The seats in Florida Rep’s Arcade Theatre after Ian subsided.
The final weekend in September, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill opened within the black field area inside Florida Repertory Theatre’s 100-year-old dwelling in Fort Myers, regardless of warnings of a hurricane headed additional up the west coast towards Tampa.
Ninety-six hours, a sudden proper flip in Ian’s path, 115 mph winds and 6 to twenty-eight ft of storm surge later, the present didn’t go on.
Part of the roof caved in on the 393-seat fundamental auditorium of the Rep’s historic Arcade Theatre. The orchestra pit was beneath six ft of water, which practically reached the sting of the seats. Three inches of thick black sludge coated the executive workplaces, rehearsal halls, and storage areas.
Water speeding in from the adjoining Caloosahatchee River destroyed uncalculated quantities of lighting components, costumes, props, and paperwork, even a personal library of playscripts. Four-foot-high brownish water stains have been discovered days in a while the partitions. Though performances on the theatre resumed this previous week, the harm from Ian’s onslaught continues to be being accounted for.
“I joke with people as I give the curtain speeches before our performances,” mentioned producing creative director Greg Longenhagen. “I say it’s almost biblical. First we had plague, now we have flood. If the locusts show up, I’m leaving town.”
The venerable theatre wasn’t the one one to really feel the wrath of Ian, one of the devastating storms to smash Florida: 60 miles to the north, the partitions surrounding the stage of the Venice Theatre collapsed and the fly loft was ripped open on the 72-year-old group theatre’s dwelling. Thirty-five miles to the south in Naples, the Gulfshore Playhouse’s opulent new $40 million dwelling, nonetheless beneath building, misplaced one weakened concrete wall and will lose one other.
At the Rep, the influence was quick and devastating. “It comes in, it hits hard and fast, it leaves everyone with their mouth agape,” Longenhagen mentioned of the storm throughout a break from making use of for FEMA loans and different emergency grants.
On the opposite aspect of the steadiness sheet: the Rep’s resilient workers and dedicated performers, who refused to attend longer than to catch their creative breath (after checking their very own houses for harm) to assist with restore and restoration efforts. They helped lower out a number of yards of ruined drywall and baseboards all through the constructing; they flushed out flooring; they piled ruined furnishings, stitching machines, and particles on the sidewalk.
After 16 misplaced performances, representing about $60,000-$80,000 in earnings, what was salvageable of Lady Day was moved to the close by Alliance for the Arts’ Foulds Theater, and the present went on there, even because the Rep workers was within the midst of a large cleanup of a scope that none had seen earlier than.
This previous week, after the corporate had made the primary auditorium livable sufficient for audiences, the corporate opened—on time—the satirically titled Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Rehearsals are underway for the upcoming And Then There Were None and Freud’s Last Session.
“They have let no dust grow under their feet,” quipped Michele Hylton-Terry, government director of the Fort Myers City Community Redevelopment Agency, a significant champion of the venue.
Clean-up will final for months. Insurance is not going to start to cowl a loss Longenhangen calculates will land within the vary of $1-1.7 million.
When audiences return to the primary auditorium, they could discover all of the wooden lower out beneath the apron. A portion of the ceiling has been patched and tarped. Rugs have been freshly drained and shampooed. A remediation firm dehumidified the realm, and refreshed it with a disinfectant to cease mildew and curb the odor.
The harm is a profound blow for an expert firm celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary with two lively efficiency areas, in addition to a prolonged checklist of education schemes serving about 45,000 younger individuals, from Shakespeare within the faculties to summer time camps. Its status for high quality is strong, and never simply in the neighborhood. The late Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout bestowed sterling evaluations throughout annual visits 12 months after 12 months, contending that the Rep’s 2017 manufacturing of The House of Blue Leaves was “as good as it gets.”
Aside from the fiscal loss, the overwhelming fear is attracting individuals again into the theatre, Longenhagen mentioned. “We haven’t sold many tickets since the storm hit, which is understandable,” he mentioned. “A lot of people here are homeless. People are still living in shelters. We lost lives. We lost, sadly, one of our volunteers.” Marti Campbell, 74, had been an usher there for 16 years.
