Walking into the orchestra level of the Royal Alexandra Theatre in its current state would be a shock for anyone who’s been a theatregoer in Toronto at some point in the past 100 years or so.

On a recent hard-hat tour of what is now essentially a construction site, the seats – which until May had been packed with spectators for the Canadian production of the musical Kinky Boots – had vanished and workers were hard at work turning the concrete that lay underneath them into rubble.

The orchestra pit and stage are seen from the first balcony seating. (Fred Lum / The Globe and Mail)

Theatre Consultants Collaborative’s Athos Zaghi, who was project architect on the Princess of Wales Theatre (opened in 1993) farther down King Street, is overseeing the work in the auditorium. The main floor is being broken up in preparation for a concrete pour that will restore the theatre’s original slope and sight lines. The mural above the stage – Venus and Attendants Discover the Sleeping Adonis – is also being restored. The beaux-arts plaster mouldings are being cleaned and regilded (albeit with gold paint, not gold leaf).

The biggest change to the Mirvish Productions-owned theatre: new seats modelled after the old ones but made for today’s bodies are being installed on the orchestra level and the two balconies, which are being renamed, after the British fashion, as the “dress circle” and “balcony” as they are at The Princess of Wales.

The beaux-arts plaster mouldings are being cleaned and regilded. (Fred Lum / The Globe and Mail)

That means when the Royal Alex reopens in November – with the pre-Broadway engagement of Come From Away, a new Canadian-written musical, one of only a handful to ever play in the theatre – it will have just 1,244 seats, down from 1,497.

The orchestra and dress circle are losing a combined 145 seats to accommodate theatregoers’ growing girths. Times change – after all, the original seats had hat racks installed underneath them for gentlemen.

The old seats were about 40 centimetres to 48 cm wide; the new ones will be about 53 cm to 58 cm wide. (They vary in width so that they can be staggered – and yet rows can start and end in the same place.) The balcony is losing 108 chairs – but the new ones will be plusher and add more than 30 cm of leg room for those in the (relatively) cheap seats.

The upper balcony has been stripped down to bare concrete. (Fred Lum / The Globe and Mail)

Few Torontonians realize what a marvel it is that Toronto has a theatre still standing from the brief Edwardian era, still doing what it was built to do – but the renovation, stripping the auditorium down to its skeleton, gives a visitor an opportunity to glimpse some of the reasons why it is unique and has survived to become, as Mirvish Productions puts it, “the oldest continuously operating legitimate theatre in North America.”

Cawthra Mulock – son of a member of Parliament and an heir to the William Cawthra (then known as “the Astor of Canada”) fortune – was the fellow who came up with the idea to build the theatre in the first place.

At that time, it seemed foolhardy: In 1905, Toronto had a population of just 300,000, but already was home to five large theatres that could seat more than 1,500 people each – including two that were already deemed, as the Royal Alex would be, “first-class legitimate.” (The term “legitimate” dates back to English licensing laws of the 18th century – but, essentially, at the time it meant theatrical performances that weren’t opera, vaudeville or burlesque.)

Ed Mirvish, seated, talks with workers on Sept. 4, 1963, prior to reopening of the theatre. (Erik Christensen for The Globe and Mail)

Why build in this overcrowded market? In his 2007 book, Royal Alexandra Theatre: A Celebration of 100 Years, Robert Brockhouse relates the story – surely too good to be true – that the wealthy, well-connected Mulock got the idea in a fit of pique after he could not get a ticket to a sold-out show at a Toronto theatre called The Princess despite his aforementioned wealth and connections.

Regardless of his motivations, Mulock and his partners spent substantially more on the building of his theatre than most did at the time – the project eventually costing about $750,000, about five times what had been spent to build Massey Hall a decade before.

That hefty price tag is, in part, explained because Canadian architect John Lyle built it as the first “fireproof” theatre on the continent.

At the time it was built, in the early 20th century, North American theatres burnt down with alarming frequency – and had an average lifespan of just 12 years.

The orchestra seating has been stripped and the floor dug down to bare concrete. (Fred Lum / The Globe and Mail)

Most were built on wooden frames, and with stage lighting at the time being created by gas lamps or calcium lamps (a.k.a limelight), fires were commonplace. (The Princess, for instance, burned down, was rebuilt, and then burned down again)

Poking out of the concrete here and there you can see what made the Royal Alex (which would be lit by electrical light) so different at the time: a steel frame.

The steel frame allowed for Lyle to build what Mr. Brockhouse calls a “daring innovation” in theatre design: balconies that were made of reinforced concrete on steel frames, bolted to the side walls and cantilevered to the rear wall.

The upshot: no internal pillars and, therefore, the best sight lines in town from any seat.

The Royal Alex was responsible for a number of other “firsts” – for instance, it was the first legally royal theatre on the continent, with Mulock using his connections to receive a Royal Patent from King Edward VII to display the Royal coat of arms on the lobby doors. (The theatre was, after all, named after his wife – Queen Alexandra.)

