You may come away from the latest production at the Royal Alexandra Theatre with a probing question: what the heck is that large and evocatively shaped object between Cupid’s legs in the mural above the stage?

The theatre recently underwent a five-month, $2.5 million facelift, which, among other things, upgraded the seating and restored some of the Edwardian space’s artistic features.

The doors reopened Nov. 15 as the Broadway-bound Canadian musicalCome From Away began previews before this week’s gala premiere.

Numerous theatregoers, gazing upwards at the sounding board — which deflects the sound of the performers on stage towards the audience sitting in the balconies — have also been struck by the magnificently restored mural painted there, titled Venus and Attendants Discover the Sleeping Adonis by Frederick Sproston Challener.

But it’s the figure of Cupid that has been cause for a double-take.

One recent attendee sent an email to Mirvish Productions asking a rather pointed question.

“I looked up at the ceiling and was just wondering . . . what is that ‘thing’ in front of the Cupid-like figure on the far right? My whole row was talking about it,” inquired Marion Coomey, a professor at Ryerson University’s RTA School of Media.

“While waiting for the show to begin, we had quite a conversation about it. It’s flesh-coloured so it looks like part of the Cupid.”

While Coomey initially posited two suggestions, a large baguette or an inverted phallus, one gentleman suggested — correctly, it turns out — that it’s a quiver to hold Cupid’s love-inducing arrows.

“Before the mural was cleaned and restored, you could see Cupid but you really could not see details. We had noticed this (object) once all the scaffolding came down and we thought, ‘what is that?’” explained Mirvish Productions spokesperson John Karastamatis.

“At first, we thought it had been put there the way people in history went around and put fig leaves on statues and that kind of stuff.”

To hide the naughty bits, in other words.

“But no, it was put there exactly as the artist intended it,” he added.

Karastamatis said Challener — a noted painter and muralist whose works adorn Winnipeg’s Royal Alexandra Hotel, Edmonton’s MacDonald Hotel and London, Ont.’s Grand Opera House — actually based the faces of all the female figures in the Royal Alex mural on his wife, Ethel White.

“Who knows? Maybe the quiver that he provided little Cupid was a physical representation of his love for her,” Karastamatis said.

Sadly, the marriage soured and White left the artist, returning to Chicago with their five children, though they never divorced.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Curiously, Mirvish staff members have been unable to find any mention in media accounts or public records of controversy surrounding the mural or Cupid’s accoutrement when the theatre first opened in 1907, Karastamatis said.

“Obviously it was something people didn’t talk about but I can’t imagine people didn’t have the same thought when they looked at it.”