The show will go on: Toronto's Ed Mirvish Theatre turns 100, but celebrations will have to wait

The show will go on: Toronto's Ed Mirvish Theatre turns 100, but celebrations will have to wait

National Post

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On the night of the 28th of August, 1920 — 100 years ago today — an opulent, palatial theatre at 263 Yonge Street in Toronto, opened its doors to the public for the first time. It was named The Pantages, after entertainment impresario and former sailor Alexander Pantages, who managed the theatre’s operations on behalf of the Famous Players company, which had commissioned the building.

The Pantages was built to be the largest and most extravagant theatre not only in Canada, but throughout the British Empire — an extraordinary beacon of nightlife in the centre of a burgeoning city of half a million people.

The theatre is still there on Yonge Street, and still in use, now bearing the name The Ed Mirvish Theatre. One of the most beautiful and prestigious venues for live theatre in Toronto, and one of the central cinemas during the annual Toronto International Film Festival, it still retains much of the old-world glamour of its original heyday.

It’s hard to imagine today, a full century later, but when it opened in the summer of 1920, the Pantages was on the frontier of live entertainment in North America. Designed primarily as a vaudeville house, the lavish 3,373-seat auditorium was also outfitted with a silver screen for “pictorial revues,” daily screenings of silent shorts and features and newsreels that ran continuously from mid-afternoon until late in the evening. Tickets were available for as little as 25 cents, and as was the custom at the time, patrons would pay for admission and wander into the theatre in the middle of whatever happened to be showing.

In the late 1920s, as vaudeville’s popularity waned and cinema began to emerge as the dominant form of entertainment around the world, the Pantages shifted its programming. In 1930, at the dawn of the “talkies,” the theatre was wired for sound. Under a new name — The Imperial — it became a movie house full time, showing films around the clock. The Imperial remained for decades an enormous single-screen theatre that attracted Torontonians by the thousands.

In the spring of 1972, the Imperial debuted The Godfather . It proved so popular with audiences that the Imperial screened it constantly every day for eight months. When the film’s run finally ended, the theatre closed for extensive renovations — renovations that reflected the changing landscape of motion pictures in North America. In the era of New Hollywood and evolving standards of acceptable screen content, the movies were no longer capable of drawing the audiences they were through the 30s and 40s, and a single auditorium seating more than 3,000 was no longer sustainable. So Famous Players hired the architect Mandel Sprachman to divide the space into six separate smaller cinemas. The following year, in 1973, the Imperial reopened as the new and improved Imperial Six.

Cineplex Odeon acquired the building from Famous Players in the the mid-1980s. Strangely enough, they did not intend to use the space as a movie house: they had recently established a live entertainment division, and invested millions into restoring the Imperial Six to its former glory to make it suitable, once again, for theatre. After screening blockbusters such as Wall Street and Die Hard in the late 80s, the theatre was shuttered and preparations began to transform the space once more.

The restoration was comprehensive. “The seating capacity was reduced from 3,373 to 2,200. The soot and grime, as well as the many layers of paint that obscured its original beauty were removed,” describes the Historic Toronto blog.  In 1989, now once more called The Pantages, the theatre reopened as the official home of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera — a Broadway musical that became such a radical hit that the production continued for an entire decade.

Livent, the company that produced Phantom , went bankrupt at the turn of the millennium, and The Pantages fell into the hands of Clear Channel and Live Nation. They commissioned the Mirvish Productions company to manage the space, and under Mirvish’s leadership, the theatre — redubbed the Canon, after a deal with Canon Canada — took off once more. It became the home of Chicago , Les Miserables  and Billy Elliot , among other hit shows.

David Mirvish formally acquired the theatre in 2008. His famous father, Ed Mirvish, had passed away the year previously, and so in 2011, when his company’s partnership with Canon Canada came to an end, he renamed the storied space the Ed Mirvish Theatre, the name it still bears to this day.

The Ed Mirvish Theatre was the home, earlier this year, of the much-anticipated Canadian premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway sensation Hamilton . It was also to house Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , direct from London. The pandemic  — for the time being — has waylaid those plans. Centenary celebrations will have to wait, but if any space is capable of surviving this period of uncertainty, it’s the Ed MIrvish Theatre: After a century of evolution and change, it’s still here and as opulent as ever.

· Mirvish announces new subscription season delayed to January 2021
· Canon Theatre renamed in honour of Ed Mirvish (2011)

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