Last look at old Massey Hall
Fabled concert venue marks its 124th birthday with star-studded show — not long before it closes for ambitious $142M, two-year ‘revitalization’
Raise your lighters, Toronto, it's Massey Hall Day.
The most fabled of Toronto’s many fabled performance venues celebrates its 124th birthday today with an evening of music provided by such CanCon leading lights as Jim Cuddy, Sarah Harmer, Buffy SainteMarie, Sam Roberts and Whitehorse, and Mayor John Tory has proclaimed June 14 Massey Hall Day in its honour.
The evening’s star-studded shindig will be a somewhat bittersweet occasion, however, as the venue will go dark early next month until the fall of 2020, while its interior and exterior get a thorough makeover and its overall footprint is expanded to take in a brand-new, seven-storey tower — to the immediate south of its longtime perch on Shuter St. — that will include a new, 500-capacity secondary live venue on its fourth floor. After a run of three shows by living local legend Gordon Lightfoot on June 29, June 30 and July 1 and a final staff party on July 3, that’s it. No Massey Hall for two years. The mind boggles.
“Honestly, I’m trying to avoid thinking about it too much since we still have so much work to do in this last stretch,” says Jesse Kumagai, director of programming, marketing and business development for the Massey Hall/Roy Thomson Hall corporation. “Despite that, you inevitably end up talking about it and I’d be lying if I said a few tears haven’t already been shed around the office. But we all know this renovation needs to happen, that this work is going to mean Massey Hall will be here for future generations.”
The scale of the $142-million Massey “revitalization,” as its overseers have been calling it, is daunting. But if all goes as planned, the results promise to be genuinely breathtaking.
For starters, a building that’s come to be regarded as holy ground in Canadian-music circles is going to look an awful lot more like a church. Restoration will uncover 100 stained-glass windows ringing the auditorium that have been covered up for the better part of a century.
Standing on the empty stage where so many musical giants have performed over the years — Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Loretta Lynn, Pete Seeger, B.B. King, P.J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Sinead O’Connor, the National, Blue Rodeo, Wilco and Kraftwerk, just to name a few — and gazing up at the blank indentations in the walls where those windows will soon be returned to the cathedral-like splendour, it’s hard to imagine the room becoming any more impressive. But it looks like it’s going that way.
“Last August, there was one day they had three of them out and we all rushed over and honestly, Ben, we all had a lump in our throat (to) see all the light come in,” says Deane Cameron, the former EMI Music Canada president who came out of retirement three years ago to assume the CEO position at the Massey/Roy Thomson corporation just as the renovation plans were becoming concrete. “Most of them have been covered over for probably 85 or 90 years. We’ve seen some of the initial work going into the windows, and they’re spectacular. It’s gonna be beautiful.”
In addition to restoring the windows, which will each have retractable acoustic blinds to keep the light out and the noise in as performances warrant, the revitalization will also involve a complete redo of the auditorium’s vaulted ceiling. Inside, the 70-year-old cinema seats on the floor will be pulled and replaced with removable seating that will allow for a standing, general-admission space for appropriate shows and boost the hall’s 2,700-person capacity.
There will also be a few rows of newly tiered seating going in under the balcony, while downstairs the Centuries lounge will add a stage — yet another (250capacity) performance space for the venue.
The new tower expands Mas- sey into some land graciously deeded by a condo development going up nearby. This will finally give the hall an actual loading dock for the stage, expanded dressing rooms for visiting artists, plus a fifth-floor mezzanine wired to record audio-visual content from the three stages.
Kumagai says the thought of new stages began a decade ago, when “we started presenting concerts in smaller venues... Expanding the venue portfolio was the obvious next step, made possible when we acquired the land to the south of Massey Hall. At a time when small venues in Toronto are more likely to close than they are to open, you jump at the opportunity to build a great new room.”
The main concern, says Cameron, is that “we get everything 100 per cent right” so that neither the public nor performers at the hall — built all those years ago by Hart Massey as a home for the Mendelssohn Choir and a tribute to his son, Charles Albert, a musician who died of typhoid fever— think the old vibe has been ruined.
“One concern I’ve had is people just believing that we can make this beautiful again and still keep the charm,” he says. “It’s just carefully restoring everything to its natural state. And a lot of hand-plaster work.”
And what of our mayor and his Massey Hall Day proclamation? Might he have some personal connections to the room?
Turns out, like most Torontonians, he does.
“My first visit to Massey Hall was probably when I was about 8 or 9 and I was actually on stage as part of Captain Kangaroo’s visit to Toronto. He was a big U.S. TV star and we just had to walk across the stage and no more, but it was a very big deal,” he says.
It’s gonna be a long two years.