Wednesday, 4 December 2002

Uncovering a colourful past - 4 December 2002

An Article from the Vancouver Sun

The Burr theatre on Columbia Street reveals a couple of secrets from its construction as a vaudeville house. Conservator Cheryle Harrison is delighted with the bright colours uncovered in the decorations originally applied to the walls and corbels of the theatre.

Theatre revealing its secrets
Early work on a $7-million restoration of New Westminster's 75-year-old Columbia Theatre
— now the Burr theatre — is uncovering some astonishing art beneath thick layers of paint
John Mackie
  Lost amidst the hubbub of the Orpheum's 75th anniversary cel­ebration was news that another local theatre recently had its 75th birthday.
New Westminster's Raymond Burr Performing
 Arts Centre 
hides a couple of secrets from its
    early 
days as a vaudeville house.
  The Columbia Theatre in New Westminster turned 75 on Nov 3. Now known as the Burr theatre, after New Westminster native Raymond Burr, the the­atre is in the early stages of a proposed $7-million restoration to return it to its former glory.
  The first stage of the restora­tion is beginning to take shape on the walls of the theatre. Buried under six layers of paint, drywall and plaster, conservator Cheryle Harrison is painstak­ingly uncovering a mural straight out of The Arabian Nights.
  The mural depicts a rolling landscape of trees and classical buildings, alongside a golden shield, crown and scroll. Wind­ing its way up a beam is a faux-painting of a trellis with wild roses and wisteria; the ceiling is a deep blue night sky, complete with sparkling silver leaf stars.
  The three-by-six-metre sec­tion uncovered so far points to the Columbia's origins, when it was one of Canada's first "atmospheric" theatres.
  In atmospheric theatres, the auditorium was painted in a fan­tasy theme, giving theatre-goers the feeling they were entering an enchanted never-never-land.
  "An atmospheric theatre is one that visually transports you to another place and time," said the theatre's historian, Jim Wolf. "It was the vogue at the time.
  "In the case of the Columbia, it was the fantasy of a Moorish garden. You stepped into a walled garden city, and walked down an old street in a Moorish town."
  The Columbia was the centerpiece of New West's theatre row when it opened in 1927. Like the Orpheum, it was a combination vaudeville/movie palace.
Theatre manager Billy Long stands
beside one of the huge fir pillars that
support the floor of the building over
the ravine it was sited on.
  The opening show featured a vignette from actors Francis & Hubert, dancing from Jeane Gauld, music from AV Thomas and His Columbians, and the "photoplay" Swim Girl Swim with Bebe Daniels.
  But time hasn't been kind to the theatre. The 1927 mural was probably covered up in the 1930s, the auditorium was split into a dual cinema in 1976, and the building was converted to a Fraternal Order of Eagles Hall in 1987.
In recent years the Eagles operated a bar in the upstairs cinema, while the lower cinema hosted events like Extreme Canadian Championship Wrestling.
  The city of New Westminster purchased the theatre in Sept., 2000. The bar is still upstairs, but the downstairs is now an extremely successful live theatre — 30,000 people have seen plays there in the last two years. (The next production is Mother Goose, from Dec. 11 to Jan. 4.)
  If funding is successful, Har­rison feels she could probably have the whole mural uncov­ered in a couple of years. It took about 400 hours to do the cur-rent section, which had to be uncovered layer by layer - each type of paint is taken off with a different solution.
  When she started working on the mural, she knew what it looked like from an old black and white photograph, but had no idea about the colour scheme.
  That changed about a month ago, when Wolf discovered a treasury of architectural draw­ings in the former home of the muralist, John Girvan. Among the find were the original colour drawings for the interior of the Columbia.
  Locating the Girvan collection involved detective work worthy of Perry Mason. A man named Peter McInnis showed up at a Burr theatre open house, and told someone his grandfather William had worked on the the­atre opening.
  "William McInnis remem­bered it quite well, because somebody had put their foot through the ceiling during the decoration and he had to madly work to fix the hole in the ceiling prior to the opening," Wolf said with a laugh.
A copy of a design drawing for the Columbia Theatre's original 1927 interior decoration.
  McInnis was a Scot who spe­cialized in applying gold leaf — he had done the extensive gold leaf in the Titanic's ballrooms. He was actually booked on the Titanic, but bowed out at the last minute when there was a death in his wife's family.
  "They missed their own funer­al by going to another funeral," said Wolf. "They caught another boat and ended up in New West­minster."
  In 1923, another Scottish artist, John Girvan, arrived in Vancou­ver. Girvan specialized in murals (he did a legendary mural series for the old Province building) and theatres, and convinced Famous Players to go with the atmos­pheric design at the Columbia.
The metal sign from the firm that
originally designed the Columbia Theatre.
  A story in Canadian Paint and Varnish magazine claimed that Girvan used 1000 pounds of paint and 100 books of metal leaf in the interior decoration.
  Peter McInnis remembered meeting Girvan's son at an open house several years ago in Burnaby or Vancouver, and Wolf start­ed scouring old directories trying to locate the house. When he finally found it, he looked up the address in a city directory and called the current owner, out of the blue.
  "I said `Do you know anything about Girvan [Studios]? This woman said `Not only do I know about Girvan, I have their entire studio collection in the basement,"' said Wolf.
  He went to see it the next day — 75 years to the day after the Columbia Theatre opened.
  The Girvan Studios collection isn't the only discovery in the Burr theatre project. Underneath the auditorium is an old ravine — the building actually sits on piles. Before it was covered by the the­atre in 1927, people had been throwing their garbage into the ravine for decades. All sorts of relics have been found, including pottery and remnants of the orig­inal theatre facade.
  "We haven't even done a dig yet, this is all just lying on the surface down there," said Wolf.
  "It's quite incredible. Inside it's a historic garbage dump of New Westminster going back to the 1860s."