You may have noticed that 2015 has been the year for anniversaries around here. Whether it’s the city’s 250th anniversary of incorporation, the Sewalls Falls Bridge’s 100th anniversary of construction or your parents’ 35th wedding anniversary, it’s hard to escape all the milestones this year.
Now you can add the Capitol Center for the Arts’s 20th anniversary to that list.
The last weekend in September and first weekend in October, the Cap Center had a 20th anniversary festival to kick off the season, featuring eight shows in a row over the two weekends. “We tried to showcase all kinds of programming we have,” said Nicolette Clarke, the center’s executive director. “We kicked off the whole thing with this wonderful performance of dance in the back of a U-Haul truck. It was very cool, very different, very unique.”
Dancing in the back of a U-Haul? Sounds like move-out day at college, only more choreographed, one would imagine.
It all started back in the 1920s. The building was constructed with the idea that it would become the governor’s mansion, but the Legislature didn’t approve that plan. Eventually, the Masons opened it as their lodge in 1925, and they immediately leased out the theater. From there, a company out of Boston brought vaudeville and film to the theater. By 1927, the Capitol Theater was a prime stop on the vaudeville circuit, and it caught on as a movie house after that.
Fast forward a few decades. The property changed hands many times through the ’60s and ’70s, and by the late ’80s, it had fallen into disrepair and out of code. The theater was shut down in 1989.
That’s about the time when people in the community started talking about bringing it back as a nonprofit, Clarke said.
After many, many meetings, discussions, planning sessions and so forth, enough resources were pulled together to reopen the building. So in November of 1995, the Capitol Center for Arts was born.
“In the beginning, they were doing maybe 40 to 50 performances a year,” Clarke said. “It was a gathering place for the community, and that’s part of our mission as well.”
Forty to 50 shows a year doesn’t really sound that slow, does it? That’s about one a week.
Well, the Cap Center hosted 235 performances and 80 community events last year. Looks like things have picked up a little bit over the years.
And it’s not just the big shows, such as Mamma Mia! and Dave Chappelle, that draw the crowds.
“There’s lots of wonderful kinds of performances you can do in a more intimate setting,” Clarke said.
The Governor’s Hall, a floor below the big auditorium known as the Chubb Theatre, holds a couple hundred people and is often used for company events, dinners and lectures. It also gets turned into the Spotlight Cafe when the occasion calls for it, in which up-and-coming and/or local artists perform in a more intimate setting.
There’s also the Kimball House, a historic mansion attached to the property that can hold an audience of 40. “It allows us to have visual artists and writers and things not so performance oriented,” Clarke said.
And there’s more than just music and theater performances.
“We tuck in as many other community events as we possibly can around the show schedule,” she said.
But in order to keep providing all this programming for another 20 years, the theater needs some help – from you.
“Everything in our building now is 20 years old,” Clarke said. A lot of the equipment is reaching the end of its useful life, and soon it will be time to open the checkbooks to bring the place up to date.
“Looking ahead, we need to make all these investments – the heating system, phone system, ticketing system, the marquee – and we really want to be in close contact with our community,” Clarke said.
So if you want to help keep the Cap Center going, go to their website (ccanh.com) and look for the volunteer button if you want to give some of your time or the donate button if you want to give some of your money.
“Any contribution would help us and keep the shows going and the facility functioning,” Clarke said.