Probably of more interest to theatregoers at the time was something now revealed by pipes – long hidden in the floor – about 20 cm in diameter. They led from a crawlspace below that workers would fill with ice on a hot summer’s day to deliver cool air to patrons. The setup gave the Royal Alex another distinction: the first theatre on the continent to be air conditioned.

A crowd waits to get into the theatre on its re-opening night on Sept. 9, 1963. (James Lewcun / The Globe and Mail)

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ANATOMY OF A THEATRE

The first review

The Royal Alexandra opened on Monday, Aug. 26, 1907, with a world premiere – a new musical called Top o’ th’ World that was an attempt to capitalize on the success of an early stage version of The Wizard of Oz. According to author Robert Brockhouse, the plot involved a young girl who travelled to the North Pole and “overcomes an evil witch-queen with the aid of a friendly bear, a man made of candy and a jack-in-the-box.”

The reviewer for The Globe (which wouldn’t merge with The Mail and Empire until 1936) was not impressed. “The management in selecting a musical extravaganza for the opening acted no doubt wisely, as this is a popular form of entertainment with the large numbers of visitors who come to Toronto during the Exhibition weeks,” the unnamed critic wrote. “The audience, however, last night was essentially a city gathering, and the extravaganza does not secure an enthusiastically favourable verdict from a Toronto audience.”

The new building, however, got an enthusiastic notice. “The house looked very handsome when seen under the full illumination of the electric lights, from the onyx-walled entrance hall to the auditorium, in which the tasteful harmony of the colour scheme showed to great advantage … Veteran theatregoers present last night were congratulating themselves that Toronto has now a new first-class theatre, and one, moreover, thoroughly up to date.”

The orchestra seating has been stripped out and the floor dug down to bare concrete. (Fred Lum / The Globe and Mail)

Restoring the original orchestra slope

When the Royal Alexandra opened in 1907, every seat on the orchestra level had a great sight line to the stage – but over the years the slope was altered several times. According to John Karastamatis, director of communications at Mirvish Productions, automated sets in the 1970s ran on thick tracks that required a big “deck” (the floor of a set that goes on top of a stage) and so the front rows of seats were raised so those sitting there could still see. “Nowadays, everything being automated by computers and microchips, the deck doesn’t have to be that tall,” Karastamatis explains – and so the front rows will return to their original level and slope.

Pipes from the old air-conditioning system

Breaking up the concrete floor has exposed the pipes that used to heat and cool the theatre. In the winter, this was done with coal-fired boilers in the basement (now dug down into a lobby). In front of the boilers was a concrete pit that workmen filled with ice in the summer. A fan hidden up behind the auditorium’s chandelier – now lowered for the renovations, wrapped in plastic and nestled in the scaffolding – pulled the cool air upward, an early forced-air system. According to Brockhouse, this was the first air-conditioning system to be found in any theatre on the continent.

The chandelier has been lowered and covered in plastic and surrounded by scaffolding. (Fred Lum / The Globe and Mail)

Mural up above the stage

Ever wonder why many theatres have small murals on the ceiling? It’s because they are painted on what would otherwise be a very boring, flat, smooth surface called a “sound boarding,” designed to help the theatre acoustics.

Frederick Sproston Challener, a Canadian painter known for his allegorical and historical scenes, whose works are also found on the walls of Toronto’s Old City Hall and hanging at the War Museum in Ottawa, painted the mural at the Royal Alex: Venus and Attendants Discover the Sleeping Adonis. According to Brockhouse, his wife, Ethel, served as the model for all the women and her face is on Venus – the woman with the dark hair and orange gown.

Cantilevered balconies

Thanks to its steel frame and techniques newly borrowed from bridge construction, The Royal Alexandra was the first theatre in North America to have cantilevered balconies. That meant no pillars – and therefore not a single obstructed-view seat in the house.

What were the views at this “first-class legitimate” theatre originally? Stars of the day from Fred Astaire to Al Jolson, Gertrude Lawrence to John Gielgud were all there in the early decades, plus many names that no longer hold much resonance. To pick one year at random – 1950 – the names we still remember include: Anthony Quinn and Uta Hagen in A Streetcar Named Desire; Mae West in Diamond Lil; Tallulah Bankhead in Private Lives; John Carradine in The Madwoman of Chaillot; Bela Lugosi in The Devil Also Dreams; Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in I Know My Love.

A crowd waits to get into the theatre on its re-opening night on Sept. 9, 1963. (Harry McLorinan / The Globe and Mail)

Canadians weren’t often seen on the Royal Alex’s stage in its early days – unless they were those who had gone to London and New York and made names for themselves there. (Though, in 1908, a young Toronto actress named Gladys Smith tried out a new stage name for the first time at the stage: Mary Pickford.)

But the 1950 season closed with Babes in the Wood, Bold Robin Hood – a pantomime written by Canadian culture-builder Mavor Moore and starring Lou Jacobi (who would make his Broadway debut five years later in The Diary of Anne Frank) and Ted Follows (best known these days for being the father of Megan “Anne of Green Gables” Follows).