AT&T Performing Arts Center Winspear Opera House

The last time I was in Dallas (before Beauty) I was playing at Music Hall with The Wizard of Oz. Now Music Hall is not downtown, but I spent a fair amount of time exploring downtown. In my exploring I noticed a construction site for what was then called the Dallas Performing Arts Center. I could make out two different buildings. The first was what turned out to be the Wyly Theatre and was also the more complete of the two. The second building was this circular shiny red building that stuck up above the construction barricades. The red building totally captured my imagination and so I followed its progression as best I could via the internet. That building turned out to be The Winspear Opera House. Imagine how excited I was when I discovered that Beauty and the Beast would be playing there.

It is a bit hard to get a sense of just what a cool design the opera house is just from these pictures. Basically the shiny red part is the theatre itself. Surrounding it are glass walls that then make the lobby spaces. Now you might say, "But Texas is hot and the sun is brutal, how can they have glass walls?". Well that is the function of the shade canopy which sticks out past the glass box and blocks just enough of the sun to make the lobby comfortable. As I have said before, I really do not know much about architecture, but I know what I like. I love the Winspear Opera House!

Inside The Winspear Opera House

From the first moment that I walked into the pit of the Winspear Opera House, I dumped my instruments and grabbed my camera. I spent the next two weeks taking pictures of this very cool theatre. In some ways the design is very simple, but the modern take on the opera house style theatre is very striking.

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We were given a tour of the theatre by the presenter, and found out a few interesting factoids. The old people who donated the money that made the opera house possible were very particular about what they wanted. The theatre had to be an opera house design meaning no balcony but multiple horseshoe tiers. Another demand of the money people was that the tiers are painted with a certain carat gold paint (I don't remember the exact carat number). If the first rows of the orchestra level are lowered and the seats removed, the orchestra pit is one of the biggest in the country (if not the largest). Needless to say we did not need the extra space!

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I loved my two weeks at the Winspear. I hope that I return with a different show one day.

I had a hard time getting the little lamps all along the tiers to look like anything but little blurs of lights.

They left the chandelier down one day with the lights turned off. Of course I had to take a picture.

She's Singing To Bring Down The Chandelier

By far the most striking feature of the Winspear Opera House (inside the house that is) is the chandelier. It is made up of hundreds of individual tubes that light up in the full rainbow of colors and raise and lower out of the ceiling in any pattern programmed into its computer. Generally the chandelier was raised up all of the way when they opened the house to the audience. As people walked in they would start to lower it into its programmed arrangement. Then as the overture started, the chandelier would retract back into the ceiling. It is a good thing too because apparently they got many, many complaints from patrons in the top tier who were afraid that they would have to watch the show through the chandelier!

So I really wanted to get a series of photos of the chandelier being lowered, and you would think that in a run of two weeks that would not be a problem. Well for various reasons this was the best I could do. Oh well!

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's The Wyly Theatre

The second theatre in the AT&T Performing Arts Center complex is the Wyly Theatre. The Wyly is a smaller space than the Winspear Opera House and is more multifunctional. It also is the home to the Dallas Theatre Center.

When I was researching if there were any shows that I could see during our two weeks in Dallas, I discovered that the Dallas Theatre Center was producing a newly revised version of It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman, and they had a matinee during the week which did not conflict. Naturally I was excited because not only was this a second show I could see (Dreamgirls being the other) I have never seen It's A Bird... but have always been curious. So just like Dreamgirls our two shows did a ticket trade and to make matters even better the presenter gave us a tour of the Wyly Theatre. The theatre is designed to be vertical meaning that the theatre space itself is one level and all of the other spaces (like dressing rooms, rehearsal rooms, and tech spaces) are stacked on top of the theatre. As for the show, it definitely feels like a musical version of Superman that was written in the sixties, but it was a fun afternoon at the theatre.

Dreamgirls...Finally!

If you can remember back a year ago when we were in Providence rehearsing Beauty and the Beast, I had made plans to go see the tour of Dreamgirls in Boston on our day off which happened to be Super Bowl Sunday. Well they ended up calling a pointless rehearsal on that day, and my plans were spoiled. After I found out that I could not go, I immediately went online to see if there was a time that our two tours would cross paths again. Well Dallas was that time. Since Dallas now has two touring venues, two different shows can overlap which was the case for us. We were at the AT&T Center and Dreamgirls was at the old Music Hall. So our tours did a ticket trade, and I got to see Dreamgirls at long last! And it was worth the wait.

I now have another entry for my "it figures" file. Dallas has a pretty efficient light rail train system that goes most of the places I could want to go. Well except for the Music Hall. Since I last played at Music Hall, DART has now expanded their system with a train that goes right to the Music Hall. It made getting to Dreamgirls quite easy, but why couldn't I have had that option the two times that I played there. It figures!

The Traveling Man

The Amazing Technicolor Sculpture

I tried everything I could think of to get the moon in focus in these pictures. Oh well!

Will I Ever Learn?

So as I set out for my day of visiting the Dallas World Aquarium, I decided to go take some pictures of a little park area across the street from our hotel. Imagine how excited I was that there was a giant dragonfly buzzing around by the water. So I got out my zoom lens and went crazy taking pictures. It was insanely hot and bright out, but from what I could tell I had some really great shots. Now imagine how devastated I was when I got home after a full day of taking pictures and saw that all of my pictures were grainy because I had my ISO turned up to 1600. I had been taking pictures of the theatre at night and did not reset my ISO. Damnation!