It’s been nine years since Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (August 29, 2005), killing more than 1,800 people and causing more than 80 billion dollars in property damage. To say that New Orleans was devastated doesn’t begin to tell the story. The catastrophe affected every facet of life in the Big Easy.
Besides the almost incomprehensible physical destruction — a majority of it from the storm surge that breached the levee system and flooded much of the city — Katrina brought the local economy to a complete and catastrophic standstill. Tourism, the lifeblood of the city, was actively discouraged for a long time after the hurricane. For locals, too, the infrastructure — houses, shops, business of every kind — was so badly damaged in so many areas, that “normal” life was impossible. The national economic crisis of 2008 only exacerbated the already critical situation there.
Many of New Orleans’ entertainment venues were severely damaged by Katrina, and even those that escaped the storm’s wrath were seriously affected by the decline in tourism and the severely depressed local economy. Miraculously, the French Quarter was spared the worst of the hurricane’s fury. However, in the years since Katrina, the city and people of New Orleans have shown their tremendous resiliency, and slowly but surely the Crescent City has rebounded, with billions of dollars being funneled into restoration projects. Canal Street is jumping again, and New Orleans has reclaimed its status as one of the most important entertainment capitals in the U.S.
Perhaps next year the city will be also able to crow about the triumphant and long-awaited return of the grand old 1,700-plus seat Orpheum Theatre. Currently underway, the Orpheum project is slated for an autumn 2015 reopening, but that’s a story for another day. Stay tuned for updates.
We decided to take a brief look at six completed New Orleans venue restorations that have been renovated since Katrina; all are clustered within a half-mile radius of the town’s famed French Quarter.
Civic Theatre
Located in the Central Business District, the Civic is the oldest surviving theater in the city, built in 1906 (as the Shubert Theatre), however it closed for three decades and was in a state of serious disrepair before its multimillion dollar renovation and reopening at the beginning of 2013.
The “new” Civic, which holds 1,150 patrons, now has an open main floor for general admission concert events, but can also be easily converted to a more traditional arrangement with seats on the floor, or be set up with tables and chairs for banquets and other gatherings. The two balconies, side walls and stage area have been lovingly restored to show off the building’s original low-key Beaux Arts plaster ornamentation.
Last year, the Civic was one of 15 buildings in the city to win an award for Excellence in Historic Preservation from the Louisiana Landmarks Society. Needless to say, too, the venue has undergone a complete technical overhaul to bring it squarely into the 21st century. In the year-and-half since its return, the venue hosted everything from music shows (Black Crowes, Esperanza Spalding, Steve Earle, et al) to stand-up comedy, large weddings, corporate events and even a series of TED Talks.
Handling the house sound system design and install was the New Orleans-based Solomon Group, which is one of the Civic’s three partners (the other two are developers). For the venue’s main P.A., which has the challenge of filling a space that is much more vertical than it is wide or deep, they elected to fly arrays of L-Acoustics loudspeakers on each side of the stage, consisting of 11 KIVA compact line array enclosures and three KILO low frequency extension cabinets, all finished to match the look of the surrounding walls and proscenium. On the floor below the arrays on each side is a pair of L-Acoustics SB18 subwoofers a two coaxial 8XT enclosures for front fill.
The system’s power and processing comes from three L-Acoustics LA8’s and a single LA4. The FOH console is Midas PRO1 digital with a 48×16 stage box. The venue also has a couple of Shure UHF-R wireless systems and a Clear-Com communications system. The Solomon Group has since become an a Certified Provider for L-Acoustics gear, and added a large complement of KARA line array speakers, subs, coaxials and controller racks to its rental inventory.
Saenger Theatre
The Saenger Theatre is not merely the most spectacular of New Orleans’ many theaters; it is one of the most glorious historic venues in the entire country, up there with the Fox theaters in Atlanta, St. Louis and Oakland, the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago and New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
The venue opened in 1927 as a 4,000-seat movie house, the crown jewel of the Saenger theater chain. The interior was designed to look like the courtyard of an Italian renaissance villa, complete with columns, arches, statuary and incredibly ornate and colorful molding, gaudy chandeliers and mind-boggling detail work throughout. Above, a faux evening sky, with twinkling white stars and ever-shifting clouds, heightened the illusion of being outdoors. By the mid-1960s, the large balcony had been walled off from the downstairs and turned into two other movie theaters. But then it underwent its first serious renovation in the late 1970s, when it was converted into a live venue (with a reduced capacity of 2,700) to mostly host concerts and theatrical productions.
When Katrina hit in 2005, the Saenger was closed and undergoing yet another renovation, so the carpeting and seats were not in the theater when the flood surge inundated the basement and left the stage and some of the orchestra under a couple of feet of water. A city agency (the Canal Street Development Corp.) took over the building in 2009 and leased it to the Saenger Theatre Partnership; between them, they raised $53 million to restore the Saenger to its original glory.
