Stage craft

Auckland's much-loved Civic Theatre reopens to the public next weekend. BRIAN RUDMAN peeks behind the curtains.

The Civic has always been more about myth than reality. The greatest fantasy is that the grande dame of Queen St was lovingly built by olde worlde craftsmen before "planned obsolescence" entered the vocabulary.

Not so. The theatre was thrown up in 33 weeks by Depression-era unemployed plucked off the surrounding streets. Small wonder that its $42 million refit has taken two-thirds as long as the original construction and, according to plaster and painting contractor Tim Sullivan: "The truth is, a good shake and it would have all fallen down."

He's referring to the ornate interior decoration. However, George Farrant, Auckland City's heritage architect, says the same is true of the whole structure.

The Civic, which reopens next weekend, was always a consumable. In 1929 the Auckland City Council leased the prime site to entrepreneur Thomas O'Brien in return for him building a suitably grand theatre. It was agreed that property and improvements would revert to the city in December 1993.

As the Great Depression began to bite, labourers were pulled from queues of jobless who circled the building site in their shabby grey suits to start the building.

"If one put a foot wrong then goodbye, the next one stepped in. The result was, it wasn't well built," says Farrant.

A newsreel of the construction shows over-watered concrete sloshing about the wheelbarrows. "At one stage," says a contemporary report, "two million bricks were laid in cement mortar in 12 weeks and concrete was mixed and used at the rate of 500 yards [382 cu m] a day." In midwinter 700 men were employed on the site. Later, as deadlines approached, 2000 men were working on the building.

Sure enough, the shortcuts showed up during the rebuild. Hollows were found in the western retaining wall where shoddy boxing had come adrift and floated into the wet concrete. Walls were started in the wrong position then, when the error was discovered, cantilevered over, then continued upwards. Farrant pays tribute to the resilience of brick.

If the theatre had a use-by date built into its fabric, lack of maintenance added to its decay.

To protect its long-term interests, the council had included a clause committing the lessee to "repair and maintain in good and tenantable repair and condition all the buildings."

Unfortunately the council failed to police this clause and, as the lease got closer to expiry, the slow decay of the building gathered pace. The roof developed leaks, the basement flooded, the twinkling stars in the ceiling progressively shorted out and the cloud machine died.

In the 70s two major "improvements" took place which added to the decay. In 1975 the lower part of the theatre was gutted to make way for the Wintergarden Cinema. Ornate ceilings were hacked out, the spiralling Wurlitzer organ sold and the elaborate orchestral gondola, which in the theatre's heyday used to move up and down as the musicians played, was bowled. Then there was the legendary "brown tide."

Sometime in the 70s, painters were put to work in the interior to paint over the existing multi-coloured plasterwork with a uniformly dull khaki. Only high and other hard-to-reach parts were spared, providing vital clues for the restoration work.

Neglected or not, the old Civic remained one of the best and probably the most intact of the old flamboyant "atmospheric" movie palaces left standing anywhere in the world.

The term "atmospheric" refers to the decorative plasterwork in the auditorium, the garden walls, the plaster sky with its twinkling stars and the cloud machine.

It was a style developed by an Austrian architect living in the United States, John Eberson.

"These palaces were where ordinary people watched the 'royalty' of the New World - the stars of Hollywood," writes film historian Noni Boyd. "The luxury portrayed in films was reflected in the surroundings. The idea of transporting a patron into dreamland was part of the concept of the design of a movie palace."

For O'Brien, the Civic transported him not into dreamland but off to Australia and far from his debtors. Born in an Auckland Fencible cottage in 1889 of Irish immigrants, he saw the Civic as the mighty centrepiece of a movie chain which already included the Regent in Epsom (later the Lido), the Princess and Tivoli in Karangahape Rd, the Rialto in Newmarket, the Royal in Kingsland and the Britannia in Ponsonby.

But his timing was all wrong. The Depression halved his audiences and the arrival of talkies was to cost him money in wiring and other renovations he could not pay back.

