St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre: the curtain rises
First performances in theatre held 50 years ago
Walking into the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre, in the quiet of the foyer, it’s difficult to picture the original opening night.
On May 22, 1967, the order of the evening was black tie and general splendor. Well to-dos of St. John’s society and a handful of guests from Upper Canada gathered to see the new cultural marvel, even if the building wasn’t entirely ready.
Premier Joey Smallwood was warned ahead of time of unfinished grounds and the entrance he would be unable to drive up to. There was still no administration hired for operations, and there wouldn’t be until the fall of the year. The art galleries had no art, the libraries had no books and it would be months, years in some cases, before all of the building’s elements were available as designed.
Yet the facility had already been through two years of expensive construction. The more than 1,000-seat, proscenium theatre space was ready. And on the occasion of colonial Canada’s 100th anniversary, Newfoundland and Labrador was committed to using it to host the Dominion Drama Festival.
It’s “monolithic and … well, ugly”
The centre was rushed to semi-completion and first reactions were mixed, usually with an interior-exterior divide.
The exterior was not immediately beloved. “From the outside, the centre gives no idea — hardly a hint — of what is inside. The reddishbrown, supposedly castle-like structure, if anything is monolithic and … well, ugly,” said Telegram reporter John Fraser, in a story May 19, 1967, just a few days before the opening.
He went on to describe the interior as reeking of money, even if it’s “money that’s been well used.”
But being seen inside the centre and seeing it for yourself became part of the value in those early tickets. And the social aspect was encouraged by the work of architects Affleck Desbarats Dimakopulos Lebensold and Sise of Montreal, tapped by local contracted architects Cummings, Dove and Whitten. The Quebec firm had designed the National Arts Centre, also in the brutalist style.
“The dramatic atmosphere of the performance hall carries over into a generous multilevel lobby, where the audience is put on stage. It is a place to see people and to be seen,” wrote Robert Mellin, architect and associate professor at Mcgill University, in his book “Newfoundland Modern: Architecture in the Smallwood years 1949-1972.”
The core of the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre was a dramatic space, he stated, with its slate flooring, low and nonuniform lighting and dark walls of brick. The brick was formed with material from Newfoundland quarries.
The ‘in’ event
Guests were able to have a good gawk at everything from the coat check to the Act III restaurant on the lower floor, to the ‘starry night’ of the thousands of hanging lights in the house of the theatre, where you might also catch a glimpse of someone from the Who’s Who.
“It was very, definitely fashionable,” said John Perlin, in an interview earlier this year.
He was responsible for the drama festival and a smooth opening for the centre — a volunteer at the time. He was later hired as the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre’s first executive director, leading the operation for 22 years.
“If you didn’t have tickets, you weren’t anybody, you know what I mean? It was the ‘in’ event of years, not just that year,” he said of the opening.
The festival began on a showing of “Tomorrow Will Be Sunday,” an adaptation by Tom Cahill of a Harold Horwood novel. The play was avant-garde for its day, Perlin said, recalling at least one walk-out from the audience, by Phil Lewis, a Liberal representative in the House of Assembly for Harbour Mainbell Island.