The new Saenger Theatre finally reopened on September 27, 2013, and by October, it had reinstituted its popular “Broadway in New Orleans” series, which had moved for several seasons six blocks away to the Mahalia Jackson Theatre (profiled below). “Our Broadway season is going great,” says Scott Stewart, technical director of both the Saenger and Mahalia Jackson theaters. “We have more than 13,000 subscribers, which more than we had before Katrina.” Top-name music, comedy and dance concerts fill the theater at other times.
According to Stewart, because the Saenger attracts so many touring music and stage productions that carry their own P.A.’s, the facility opted not to invest in an extravagant house system, “and instead we went for something that would cover us for smaller productions and events. We have is a center cluster of eight Meyer MICA boxes, which mainly cover the fairly large balcony, and on deck we have two Meyer MSL-4’s per side, and a couple of Meyer 700-HP subs per side.” The FOH console is a digital Midas PRO 2 and the monitor desk is the smaller Midas PRO 2C. “So far, it’s all worked out well for us,” he says.
Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts
The Mahalia Jackson Theater — named after the famous New Orleans-born gospel singer — is the most modern building of the six discussed here. It originally opened as the New Orleans Theater of the Performing Arts in 1973, then was renamed after Jackson in 1993. The facility quickly became the main place in the city to enjoy symphony, opera, dance and other theatrical events. It, too, was heavily damaged by Katrina. More than 14 feet of water poured into the basement, essentially destroying the building’s motor control center, HVAC controllers and orchestra lifts. Hurricane gales, meanwhile, damaged the roof, rear doors and even the stage.
Thankfully, then-mayor Ray Nagin made the renovation of the city-owned structure a high priority project and quickly helped line up financing — much of it from local tax revenue — to get the theater up and running again. After about $25 million in top-to-bottom renovations, the 2,100-seat Mahalia Jackson Theater came to life again in January 2009; the first of the major arts buildings in the city to reopen after the hurricane. It immediately became the performing home for the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (which previously played at the Orpheum Theatre; still being renovated), the New Orleans Opera Association, the Ballet Association, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and, while the Saenger Theatre was closed, “the Mahalia” hosted the popular “Broadway in New Orleans” series, from 2009 to 2012.
In a conscious move to attract a broader range of events to the venue, the theater’s new sound system, designed by New Orleans-based SoundWorks System Integrators in conjunction with Meyer Sound Design Systems, is much more powerful and flexible than the rig that was there pre-Katrina. It includes left-right hanging arrays consisting of 12 Meyer M’elodie loudspeakers and soffit-mounted center cluster of Meyer MSL-4’s, DF-4s for down fill coverage, and 600-HP subs. Compact Meyer UPJ-1P VariO speakers are on hand for balcony fills, while front fills are handled by UPJunior VariO’s, and UPA-1P speakers provide upper balcony center delay. The venue also boasts a Galileo loudspeaker management system, comprised of four Galileo 616 digital matrix processors. The FOH console at the Mahalia is a Yamaha PM5D.
Joy Theater
The Joy Theater is a smallish (900 capacity) multipurpose venue downtown on Canal Street with a long history — it dates back to 1947, when it opened as “New Orleans’ newest and most modern film temple.” Though a popular destination for movie-goers for decades, by the 1990’s, it had largely fallen out of favor with the public, who were evidently more interested in modern multiplexes with stadium seating, and in 2003 the Joy Theater closed for good.
Two years later, the vacant building was severely damaged by the floods wrought by Hurricane Katrina. In 2011, a consortium of developers and business types operating as the NOLA Theatre District LLC came to the theater’s rescue.
In its heyday, the Joy had a moderne, vaguely Art Deco-ish look to it inside and out, but in its current incarnation, only the exterior, with its distinctive wrap-around marquee, has retained that original character. The interior required what one of the developers called “a complete gut and re-do.” All the seats were severely damaged and had to be taken out (the downstairs can now be an open space or filled with seats, depending on the event), though some of the decorative features and lighting fixtures in the lobby were able to be restored. In December 2011, the Joy became the first of the four major theaters in the Canal Street area to reopen (the others are the Saenger, the Orpheum and the since-closed Loew’s State, all dating back to the 1920s). As hoped, the Joy has managed to managed to attract a wide variety of events, including small touring shows — including stalwarts such as Beatlemania Now and Tony & Tina’s Wedding — concerts (Irma Thomas, Snoop Dog, Slightly Stoopid), private parties, receptions and corporate affairs.
Installed by PSX Worldwide Audio Visual Technologies of nearby Covington, LA, the Joy’s main P.A. system consists of two flown JBL VerTec line arrays, each comprised of nine VT4887-DP compact mid-hi loudspeakers, two VT4881-DP powered subwoofers and one VT4882-DP powered sub. On the ground are a dozen VP7212MDP powered floor monitors, four ground-stacked SRX728S subwoofers and a pair of VP7215/95-DPDA powered loudspeakers for sidefill.
