JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Numa Saisselin admits that he has one big concern about the next phase of the Florida Theatre’s renovation project – that fans might not notice that any work has been done.
Plenty of work will go on at the historic theater in downtown Jacksonville over the next four months. It’s closing down Saturday and staying dark until around Halloween while the elaborate ceiling is repainted, the air-conditioning system is replaced and the bathrooms are updated.
“That’s the thing I worry about,” said Saisselin, the theater’s president. “That people will walk in and say ‘what did you do?’”
The theater, which opened in 1927 and was renovated as a performing arts center in 1983, will close its doors following Friday night's Dave Koz & Friends concert and become a beehive of painters, plumbers, electricians and HVAC pros for four months before reopening in October.
Repainting the ceiling is the centerpiece of this phase of the project. The ceiling was last repainted in 1994, and it shows. Paint has flaked away from large sections of the ceiling under the balcony and in spots on the proscenium arch around the stage.
Time certainly played a role but Saisselin said a big part of the blame can be placed on the building’s air-conditioning system. “Partly it’s the years, partly it’s the climate control,” he said. “The air-conditioner is either on or off. There are no thermostats, no zones.”
The theater – and office spaces – have to be kept cool during the day to prepare for up to 1,865 people to pack the seats. Then the climate-control is turned off at night to save energy and turned on again by a timer. The new system will take care of that.
Jeff Greene, executive chairman and founder of Evergreene Architectural Arts, the company that will do the work on the ceiling, agreed that the temperature and humidity fluctuations haven't been easy on the ceiling.
"That will definitely ruin paint, no question about it," Greene said Thursday in a phone interview from Rome.
Evergreene has restored opera houses, cathedrals, state capitol buildings, courthouses, the decorative work at the Library of Congress, the lobby ceilings at the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in New York, the terra cotta at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, the ornamental plaster at the Boston Opera House and the stained glass in the largest library at Yale.
He said his crews have taken samples of the paint from the Florida Theatre and found it to be remarkably similar to that used in the Tampa Theatre, which was designed by famed architect John Eberson. There's no evidence that Eberson designed the Florida Theatre, but the paint was a clue that helped choose the color palette for the restoration, which will be a little brighter than what has been in place in recent years.
“We have picked a palette that we believe is the 1927 palette of colors,” Saisselin said.
Greene, who has restored more than 400 theaters in his 45-year career, said there is still original 1927 paint visible on parts of the ceiling. That paint, a mix of pigments and animal glue, retains its color very well and will be preserved while the rest of the ceiling is repainted.
The job will likely take every bit of time available, Greene said. "It’s a very tight window. We’ll be there the whole time."
Crews must erect wall-to-wall scaffolding, remove loose paint and gently wash everything before picking up the first brush. But there's no reason to think the paint job won't last 30-50 years, he said. "Presumably, if we do our job right, it will be my grandchildren who will be touching it up. "
The ceiling is the largest part of this phase of the restoration, but the bathrooms will be the crowd-pleasers. They’ll all be updated to modern standards. “Our bathrooms are a mix of 1927 and 1990 and they are all hideous,” Saisselin said.
Saisselin said the project is incorporating as many “50-year solutions” as possible.
The building’s electrical vault has been on the first floor since the place was built, in a spot along Forsyth Street between the theater box office and the entrance to the upper-floor office spaces. Saisselin said that’s a flood risk, so the equipment will be moved to the third floor, freeing up that prime streetfront for a future phase that will involve restoring the building’s marquee, expanding the entry lobby and bringing back the large vertical “blade” sign that once hung on the corner of Forsyth and Newnan.
The project to update the theater in time for its 100th anniversary was announced in 2019, with a five-year timeline and a $10 million price tag.
The pandemic helped with the timeline, Saisselin said. The original project called for the seats to be replaced in the summer of 2021, but the theater wasn’t putting on any shows and the seats were available, so that was pushed forward by a whole year.
That $10 million price tag has risen dramatically, though.
“By Halloween, we will have raised and spent $15 million on this building over the last four years,” he said, adding that the work is fully funded.
Completed parts of the projects include the seats and a new sound and light system. The Remedy Lounge, the first expansion of the theater's public space since it opened in 1927, was added earlier this year in a space behind the marquee that had previously housed mechanical equipment.
When this phase is complete, there will still be work to be done, but much of it won’t be in the public spaces. The backstage “green room” used by artists playing the theater needs to be updated, as do the upstairs office spaces.
Plans also call for the entry lobby to be expanded along Forsyth Street, the marquee to be renovated and a new version of the historic “Florida” sign that adorned the building when it was built. The price tag for all of that would be about $8 million, Saisselin said.
The theater has 28 full-time and about 175 part-time employees. The staff will keep working through the shutdown, but nearly all of them will need to work remotely at some point, when the air-conditioning system is turned off. Saisselin said that, with no shows on the stage and no fans in the seats, the workload will be light. "Some will have a very easy summer, others will have to work harder," he said.
Summer was the best time of year to close the theater, Saisselin said, since a lot of tours would prefer to play Florida in the winter. He said the theater might have missed out on 10 or 20 shows, but it had to be done eventually and the theater has been busy all year. In the 2022 fiscal year, 126 shows played at the Florida Theatre; this year the number is 117 with four months to go.
A new report by Pollstar, a magazine that monitors the concert industry, ranks the Florida Theatre at number 39 in the world in attendance for the first half of 2023 in the auditoriums and theatres category, a group that includes Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. The report states that more than 102,000 people attended shows at the Florida Theatre between Dec. 12, 2022, and June 26, 2023.
The theater will reopen on Oct. 28 with a showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Saisselin noted that it’s a risky choice, since audience members are known to throw toast, rice and toilet paper during the screening.
More than three dozen events follow, ranging from concerts by Steep Canyon Rangers, Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons and Kansas to comedy shows by Anthony Jeselnik, Nurse Blake and Lewis Black to appearances by William Shatner, Cary Elwes and the "Ancient Aliens" guys.
