odd seating.
When I give a tour in here, I will seat my visitors behind me
here in the in the balcony and I'll stand
in box "O," which is up right here on the stage but I
can actually speak in a normal voice in that box and they can
hear every word I say. Which is a very great tribute
to the men and women who designed this building.
"Pay up or move out." We've been performing here for
forty years. Actually the very first production was a
production of a Christmas Carol back in Nineteen Seventy Eight.
We produce that show about every other year. In fact
this year's our twenty first Christmas Carol,
as well. We get to tell many of the stories of our
own community in our own state. We've had original plays like
"The Seat of Justice" which is about the Briggs vs Elliott
case. We did a play called "Gershwin At Folly,"
which is about Gershwin writing "Porgy and Bess." So we try not
only to bring plays from New York and around the country but
to tell our own stories as well. We have many homes in Charleston
that people walk through you know you go through as a tourist
these beautiful homes. ineffective museums. This is not
a museum. This is a live building. And the men and women
in here that are part of it. The men and woman on the stage, all
the people in the audience,it's an interactive piece. To
see it here live with human beings on the stage, there's a
magnetism, there's a dynamics
you can feel it when you walk out the door.