Four VP7212/95’s provide fill coverage for the 250-seat balcony and 25 JBL Control 26CT ceiling speakers bring clean sound to the lobby and restrooms. Those ceiling speakers and the SRX subs are powered by Crown IT 5000HD amplifiers; also on hand is a Crown XTi6000. The Joy features two Avid VENUE SC48 consoles — one for FOH and one for the monitor position. Wedges are JBL VP7212-MDPs and, for drums, a VPSM7118-DP. The Joy also has BSS London Blu DSP, Clear-Com 2-channel communications, a large complement of Shure and AKG mics, plenty of backline equipment and more.
Carver Theater
Built in 1950, the Carver Theater, in the racially diverse Faubourg Tremé section of New Orleans, is the most recently revitalized venue in our little survey — it opened with great fanfare on April 30, 2014.
The original Carver may have lacked the gaudy trappings of the other renovated theaters here, but it has great historical significance that transcends its utilitarian aesthetics: It was the first state-of-the-art theater for blacks in New Orleans, built at a time when downtown theaters were segregated, with blacks relegated to the balconies. By contrast, the Carver — named after the great African American botanist, scientist and educator, George Washington Carver — “was built as the only theater without a balcony in the city,” owner Dr. Eugene Oppman noted recently. It was an important neighborhood gathering place for many years, but closed as a theater in 1980, eventually becoming a medical clinic.
However, the building — recognized on the National Register of Historic Places — sustained so much water damage during Hurricane Katrina and surrounding neighborhood was so devastated that the clinic was forced to close. It was at that point that Dr. Oppman decided to try to restore the Carver to its roots as an entertainment venue — oriented to live performance (music concerts and recitals, stage plays and musicals), community events and private rentals of every variety, from parties to business functions. Local legend Dr. John headlined the opening day festivities, and no doubt other big names and local faves will grace the stage of the Carver as it continues to ramp up over the coming months.
The $11 million remodel of the Carver restored the look of the old building’s exterior, but inside, it’s a whole new world, rebuilt from the ground up and equipped to meet the demands of modern music and theater productions. With a capacity ranging from 530 to 850 (open floor) in the auditorium, the venue didn’t require a huge sound system, but it had to be versatile enough to provide outstanding coverage for different types of events. Each of the two main curvilinear line arrays are comprised of Meyer M’elodie ultra-compact loudspeakers and Meyer 700HP subs. The front fill speakers are compact Meyer MINA’s, while the stage monitors are JBL STX812M’s and STX815M’s. Amps are a variety of QSC models: the CX108V (8-channel), CX1202V (2-channel), CX302V (2-channel) and CX502 (2-channel). The main FOH desk is a Yamaha CL5, with another mixing surface available for “recording production” — a Yamaha CL3. I/O racks include two Yamaha Rio 3224D’s (with 32 inputs) and a pair of Rio 1608’s. Like all of the venues profiled here, the Carver features a state-of-the-art lighting system.
Le Petit Theatre Du Vieux Carré
A Jackson Square landmark dating back to 1922, Le Petit Theatre Du Vieux Carré (“Little Theater of the Old Quarter”) has been a hub for community-based theater in New Orleans for its entire existence, until it closed due to financial issues in 2010. (This is one theater that was not physically affected by Katrina.) What saved the 365-capacity theater was an infusion of capital from the Dickie Brennan Restaurant Group, which already operated a trio of popular eateries in New Orleans, and put a fourth, an elegant Creole restaurant called Tableau, in one corner of the historic building, across a small courtyard from Le Petit Theatre. The deal with Brennan paid off the theater’s debt, helped fund extensive renovations and also created an endowment to keep the theater open for the foreseeable future, still operated by the venerable non-profit organization that shares the venue’s name. The restaurant has become a popular pre-theater draw, and the Le Petit’s 2013-14 season, featuring such varied offerings as Hair, Death of Salesman and Lombardi, has reestablished its sterling reputation.
According to the theater’s technical director, Alex Smith, “The system still needs a bit of work and upgrading, but what I have is currently sufficient for straight plays and events. The main loudspeakers in the intimate venue are two Meyer Sound MSL-2A’s “and we also have a small complement of secondary speakers we use as monitors or for directional sound effects — three Yamaha StagePas 400i powered speakers and a pair of powered Yamaha 400s.” The mixing board is Yamaha MG-24/14 FX, amplification is supplied by a pair of QSC PL 236’s and processors are two Meyer Sound Ultraseries S-1 units. “For sound output we utilize a Mac Mini and Qlab 3 — or Qlab 2 for designers who prefer the older interface — and we also have a MOTU UltraLite Mk3 Hybrid FW USB2 audio interface, giving our sound computer up to eight stereo outputs, which is lots of fun when we need a lot of directional sound.
“For our musical, Hair,” Smith continues, we brought in some bigger guns, and Crescent Light & Sound [of nearby Kenner, LA] helped us out — we rented a Yamaha LS-9 mixer and a pair of powered wedge speakers to supplement our sound.” Smith also says he expects to further upgrade the system before this summer’s big musical production, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
