a poor player

Dunkirk NY

“Birmingham Birmingham

Greatest city in Alabam

You can travel ‘cross this entire land

There ain’t no place like Birmingham”   -Randy Newman

Well, it’s back from the SETC Conference. With the change in time, I’ve actually lost two hours today; one from the change to Daylight Savings Time, and one from going from the Central back to the Eastern Time Zone. But I have to get this post up before I go into serious rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet starting tomorrow.

The Prof and I had a wonderful day yesterday getting our fill of downtown Birmingham. Actually, it began on Friday night when we went to the Five Point district to grab some Thai food. Five Points is a very nice entertainment district that has a number of restaurants, night life hot spots, coffeehouses, and panhandlers. Considering that it is in the neighborhood of the University of Alabama-Birmingham, no doubt there is a lot of college nightlife going on in the district. I was amazed, as Scott drove me back to my hotel, to find ourselves in a lot of traffic on the interstates. Things were very very busy.

Saturday we got the the conference hotel about 8:45 AM. Scott wanted to check out a session which was about traveling shows in the 19th and early 20th centuries (the Toby Show was an example). Me, I blew off the conference as there was really nothing I was interested in. I had given up conferences many years ago, and I can tell you that over the years nothing changed. I actually made the attempt to go to a workshop late on Thursday after the keynote which was a workshop on Viola Spolin games, but once the facilitator let someone get hurt because he didn’t restrain the overenthusiasm of a player who was clearly out of control, that was it for me. While Scott got his Toby on, I checked out the sites to see.

It was clear the must-see place was the Civil Rights District. We walked over to Kelly Ingram Park, which was the city park where a lot of the action during the Civil Rights days took place. It now houses a number of statues around a Freedom Walk, starting with ministers in prayer, and containing a number of somewhat interactive statues. There was a statue featuring water canons aimed at people, kids in jail, and “Bull” Connors’ dogs being unleashed. There is also a statue to Martin Luther King facing the Sixteenth Baptist Church.

16th St. Baptist Church

We then took a tour of the Civil Rights Institute. It also stands across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. For those not in the know, the Sixteenth Baptist Church is the church where four young girls lost their lives when the church was bombed by segregationists in 1963. This entire district was once one of the “official Negro neighborhoods” in the days of segregation, and the area has become an historic district.  The Institute itself is stunning and inspiring. You first view a quick film which give you the history of Birmingham up until the early 20th century. Then the screen lifts and you are brought through a very visual and informative history of segregation and integration. Everything is there: newspaper clippings, video of the confrontations between police and demonstrators, a portion of MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the Freedom Riders, integrating the public schools and universities, MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington, and much more. There was even one video where you listened to a collection of upstanding white citizens explaining how wise segregation really was. I didn’t realize until I read the newspaper report on one of the exhibitions that Scott and I were there on the 44th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, the day that civil rights marchers tried to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge outside Selma, AL and were brutally beaten back by armed state troopers on horseback. 17 demonstrators were hospitalized, and the brutality of the Alabama state troopers was broadcast all across the nation on TV.  All in all, the tour of the Institute was much better than anything a theatre workshop could have offered.

We then took a walking tour of the district. We toyed about going into the Jazz Museum, but Scott had to leave about 4PM, so we passed it up. As we were walking through the district, our radar went up when we saw a building with a huge fire escape coming down from the third floor. The word “Lyric” was fading on the brick, and Scott and I knew we had to find out if the building was an old theatre. As we walked around the block we came upon the Alabama Theatre, the “Showplace of the South.”

We took a peek into the Alabama first, and it was one of those classic Paramount Theatres built in the 1920s, an elaborate and ornate movie theatre with three floors seating over 2,000 people at its height. We weren’t sure if we could go in, since there was some teen dance competition taking place, but the man who was sitting right at the front door came up to us and began explaining the history of the place and told us to go ahead and take a look around. We did – quite the ornate structure! It is home to one of the few “Mighty Wurlitzers” left in the country.

But the big surprise was yet to come. When we were ready to leave, our host, Dan Liles, asked if we

Our Host Dan Liles poses outside the Alabama Theatre

wanted to go see the Lyric. We thought he meant the outside of the building where we was the fire escape. Wrong. He meant the inside of that building. Dan, it turns out, is a local theatre historian and works as a volunteer for a group trying to restore the Lyric. He had the key, and he took us inside for a tour of the building.

The Lyric is in really bad shape, but when you walk inside of it, there is an aura about the place which is unmistakable. Here is a real theatre, an old gem, a place where the vaudeville acts of the day came to play in their heyday. Sophie Tucker, the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle – they all played the Lyric.

The first thing I noticed was a painted oleo still hanging, with the word “Asbestos” painted on it. Above the proscenium arch was a wonderful mural. Guilded box seats, old filagre, a high ceiling which had four chandeliers hanging from it at one time. The fly space was twice as high as from floor to the top of the proscenium arch, and the grid was still there, all wood. The foot lights were also in place sans actual bulbs. The floor was rotting, there were no seats, another dismantled organ was in the space,

The oleo in the Lyric Theatre

as was a piano used in the pit. Dan told us it would take $15 million to restore, and his organization has $5 million. If you’ve ever been in the Brooklyn Academy of Music when it first re-opened as was left in a somewhat deteriorated state, you would have some idea of the kind of state the Lyric was in, and the kind of emotions you can feel when you’ve stepped back in time through one of these theatres.

Scott and I finished our day eating BBQ at Dreamland, which is the BBQ icon of Birmingham just off the Five Points area. Good stuff. I took on a half-slab of ribs, while Scott tried a BBQ chicken sandwich. They also served the whitest white bread I have seen in a long time, with some sauce for dipping. Nice.

All in all, a great day. The Prof and I talked theatre, saw some great and inspiring sites, got an inside look at a Birmingham landmark, and all during a 70º day full of sunshine. It was very invigorating, stimulating and fun. Going back to work tomorrow will be a drag.

The piéce de resistance? Here you go:

Section of a replica playbill from the Lyric Theatre

You can see all the pictures I took during the day right here.   -twl