Two years after the opening of the $440,000 palace on December 20, 1929, O'Brien departed across the Tasman, apparently broke. The builder, Fletcher Construction Co, missed out on its final $24,000 payment. Management was taken over by Williamson's Film Ltd.

The Civic's heyday was during the Second World War. After the movies, bands played in the Winter Garden nightclub under the theatre, which became the "downstairs" cinema, until the early hours while American soldiers danced with local girls. It was then that the legendary Freda Stark danced naked apart from some gold paint and strategically arranged feathers. Thanks to the troops, Casablanca had its world premiere at the Civic.

The question for the city when it took over the building at the end of 1993 was what to do with it. Rundown and with a seating capacity of some 3250, it was uneconomic as a cinema in the multiplex age.

The Edge chief execuitve, Greg Innes, with the backing of Australian theatre promoter Sir Cameron MacIntosh, convinced the council that it should be converted into a lyric theatre to cater for long-running shows. This would free the Aotea Centre for more community group use, avoiding the clashes that occur when long-standing community bookings at the Aotea sometimes have to make way for big shows.

The decision was also made to develop as many individual function spaces as possible that could be used both as quick watering-spots for show patrons and as revenue-earning meeting-places independent of what was going on in the main auditorium.

At least nine function spaces have been created from the large Wintergarden performance and function room, where 400 could dine and 600 party, through to the discrete art deco Heritage Board Room, where you can throw an intimate dinner party for six, arriving and departing secretly through an unobtrusive Wellesley St entrance.

All this was to be done under the eagle eye of "more heritage police than you can throw a stick at", jokes Richard Harris, the project leader for Jasmax architects. Perhaps the biggest challenge, said Harris, was "at the end of the day it had to look as though an architect hadn't been near it. It's hard to work on a heritage building if you have an ego. The acid test is if people go in and find it hard to see what has changed."

Farrant agrees, comparing the Civic to an ornate, tiered wedding-cake on which the icing was all right but the cake had gone bad. "We had to replace the cake without anyone knowing what had happened."

An example of the creative approach to the restoration process was the theatre's fabulous night sky. First there was the problem of replacing the myriad tiny bulbs - many of them long blown - linked in circuits similar to Christmas tree lights.

There were the acoustic problems created by the huge domed ceiling. With the reverberation time of St Paul's Cathedral, it was great for choirs, but hopeless for speech or live theatre. For a year attempts were made to find an acoustically absorbent material that could be attached to parts of the original plaster sky but not be visible under any lighting. After a year they admitted defeat and rebuilt the whole sky in plasterboard covered with a spray-on acoustic absorbent.

Before that the starscape had been laboriously mapped - a peg was placed in each lightbulb socket, then the sky was photographed from the ground - section by section.

Everyone remembered it as the Southern Sky, complete down to the Southern Cross - though opinions differed as to where it actually was. Farrant, however, was not so sure any of it was real. An amateur astronomy buff, he had never been able to see the similarity.

He got the experts in and they confirmed his suspicions.

The question then was, "Do we get pedantic and put them back as they were in that pattern? After a lot of angst I said, 'Let's take a punt. What people need to see is what they remember.' So I made the decision that, yes, we would put back the Southern Sky and we would do it with great flair and accuracy.

"The result is many more stars than there were before, and they're all calibrated to about two decimal places for correct brightness at the day the Southern Cross is closest to being overhead. They're all computer-plotted and the major stars are coloured exactly as in the real sky."

All that was done with the aid of the latest fibre optics. Ask him how this squares with his drive for authenticity and he laughingly explains: "It does in the sense that the theatre is primarily about illusion."

To replace the night sky as it was would have been authentic, he said, but it would have disappointed people who believed what they remembered was the real night sky.

And that's the Civic. As it reopens, just as when it opened, the myth conquers the reality.

* The Civic Theatre reopens to the public Sunday, December 19, from noon to 6 pm and on Monday, December 20, from 10 am to 5 pm. No bookings accepted.