‘Wow’: Carolina Theatre restoration is almost — finally — done. Take a look inside.
Right before the start of a tour of the now-nearly completely restored Carolina Theatre in uptown Charlotte, project manager Sean Seifert held up a big piece of posterboard.
On it was a large photo of the inside of the venerable North Tryon Street venue as it appeared in 2018, right before construction started. It looked like something out of a horror movie. Like someone placed a dump truck full of mud in the center of it and set off a bomb. “I mean, there’s asbestos, and there’s lead paint and there’s everything there,” Seifert said of the image.
Moments later, he opened a door at the rear of the balcony to reveal a stunning view of the opulently renovated room and its unique seating for 905-ish (more on that in a minute).
A woman in the group gasped. “Wow.”
“Wow is right,” said Larry Farber, who arranged the intimate private tour and will host musicians here starting in the spring of 2025 as founder and director of the Charlotte private-concert club Music With Friends. “You don’t feel like you’re in Charlotte.”
“God, it’s unbelievable,” remarked the woman, a member of Farber’s club. “You don’t feel like you’re in the United States.”
It’s taken years longer than anyone ever imagined, and it’s come at a price tag of $90 million, but the renovation and restoration of the historic, 97-year-old Carolina Theatre is finally in the homestretch. Seifert said he puts the project at “96%” complete and believes that number will reach 100 “around the first of January.”
(The city, county, state and federal governments put in almost $19 million combined. The rest came from private corporate and individual donations. A planned hotel to go above it never materialized.)
The theater, located in Foundation for the Carolinas’ Belk Place campus, also has a tentative opening date: March 6.
Now, anything eventually booked for that Thursday night likely would be a VIP event for people who donated significant amounts to the project, said Sara Rae, assistant vice president of facility operations for the foundation, which owns the theater. There also could be events tied to the opening that weekend.
Rae said there are currently no ticketed events booked, but noted the foundation is in the final stage of interviewing a programming director and that it will probably start booking around the New Year. The hope is that the theater annually will host 250 events, with Seifert adding that would include a mix of community-engagement-focused events (sponsored by nonprofits, for instance), ticketed events, and corporate functions.
Whatever public, ticketed event officially marks the grand reopening, it’ll be the first since the theater’s doors closed on Nov. 27, 1978, after a screening of “The Fist,” starring Bruce Lee.
Carolina Theatre was originally built in 1927 and went on to host theatrical runs of “Gone With the Wind” (in 1940) and “The Sound of Music” (1965); Broadway productions that included “The Corn Is Green” starring Ethel Barrymore (1943); and most famously, a then-21-year-old Elvis Presley, in 1956.
Here are the two key takeaways from our tour on Thursday morning that made us eager to experience a show here in 2025:
It’s full of history, but it’s also future-proof
Standing at the rear of the balcony, Seifert explained: “When we started to do the renovation, we wanted to make sure that it had plenty of technology. So this theater has a really big technology package built in. As you can imagine, a lot of these old theaters, they just struggle to get the roof to not leak and get seats in it, and put a little paint on some stuff. We’re fortunate that, through donors, we were able to really do the right thing.”
The theater features 10 laser projectors, including one for 4K movie presentations. And then six of them — two on the ceiling, one on each side, and two in an upstairs control booth — support a projection mapping system that can display images from almost the back of the theater on the left wall, all the way around the front, to almost the back of the theater on the right wall, floor to ceiling.
(Projection mapping was the technology driving the “Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience” that was on display at Camp North End in Charlotte in 2021.)
Meanwhile, they’ve installed a multimillion-dollar sound system and have worked hard to ensure exquisite acoustics. For example, Seifert said the artwork high on the sides of the theater was re-created to match the original art that was hand-painted on plaster, but that these works were scanned at high-resolution and printed on high-tech fabric specifically designed to absorb sound.
Other features: There will be hidden roll-down screens that can be deployed high on the walls stage left and right that can cast blown-up images of the performers. The theater also has the ability, Seifert said, to pull off everything from balloon drops to bubble shows.
What they can do, he said, “is only going to be limited by our imagination, because the technology is all there.”
Many of the seats are just built different
Near the front edge of the balcony, Seifert pointed to multiple rows filled with long banquette benches that can hold six to eight people. “We’ve got banquettes, both up here and downstairs. We’re thinking we wouldn’t sell individual seats; we would sell the whole couch. That way you can come and if you want to bring in two people and (take up) the whole couch, that’s fine. Or get the whole family on there.”
There are also “luxury” boxes in the front of the balcony that will each have four living-room-style chairs — 14 such boxes in all, including the two on the sides that are ADA-compliant areas.
Downstairs, in the orchestra area (which has a capacity of 540-ish), there’s yet more unique seating: more banquettes, more rows of loose chairs, and two rows of two-person love seats.
Oh, and there are cup-holders at the traditional fixed seats and drink railings or small tables near the more-casual seating.
At the end of the 30-minute tour, the woman who was wowed at the beginning was still wowed. “I didn’t anticipate it looking like this,” she said.
“Well,” Seifert replied, “and that’s what everybody’s reaction has been. Because you have an idea, that it’s a historic theater, and you’re thinking it’s gonna be dark, a little dingy, just because that’s what they are. But yeah ... we tweaked the colors a little bit, made it a little bit more contemporary, but you’ve got all this old plaster work and everything that really, really sets it off. ...
“I also think that what you see is really amazing. But once everything’s actually turned on, it’s just going to step up your reaction to it that much more.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "‘Wow’: Carolina Theatre restoration is almost — finally — done. Take a look inside.."
