Emotions stir as Wortham reopens
Harvey derailed last season and displaced artists, but venue is ready to regain its voice
Members of Houston Grand Opera’s orchestra struggled to get through a rehearsal Monday at the Wortham Center even though they knew the music well.
Under normal circumstances, preparing for Wednesday’s concert — a sold-out gala starring the legendary tenor Plácido Domingo and sensational soprano Ana María Martínez — would have been a breeze. The program is loaded with opera standards that feel almost as natural to the artists as breathing. But this was not a normal day.
The musicians had not been on the Brown Theater stage in more than a year, since Hurricane Harvey upended life across the city and derailed their last season with floodwaters that soaked the downtown theater. A few were so overwhelmed with emotion that director Patrick Summers stopped the session briefly to let them recover. Last season, every show meant proving their resilience, in a purposebuilt but acoustically inferior space at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Artists and staff from the Wortham’s other resident companies — including Houston Ballet, Society for the Performing Arts and the chamber music groups DaCamera and Mercury — are feeling emotional, too. All have survived a year of shifted dates and venues that will drag their bottom lines for at least three years.
The fateful storm submerged the Wortham’s 55,000-squarefoot basement with 12 feet of water, also flooding a lobby and portions of both theaters, in-
cluding the largest stage. Among the casualties: a third of the center’s 60 air-handling units; electrical, plumbing and elevator systems; dressing rooms, creative shops, musicians’ lockers, conductors’ rooms and stored props and costumes. The center’s largest stage had to be rebuilt.
And yet, after a year of reconstruction, nothing appears to have changed in the center’s public areas, which were not severely damaged. In the flood-destroyed basement below the Brown and Cullen Theaters, Houston First focused on practicalities and speed — well, as fast as “speed” can be in a building with multiple and massive moving parts, such as stages that lower and lift on jack systems, with miles of wiring and rigging systems for lights and sets.
The project’s final tab will be about $100 million, not quite twice the $66 million cost of building the Wortham 31 years ago. But the theater is finally open for business again.
The auditoriums officially reopened Tuesday with an hourlong “welcome home” ceremony hosted by Houston First in the smaller Cullen Theater. For some, that event sealed a promise kept.
“Not getting back for this season just was not an option,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner. He views the Wortham project as symbolic of the entire city’s spirit. “The art that exists in our city is a reflection of who we are.”
Houston First President and CEO Brenda Bazan and Board Member Jay Zeidman delivered long lists of thank-yous, reflecting the the epic scale of the yearlong, non-stop effort to put the heart of Houston’s Theater District back together again. Work also continues in the district’s underground parking garage, which took on 270 million gallons of water — a $70 million restoration project.
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, calling herself a “mother” of the Wortham because she helped pass the original construction bonds, also doted on the center’s importance to generations of inner-city school children. The audience saved their biggest applause for a moment later, after an emotional video, when several dozen of the artists, backstage talent, stagehands, ushers, box office staff and others who work at the Wortham walked onto the stage.
Wednesday’s opera gala is a homecoming in the grandest sense: Domingo was the first artist to perform at the Wortham in 1987; and Martínez matured there as a member of the opera’s studio company. But the work isn’t done.
When the opera season begins in earnest Oct. 19 with a new production of “The Flying Dutchman,” most of the performers will use temporary dressing areas. The basement halls will be a maze of temporary walls and doors through the season, as reconstruction continues; but mechanical systems have been moved and elevated by about three feet. The lights are brighter, walls that were pink and blue are now a pleasant beige, and the floor is bare concrete instead of linoleum tile.
Houston First expects to finish the basement by May, opening segments as they’re complete.
“We’re hoping for quite a bit by ‘Nutcracker,’ with its cast of thousands,” said Houston Ballet Executive Director James Nelson. “Thankfully, we’re right next door and we have a sky bridge to beautiful dressing rooms there.”
It seemed hardly an inconvenience, after a year of hauling major ballets to other venues. “We can make do,” Nelson said. “We’re just thrilled to be back.”