Happy Birthday dear Opera House
On Wednesday, you can do what Bill Cosby, Bob Hope, Ray Charles, Neil Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Jack Benny, Itzhak Perlman, Van Cliburn and Jerry Seinfeld have all done before you:
Hang out at the Spokane Opera House.
The Opera House is celebrating its 30th birthday on Wednesday with an open house from 5 to 8 p.m. Admission is free, and guests can show up anytime during those hours.
The first 3,000 guests will receive free 30th birthday lapel pins. Everybody will get birthday cake, refreshments, backstage tours and a variety of entertainment, both live and recorded.
The Spokane Symphony will provide a brass quintet. A 30-minute movie showing taped highlights of past touring Broadway musicals will run continuously in the main auditorium. Every 30 minutes, a prize raffle will be held.
You also can check out the dressing rooms where legends like Carol Channing, Jerry Lewis, Robert Goulet and Marie Osmond (well, maybe they’re not all legends) donned their Broadway makeup. And you can tour The Tunnel – an underground passage leading to the Music Room, used for discreetly shuttling stars and VIPs (including President Richard Nixon) back and forth to the stage.
To call this date the “birthday” of the Opera House may be a bit of a stretch. The first performance in the building was on May 1, 1974, when opera singer Roberta Peters and dancer Edward Villella appeared with the Spokane Symphony. It (and the adjoining Convention Center) was called the Washington State Pavilion at the time, because it was built for the Expo ‘74 World’s Fair. Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic followed two days later with the official Expo ‘74 opening concert.
The venue saw a continual parade of stars throughout the summer of Expo, including Charles, Cosby, Merle Haggard, Liberace, George Gobel, Isaac Stern, Henry Fonda, The Carpenters, Harry Belafonte, Marcel Marceau, Buck Owens, The Joffrey Ballet, Guy Lombardo and Cab Calloway.
Eugene Ormandy conducted his Philadelphia Orchestra and, according to reports at the time, declared the building to be “one of the finest halls” in which he had ever performed. He even put it in writing.
Bing Crosby, Spokane’s favorite son, gave the place his own benediction when he toured it that summer.
“(Bob) Hope can’t appear in a place like this,” Crosby said. “This is for artists.”
In the autumn, after Expo closed, the building reverted to the city’s management and became known as the Spokane Opera House – which is why November can be considered a birthday of sorts.
“It changed the arts scene downtown forever,” said Mike Kobluk, the director of the Opera House from the beginning until his retirement in 2000.
The Opera House has hosted more than 7 million attendees since then, averaging about 250,000 per year. Concerts by traveling stars – Gordon Lightfoot, Bonnie Raitt, Bette Midler, Phish, Jethro Tull and Ani DiFranco, to name just a few – have been its bread and butter. It has also been the place to see traveling cultural institutions, including the Bolshoi Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Peking Acrobats.
Since 1987, it has also hosted the Best of Broadway series, which has brought in blockbuster tours such as “Phantom of the Opera,” “Miss Saigon” and “Les Miserables.” The latter has visited four times, with a fifth visit beginning Nov. 16.
The Opera House has also been the concert home of the Spokane Symphony, although the orchestra plans to move to the Fox Theater when it can raise sufficient funds to refurbish the historic structure.
Which raises the question: What is the future of the Opera House?
The Best of Broadway tours will still fill many dates – including the upcoming run of “The Lion King,” in October 2005, which will be the longest touring-show event in Spokane history. It will run five-and-a-half weeks.
Concerts will continue to fill many dates. At 2,700 seats, the Opera House accommodates a niche between smaller venues (The Met and the Big Easy) and larger (the Spokane Arena).
The Spokane Symphony may still use it for pops concerts and other big events, even after moving into the Fox. And the Opera House will continue to host many community events, such as high school graduations and band concerts.
Meanwhile, Spokane Center director Johnna Boxley, who manages the facility, said the Opera House is looking better than ever. All new seats were installed this year. The stage floor and rigging system have been brought up to date.
“People can’t believe it’s 30 years old,” said Boxley.
When “The Lion King” arrives, the production will pay for $275,000 worth of upgrades. Similar improvements happened when “Phantom of the Opera” came to town in 2000.
So the Opera House may be good for another 30 years. Make a note to check out its 60th birthday party, in 2034.
By the way, the name “Opera House” has more to do with tradition than with the intended purpose of this theater, which has never been primarily opera.
Western cities have been calling their big performance halls “opera houses” for more than a century, even when they never housed an opera. Back in the late 19th century, to call a hall a “theater” had low-class connotations, because “theater” often meant burlesque or strip-tease.
Spokane Opera House just sounds classy. For 30 years, the place has lived up to the name.