Picton’s historic Regent Theatre has mounted a major fundraising campaign as it prepares to reopen to the public.
The “Raise the Curtain” campaign is aimed at welcoming audiences back into the theatre after its closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.
But in order to do that, some urgent and significant safety and accessibility upgrades need to be done — and that’ll require money, says Benjamin Thornton, chair of the board of directors.
“What COVID has done is turned off all of our revenue for a half year,” Thornton said. “So now we still have the work that needs to be done, we have adjustments that need to be made to our operations to deal with the post-COVID reality and we need the money to do it.”
Theatre manager Alexandra Seay talks numbers.
“A quarter million dollars is a big ask, we recognize that, if it could have been any lower we would have made it lower,” Seay said. “But unfortunately that’s the price tag of the work that we need to do here in this space to upgrade our safety and accessibility to a point where we can safely reopen the space to an audience.”
There are a number of things that have to be done to the Main Street landmark, including purchasing a fire curtain, Seay says, adding the price tag for that alone is about $50,000.
The heating and cooling unit has seen better days, she said, and more accessible seating needs to be installed, as do accessible exits.
Seay says it’s just a few of the laundry list of upgrades needed at the 100-plus-year-old facility.
“COVID aside, a number of these upgrades would have to have been done anyways. The challenge, of course, with COVID, we’ve had no money coming in so while we might have been able to do these upgrades under our own steam, those funds have been diverted into simply keeping the lights on and so now we have to go to the community for support.”
Thornton is also positive about the campaign.
“We do have a very good feeling — we’ve always been able to count on the community for support and we have the community reaching out to us already. Everybody’s interested when are we going to reopen.”