In my last update on the renovation, I explained how we have expanded the size of the Black Box auditorium. Now we’re almost finished, we’re going to guess that when patrons come back, they’re not really going to notice anything different—but the performers will.

And so will the techs.

Because the lighting booth not only had to be rebuilt, but it had to be rewired.

Remember that when we first constructed the Black Box, it was all one level. The seating platforms were originally movable, just as the seating was, but it was not stable and it was not ideal. So back in late 2017 we refurbished and built in the risers for the seating.

We were upgrading the electricals on the property and noticed that the electrical box was in awful shape, so Philip asked the workmen to repair it. They started the work in the afternoon, but noticed that there was a crack that ran down the corner of the building that made the corner structurally unsound. You can see it in this photo, where it really doesn’t look like all that much. But the contractors didn’t want to let it stand. So they began to repair the corner of the building.

Our goal of wanting to accommodate our audiences more comfortably meant that we had to extend the auditorium by about 6 feet. This, not unreasonably, impacts the rest of the theatre. It means that we’ve had to reduce both backstage space and foyer space by about that much.

Patrons who attended Arsenic and Old Lace—or, indeed, anything this season—please note that the PAB Black Box no longer looks as you remembered it. You may not notice the change straight away the next time you come into the theatre (or, depending on what we do with the entrance, you may), but as soon as you turn the corner to head towards the auditorium you will see what we’ve done.

We’ve gutted the place.

Even before the workmen moved into the Black Box to begin work on the interior, we knew that the first thing we had to do before the summer came with its rain and heat was to fix the Black Box roof. So even while Arsenic and Old Lace was going on, we were checking out the roof to see where the water was getting in. Brian Reckley and his team did a complete inspection.

Like the WVS Main Stage, the PAB Black Box was a termite haven. Most of its interior was wooden, after all. The theatre, the backstage and the foyer were all separated by a little bit of sheet rock and a lot of pretty thin plywood built onto wooden frames. The frames in the backstage prop area were supported by braces of two by four nailed into the floor, which made them pretty sturdy but which also impeded the use of at space. The frames comprising the black box theatre proper were supported by braces attached to the outer walls.

Some images and some smiles from last week’s Drive-Thru Dollar Day, which raised awareness, some friends, and a little bit of money too!

In the space of five months, we’ve gone from a theatre who couldn’t cover our basic costs to one which now has substantial funding to work with and account for. And as big as these figures seem, they are not enough to do what we want to do, or what the nation needs us to do.

But they’re a start. They lay a strong foundation. And we’re telling you a little bit about how we’re using them in this blog.

So the roof saga was an unexpected element in our planned renovation of the WVS, which focussed on the bathrooms and the foyer. One of the things we knew we were going to have to do was to deal with the front windows of the theatre, and also of the front doors. The main door, a double metal fire door, had seen better days, while not all of the windows were necessary. They are all permanently closed and permanently shuttered—the theatre has been ready for hurricanes for years, we could say. But there were structural challenges around the doors and the windows of the foyers and we knew we would have to deal with that.

As everybody knows who embarks on renovations of any kind, once you start in one place, it’s addictive. Really, what it is is that as you renew one area, the remainder looks even shabbier than before, and if you’re not careful, your job is growing.

People may have thought that our $400,000 fundraising target for this year was ambitious, or they may have considered the contribution of $340,000 we received from the Bahamas government was sufficient to meet our needs, or they may think that now we’ve got it we don’t need anything more.

Far from it!

That figure was what we needed to make sure the Dundas does not have to close its doors before its centenary, but it doesn’t begin to touch everything that we need to do around the premises.