The potential impact on a demoralized, preoccupied viewers’s return is the rationale the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall eight miles away postponed the scheduled December go to of the nationwide Hamilton tour. The constructing sustained some roof harm, however has already resumed one-night occasions. Attracting 1,500 patrons to a one-night stand appeared way more possible than making an attempt to draw 30,000 individuals over 16-performance run.
The blow comes at a fraught time for the Rep, which, like lots of of different theatres throughout the nation, was already coping with the fallout from the pandemic, together with darkish homes and workers cutbacks. Like so many medium-sized firms, the Rep operates on a really small margin, with little or no reserves previous capital tasks. Given a $4.3-million annual working price range pre-pandemic, Longenhagen mentioned, “We feel if we can be in the black just by a little tiny bit, then we’re jumping for joy. But arts organization these are very delicate institutions.”
The theatre’s fortunes additionally have an effect on the group, which had seen the corporate as a part of a significant redevelopment. “It has been a vital part of the fabric of our downtown, bringing many visitors to go to the theatre, have dinner, shop,” mentioned Hylton-Terry. At the peak of vacationer season, its exhibits carry 500 patrons for every of eight exhibits. The public company, which paid the theatre’s lease till the corporate purchased the constructing, sees the venue as “integral to our downtown’s success,” she mentioned.
Still, the Rep’s dwelling fared much better than the Venice Theatre 60 miles to the north, initially inbuilt 1926. Rehearsals had begun for Kinky Boots, which was slated for November. But theatre’s north wall buckled open beneath 115-mph gust winds, permitting water to hurry in and canopy the stage, backstage, fly loft, and entrance of home. The partitions surrounding the stage have been ripped away, leaving solely the skeleton of the metal construction. Early estimates place the harm at $4-$5 million. While Kinky Boots has been formally postponed a 12 months, the Venice firm is discovering different venues to stage its A Christmas Carol the primary week of December.
Gulfshore Playhouse, housed in a civic constructing in Naples for a few years, canceled its first manufacturing of the season, 26 Miles, partly attributable to infrastructure challenges and city-wide harm. The condo complicated housing many of the actors was inundated with sea water.
Hurricanes are a truth of life for Florida theatres. The Rep had little bother when Hurricane Charley swept close by in 2004. When Hurricane Irma threatened in 2017, rehearsals and previews have been postponed. Among the worst harm recorded for a Florida theatre occurred in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew struck Dade County. At the 300-seat Actors’ Playhouse in Kendall, the roof of the previous film home caved in, the field workplace was destroyed, and the foyer broken. But two years later, the corporate purchased one other former film home in downtown Coral Gables’ ritzy Miracle Mile.
Hurricanes are such a staple of Florida that they’ve turned up in such regionally written works corresponding to Nilo Cruz’s Hurricane and Christopher Demos-Brown’s Captiva. But maybe the performs that come to thoughts given the latest devastation have been the likes of The Tempest and King Lear.
It’s a reminder, Longenhagen mentioned, of “how small we are in the world, how tiny we really are when we come up against Mother Nature. I don’t care what you put up, I don’t care what kind of steel doors or whatever kind of hurricane shutters you may have. At the end of the day, we’re all vulnerable.”
Some second-guessing has occurred, although the workers did lay down sandbags forward of the storm. “Some people can point the finger and say, ‘Well, you didn’t do this or you didn’t do that.’ But it really wouldn’t have mattered, because when Mother Nature comes roaring at your doorstep with a four-foot storm surge, she’s going to have her way.”
Contributions to Florida Rep may be made at https://tinyurl.com/2p9vcbdv. Contributions to the Venice Theatre may be made at www.venicetheatre.org/donate.
Bill Hirschman (he/him) is the editor and chief critic at Florida Theater On Stage. bill@floridatheateronstage.com
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