Robinson Center, before and after
It’s been five years since Robinson Center’s $70 million expansion and renovation. Built in 1939, Little Rock’s premier public auditorium officially reopened Nov. 10, 2016—on time and on budget—following a 28-month closure. It’s a magnificent re-imagining. The exterior of the original building was restored and is visible in several areas inside the new conference center addition. The elegant historic lobby was restored with exact light fixture replicas. Performance hall upgrades include more acoustic volume, improved sight lines for all patrons, increased lobby spaces and much nicer restroom facilities, ADA accessibility, and box seating along the side walls.
Back-of-house areas now include increased loading capacity, new electrical and mechanical systems, improved and enhanced staging and lighting systems, and increased dressing and chorus room capacity on stage level.
A stylish ballroom, outdoor terrace and meeting spaces are added, along with a conference center totaling 25,000 square feet overlooking the Arkansas River. And it’s now a green building — a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certified structure.
It’s stunning—a venue that any city would be proud to claim. Still, some of my best times there happened long before the building’s facelift.
Robinson used to regularly host rock ’n’ roll shows (much like my native Cleveland’s Public Hall did when I was a teenager); my favorite was R.E.M. in September 1986. It was during the band’s Pageantry tour, and Michael Stipe and company were in fine form, as was opening act Fetchin Bones.
The best memory, though, was the parade of spectacular ’80s-era fashions worn by audience members, especially the spiky multi-colored ultra-moussed Mohawk hairstyles on a good number of the guys there. I guess we shouldn’t call them Mohawks any more, but you’d know one if you saw it.
The most poignant performance came from Glen Campbell during his Goodbye Tour in September 2012. Showcasing his album “Ghost on the Canvas,” the concert featured zillions of his hits, along with accompaniment by his wife and children. It was his final tour after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011. Although he revealed cognitive difficulties, the native of tiny Billstown in Pike County had no trouble with lyrics and muscle memory on the guitar.
Bob Dylan isn’t one of my favorites, but since my husband is a huge fan, we saw him at Robinson in 1992 and again in 1995. I liked the way he would twist and turn interpretation of some of his best-known material into a form that was practically unrecognizable if you didn’t suss them out by knowing the words.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld showed up in 2006 and 2009, long after his popular NBC sitcom was off the air (it ran from 1989 to 1998). The first performance was hilarious (if you’re a fan, you’d know what to expect, and he delivered). The second was disappointing as he reused much of the material from the 2006 show. Didn’t he know we’d be back for more?
Kenny Loggins showed up in February 2005 in what on paper sounded like a concert of strange bedfellows: His four-piece band, along with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. The ASO didn’t have much to do, as Loggins and accompaniment (drums, electric bass, electric guitar, and keyboards) staged a flat-out high-energy rock show with songs like “Your Mama Don’t Dance, “Chain of Fools,” “I’m Alright, ” “Danger Zone,” and Footloose,” but the musicians on strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion had the best seats in the house. It was pretty fabulous, but might not have been what season ticket holders expected.
Plenty of hours were spent in seats to review touring productions of “Les Miserables” (those ramparts!), “Riverdance” (in the 1990s, when creator Michael Flatley was still with the show) and other Broadway musicals.
Enjoyment of such shows was hampered by a looming deadline to write and file a review for the next day’s newspaper (deadline for the city print edition was 11 p.m.), and since each production had a running time of over two hours plus intermission, it made for some fretful moments (and a rapid exit from the theater to get to the newsroom as fast as possible).
Those deadlines could be problematic, as evidenced by the time I misidentified some of the characters in “Cats” in my review (there was no Google to help then with fact-checking). Who knew there were so many dedicated fans out there? I think I heard from every last one of them.
After that, I took the advice of friend and fellow reviewer Bill Jones, who told me to look up and correctly spell the names of the characters and the actors playing them before heading to the theater. And, he added, “write a lead for the review in advance. That way you’re not facing a deadline while staring at a blank screen at 10:55 p.m.”
Future reviews went much easier, thanks to him. Somebody else reviewed “Cats” the next time it came to Little Rock. It’ll be back in May. Maybe I’ll go, not for work; just for fun.