Old Cathedral City IMAX to become Carol Channing Playhouse, will 'perform musicals and attract bigger stars'
Bruce Fessier
If all goes well, a new 220-seat Carol Channing Playhouse for a wide range of performing arts will anchor a downtown arts and entertainment district in Cathedral City as early as January of 2019.
The nonprofit Coachella Valley Repertory has announced that Rancho Mirage-based actress Carol Channing has agreed to lend her name to a Cathedral City building it hopes to start renovating by February. The theatre company agreed in July 2016 to buy the UltraStar Desert Cinemas movie theater and two adjoining restaurants from the city’s nonprofit City Urban Revitalization Corporation for $1 million. It’s now raising funds and hoping Channing’s friends will organize a national committee to raise $3 million for the renovation.
“(Dancer-choreographer) Tommy Tune said at her 95th birthday party (at the McCallum Theatre) he wanted to make sure Carol’s name lives on, like with the Helen Hayes and the John Barrymore theaters in New York,” said board member Sid Craig. “Everybody’s crazy about her.”
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“Once Sid goes to all of his lead people that he wants to go to, then we open it up to the public at large,” added founder and artistic director Ron Celona, “Because online, she’s loved by people all over the country and $20 from a lot of people is a lot of money.”
Channing, 96, has won five Tony Awards and is a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. The board plans to put a Carol Channing plaque in its lobby, and have a marquee near Highway 111 and Cathedral Canyon Drive saying The Carol Channing Playhouse: Home of the Coachella Valley Repertory.
Channing’s friends say she is frail, but in good health. Sylvia Long, who holds Channing’s power of attorney as widow of her favorite cousin, said Channing is “thrilled” by the honor.
“She said, ‘Of course I’d like to see my name on a theater.' You know how she is," Long said. "So funny.”
Her trustee, Gary Hall of Wells Fargo Bank, and other supporters had tried unsuccessfully to get a street named after her in Rancho Mirage. So, he, too, said Channing is thrilled.
“This is a woman who says the arts are fertilizer for the brain,” he said. “So, to have a theater of substance named after her is very important to her. To be able to see her name on a theater that everybody goes by 30,000 times a day, that’s awesome. Ultimately, it turned out to be better (than a street sign).”
The CVRep received a matching grant for $550,000 from the Downtown Cathedral City Foundation last month. Celona said that gave donors the confidence to believe the move from the company’s 86-seat theater in The Atrium in Rancho Mirage to a larger, more modern facility with greater visibility from Highway 111 could happen. The CVRep board committed to raising $1.5 million by the end of the year to start the phase one construction by February.
Phase two and three, including the lobby renovation, public areas and the building exterior, will be completed “in a timely manner as we continue our fund-raising.
“Some of these donations had been pledged out for several years,” said Celona. “We asked our donors if they would be willing to move their donation up to November-December this year so we could actually pull the trigger on this and the majority of them have agreed to do that. So we’re very excited.”
Major gifts include $250,000 from McCallum Theatre and Palm Springs International Film Festival board chairman Harold Matzner, and CVRep board members Carol and James Egan. The Barbara Fremont Foundation has donated $150,000 for the renovation of the box office, the Angel Family Foundation is contributing $100,000 for the back entrance, and David Hood and George Sellers are providing $100,000 for the renovation of the theater’s concession stand.
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The revamped theater will provide an expanded stage, fly space, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound to be able to perform musicals and attract bigger stars. There also will be substantially more office space for the organization’s staff.
Chris Parman, Cathedral City Communications and Events Manager, and LGBT Liaison to City Executives, said the city is “extremely excited" to have Channing's name grace its main artery.
“We think Carol Channing is known world-wide, is a major entertainer and known in the valley, and has lived in the valley for numerous years,” Parman said. “I think it will be wonderful that our downtown entertainment district will have the Carol Channing Playhouse anchoring the west side and the Mary Pickford Theatre anchoring the east side. Having those two wonderful stars and theaters named after them is a great opportunity for Cathedral City.”
The city hasn't passed a resolution or proclamation declaring the downtown area an arts and entertainment district, but Parman said it has been a city goal to make it a destination for film, live performing arts, festivals, restaurants, gaming and art galleries.
The area already has “15 or 16” art and design galleries on Perez Road accessible from the civic center by a walking bridge, plus the Scrap Gallery behind the Trilusa restaurant. It’s next step to develop an arts and entertainment district after the Carol Channing Playhouse will be an amphitheater and Festival Lawn.
The city hopes to break ground on that in March and complete it by the end of 2018 or early 2019, said Parman. The amphitheater won’t have permanent seats and rigging like the Rancho Mirage Community Park amphitheater, but it is expected to have a capacity of 2,000 standing people. Music acts will be expected to do their own set-ups, or “plug-and-play,” and temporary seats will be available. City festivals such as Glo Fest, the Hot Air Balloon Festival, LGBT Days and Taste of Jalisco will utilize the amphitheater, but the city will have the flexibility to do other activities or just use it as a park.
“It will be an amphitheater that will allow us to do multiple use,” said Parman. “If we’re not using it as an amphitheater it can be used for an art show or having food trucks in there. Also, we’ll have a playground area. We hope people will use it on a daily basis for a walking path that will be in there.”
The arts and entertainment district is expected to be expanded further east if and when the Agua Caliente Band of Cabazon Indians clear government hurdles to begin building a new casino on 13 acres north of Highway 111 at Date Palm Drive. Parman said the tribe has an application before the Bureau of Indian Affairs to add that commercially-zoned land to its tribal trust land, but said he didn’t know if the tribe plans to include a casino showroom to offer major concert acts like the Agua Caliente, Fantasy Springs and Spotlight 29 casinos.
“I can say they have the right to do that as part of their agreement with the city for purchasing the land,” he said. “They also have the right to build a hotel. But they haven’t announced any plans at this time.”