THE NEW VARSCONA

The $7.5-million budget includes $1 million in state-of-the-art lighting and sound equipment, assembled and installed by DWD theatre design from Vancouver. The Varscona is still $500,000 short in its fundraising.

Packrat Louis, the next-door restaurant, will run the lobby bar and concession on a six-month trial basis. I know what you’re wondering: Will there be red licorice, the Varscona signature snack and cocktail stir stick? Yes.

Shadow artistic director John Hudson calls the old Varscona stage, a uniquely difficult shallow arc, “a conundrum of a stage.” It’s now deeper and the audience curves around it, so the sightlines from the sides will be much better.

The seats: “Comfy, but not too comfy,” architect Allan Partridge says of his instructions to nuance audience comfort vs. attentiveness in the angle of the backs. The distance between the rows was contentious, too. Avoiding the Row 3 cartilage crunch of the old Varscona without losing intimacy: it was tricky. In a scene that will never be in a musical, sample seats were lined up one behind the other in single file. Seated persons of various heights shifted their legs diagonally at a specific angle to let another audience member past. The optimum distance: 863 millimetres, seatback to seatback.