What's behind the curtain at the city's theater jewel?
The historic Tivoli Theatre is without a doubt the crown jewel of Chattanooga’s performance spaces. Nestled in the heart of downtown in the 700 block of Broad Street, the city’s most beautiful venue hosts a variety of musicals, operas, ballets, symphonies, concerts, comedy events, and more.
The space is maintained by The Tivoli Theater Foundation, which was created by Mayor Andy Berke back in 2015 to preserve it, along with the Walker Theater and Memorial Auditorium.
Built in 1921 by Reuben H. Hunt with an interior decorated by Rapp & Rapp out of New York, the Tivoli is a rare gem. It might be more beautiful from the stage than from the seats, and a lot of performers and sound engineers love it because of the sound.
It is a “short throw” theatre, with cylindrical alcoves at the front and a dome at top designed to push the sound back. The house has great acoustics, and sound reinforcement speakers in back of the seating area for certain shows.
In addition to being crucial for local culture, the Tivoli has a massive economic impact on the city. The financial effects of the events are widespread, benefiting employees of the theater, performers and employees of the various productions, restaurants and hotels who get business from theater patrons, and a milieu of others, like people who print ads, and make signage, television, newspaper and radio ads.
The space creates a lot of jobs in town, one of the most interesting of which is that of technical director James Durham.
James oversees almost everything behind the scenes at the theatre, and does lighting design for symphony concerts. The backstage is an enormous space with 65ft ceilings which is mostly occupied by the grid. The grid is essentially a huge metal rack with holes for cables and ropes to go through. It is used to bring up and attach steel rigging, set pieces, lights, speaker systems, and anything else that needs to be hung for productions. A 96 step spiral staircase gives access to this and the fly system, which is used to raise and lower the curtains.
“The curtains allow us to mask the sides and control how deep the stage area is,” James explains. “There is a lot of weight on each curtain, and each is raised and lowered by hand. To do this, we use stage weights of different sizes that fit into slots to counterbalance them. It takes twice the weight to counterbalance each curtain, so for a 500-pound curtain you would need a thousand pounds to move it. This takes a specialized person.”
The side stage curtain that masks the backstage is called a leg. When a performer goes on stage, passing the leg curtain, that is called “breaking a leg.”
“Many stage terms come from sailors, because these men often found work as theater employees,” James elaborates, sharing his knowledge of theatre nomenclature. “Sailors has the perfect skill set to accomplish the rigging. Before they had counterbalanced metal weights, they would use sandbags as counterbalances and their own body weight, climbing over each other to raise and lower equipment and curtains.”
Just like on a boat, in backstage terms, “bring the curtain in” means lower it, and “bring it out” means raise it. “Stage left” is to the left if you’re facing the audience, “stage right” is to the right, “stage down” is closer to the audience, and “up stage” is away from the audience.
“This is because in early theaters, the stage was inclined, literally going up in back to increase visibility,” James notes.
The stage at the Tivoli is perfectly level, allowing it to accommodate the orchestra shell. This monstrous sound engineering marvel is 21 foot tall and very heavy, made of a series of 6 foot wide sections on casters. When assembled, it amplifies and focuses the sound of the orchestra.
The theatre works a lot with the symphony, who rents it out as a rehearsal space, and has a storage area in the next building. The amount of staff needed to operate the backstage varies between shows, but on average just four people can handle the symphony.
For other shows, that number goes up, when the skills of a monitor engineer, front-of-house sound engineer, lighting director, spotlight operator, etc. are needed. For an opera, there might be twenty or more people involved in the production; set and wardrobe designers, hair stylists, makeup artists, stage managers, directors, and choreographers.
“Everybody who works back here is specialized in their fields, and all of them are an important part of Chattanooga,” James sums it up.