Following a £24 million National Lottery Award through the Arts Council of England and further support from the European Regional development Fund, Birmingham City Council, donations from businesses and individuals and funds raised through appeal, the project has seen practically every part of the building reworked. The foyers were demolished and re-built providing greatly improved access, including lift and disabled access, together with a restaurant and other catering facilities - all wrapped within a design that feels light and airy. On the other side of the building, the purchase of adjacent land has allowed for the creation of a new complex housing facilities for the Hippodrome, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which uses the Hippodrome as its home base, and DanceXchange - the national dance agency for the West Midlands.
Expansion back from the stage has also allowed the most useful improvement to the theatre as far as those who tour into it will be concerned: the building has always been blessed with an enormous stage, but unfortunately it is 3.5m below street level, and the get-in has always been slowed by having to use a lift and/or ramp. Now, a new rear-stage extension houses a 15m lift that can carry trailers down to stage level. In addition, dock doors with off-street parking allow further trailers to be unloaded into the scene dock, via scenery lifts, simultaneously. It’s the kind of sensible, practical facility you rarely come across in the UK.
The stage and auditorium will be familiar to those who knew the ‘old’ theatre, though the auditorium has been re-worked with a new, very light white-and-silver colour scheme that is rather beautiful under houselights, but could perhaps be a little too pale for some shows. However, the technical facilities have undergone a considerable upgrade. Here the theatre’s staff, with considerable experience of the building between them, decided to trust their own counsel rather than that of a theatre consultant, with operations director Dave Muir turning to Stage Electrics for the lighting and sound installation.
Having enjoyed good service from their Strand JTM dimmers, Birmingham decided to take a chance on Strand’s new SLD dimmer, the installation making use of the first SLDs off the production line, though delays to the project meant that other venues were actually using the dimmers sooner. Stage Electrics’ Nick Ewins and his team installed six 96-way racks that feed permanent outlets around the stage and a Powercon-based patch panel that then feeds front-of-house.
For control, Strand was again selected, with a 500-series console sending data to the dimmer room through Strand’s Shownet network; from there Stage Electrics 12-way splitters can feed data to just about anywhere through a DMX and Ethernet patch. The newly-created Patrick Centre for the Performing Arts studio theatre uses a similar control set-up: here a 300 console with LCD screens controls two 96-way SLD racks that then feed out to a fixed grid of internally wired bars.
Ewins and his team were also charged with refurbishing the sound and communications systems, moving the amp room to the substage area, servicing the existing equipment, rewiring the stage and auditorium sound connectors using Speakon connectors wired as four-way connectors and providing a new sound control position at the rear of the stalls. Stage Electrics also provided an AMX worklight system complete with an LCD touchscreen for system programming.
The building was re-opened late in 2001 with all of the systems then being put fully to the test - and passing
