Worcester’s cultural, arts scenes putting city on the move ahead
Previous missteps, failures open some opportunities
WORCESTER (AP) — Worcester’s cultural and artistic history involves many stories of openings and closings, restorations, revivals, re-closings, re-openings, reinventions and remakings.
Opportunities for performers and artists have been both there for the taking and taken away.
The rise and opening 10 years ago of The Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts is seen by some as an important milestone, both artistically and psychologically. The theater has brought in Broadway shows ranging from “The King and I” to “Kinky Boots” and star names and acts such as Jay Leno, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Diana Ross and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
“There’s so much positive momentum now,” said Troy Siebels, president and CEO of The Hanover Theatre in an interview earlier this year. “I do think we kicked off a new optimism in Worcester.”
Frederick H. Eppinger Jr. was president and CEO of The Hanover Insurance Group from 2003 to 2016 before retiring. His company’s acquisition of naming rights is considered a key in the theater’s development.
Mr. Eppinger talks about an “optimism quotient” that seemed to bring people in Worcester together for the theater project.
“For me the vision was always a catalyst for the development of downtown,” Mr. Eppinger said.
Over the past 160 years, optimism quotients have risen, and sometimes fallen.
The Worcester Music Festival had been held at Mechanics Hall from the festival’s beginnings in 1858. But in 1933 the prestige musical event left the hall for the then-modern trappings of the Worcester Memorial Auditorium, which opened to considerable fanfare in 1933 as a gleaming 3,500-seat source of local pride.
By 1966 Sixten Ehrling, conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, at the time the festival’s resident orchestra, was saying “what Worcester needs is a really good hall. ... We have to fight the acoustics ...” In 1978, the festival was back at a newly restored and “acoustically magnificent” Mechanics Hall with a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Around the same time, the new and highly touted Center for the Performing Arts on Chatham Street would eventually become home to Forum Theatre, the Performing Arts School of Worcester, radio station WICN and other cultural organizations — all deliberately in one place. On Sept. 2, 1982, Frank Sina- tra performed the inaugural concert at the Worcester Centrum (now the DCU Center). Worcester Foothills Theatre Co., which had been without its own permanent performance space since 1982, moved into the remodeled Worcester Common Fashion Outlets (originally the Galleria at Worcester Center) as a full-time professional theater company in 1987.
“I’m not certain I’d call it an earlier attempt at remaking Worcester,” said Susan L. Smith, Foothills co-founder with her husband, the late Marc P. Smith. “The decision to utilize a part of the Outlets mall as a new theater home for Foothills Theatre came about as an instance of wonderful serendipity.”
The DCU Center still stands tall, with fewer big-name concerts than its early years but a lot of Worcester Railers ice hockey games and convention center business. Mechanics Hall hosted more than 270 events in its most recently reported fiscal year.
But Foothills and Worcester Common Fashion Outlets are no more, and the Worcester Auditorium is closed. The Center for the Performing Arts is in virtual disuse, all the previously mentioned organizations that it housed are either no longer in existence or relocated.
History shows, however, that Worcester has a way of ultimately getting performers back on the stage again.
In 2018, “Worcester’s creative community is exploding on all levels,” said Erin L. Williams, cultural development officer for the city of Worcester.
What comes first in the artistic and cultural remaking or renaissance of a city? Is it the presence of artists? Or is it the city itself and other organizations as well as businesses providing the opportunity for artists to create, perform and be seen? Or is it a combination?
“I believe it is a combination of the two,” said local actor and storyteller Tina E. Gaffney, who has seen theater from the ground up.
“Consider: The constant stream of artists such as myself (and others) will seek out venues elsewhere if we have no support from the groups in the city that look to arts organizations for the very support we need to flourish, survive and thrive in the Worcester arts scene,” she said.
Ms. Williams said, “I think it takes visionaries, not only artists. It really requires a lot of collaboration.”
Then there’s the uniqueness of Worcester itself. “I ultimately think that Worcester’s sense of collaboration and its history of being a city of innovation is in our DNA,” Ms. Williams said.
Perhaps ironically, it was the dismantling of most of the Galleria, once seen as a boon to downtown, to reopen Front Street that might have also considerably helped change the situation once more for the better.