The Shaw Festival has found a solution to keep the curtain rising while its beloved Royal George Theatre gets a much-needed rebuild.
The Shaw leased the Old Courthouse on Queen Street to host some of the Shaw’s performances over the next two to three years, while the theatre, built during the First World War and damaged by water and structural issues, is rebuilt with the help of Ontario’s $35 million in funding.
“We will be performing in that space, but in a much smaller way,” the Shaw’s executive director and CEO Tim Jennings told The Lake Report.
The Shaw hopes to open doors to the new theatre by the holiday season of 2028, but it will definitely be open by the 2029 season, he said.
“Depends on how the construction process goes,” he said. “Theatres, architecturally, are as complicated as hospitals, so it’s a very complicated process.”
The rebuild, which Jennings said will cost between $75-85 million in total, comes as the Royal George Theatre is set to close at the end of the year with no other option due to the extent of the damage.
“We lose dozens of shows every year to rain. It just runs through the walls and makes it a dangerous place to work,” Jennings said.
But performances at the courthouse, located just across the street from the Royal George, are nothing new for Shaw.
“We were founded (in 1962) in the courthouse. It’s our original theatre,” he said.
But in 2017, the courthouse could no longer support the scale of performances the Shaw used to hold there, so it stopped using the space — which was also not very accessible, said Jennings.
The Shaw has now created a new model for the next couple of years: A “relatively” accessible theatre in the courthouse, which will be about 20 per cent smaller than the Royal George, Jennings said.
“We don’t lose a whole theatre,” he said.
The Shaw started working with the town a couple of years ago to rebuild the theatre and asked if it could lease the courthouse year-round during the reconstruction, aiming to partner with parks and recreation to make it happen.
The courthouse is not typically available to the Shaw year-round, Jennings said.
It was presented to council as a two-year plan with an option for a third year if construction took longer.
“Council approved that at a public meeting back in the fall,” he said. “Both last council and this council have been very supportive of that process.”
This week, the project received $35 million from the Ontario government to help with the rebuild.
“If we hadn’t received this funding, (the theatre) would have closed and we don’t know how it would reopen,” he said.
The Shaw is currently figuring out what exactly it can do, now that it knows the funding amount, Jennings said.
“We’re moving forward very quickly on rebuilding.”
