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The Dallas Morning News
(MCT)
NEW ORLEANS - The stinking, moldy Orpheum Theater off Canal Street sits silent and abandoned, its stage warped and wood floors buckled, no longer suitable for the likes of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and Marvin Hamlisch.
Floods from Hurricane Katrina left the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra homeless. Instead of playing in its renowned theater, it has been ricocheting from churches to local universities for a year.
But a Dallas investor's interest has the area's performing-arts community hoping for a revival of the historic venue. Richard Weyand, whose new Weyand Properties Inc. bought the historic building for $675,000 in June, has said only that he hopes the orchestra will be able to play there again one day.
To performers, that's a start, considering that every one of the city's venues for opera, symphony and large theater productions was closed by the storm and none has reopened.
"I'm thrilled that it's sold," said former owner Adelaide Benjamin, an orchestra advisory board member. "I hope that the buyer will let us still play in it without raising our rent too much. I've heard that he's an honest man and that he's going to do what he says. That's all I know."
Weyand got a bargain, since the previous owners paid more than $2 million for it in 1989. That group of New Orleans residents has been trying to sell it for years, and said they were seeking assurances from buyers that they had interest in opening it as a performance hall - although nothing legally binds Weyand to do so.
The nonprofit theater, with acoustics that some say are better than Carnegie Hall, was already in need of renovation before the flood, theater owners said. They estimate it needs $4 million and at least two years of work. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places and therefore subject to restrictions on how it's developed.
Weyand, an alumnus of Southern Methodist University, has had interests in real estate, energy, sports teams, churches, and golf courses in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi over the years and numerous nonprofit and for-profit ventures, but there's no record of him investing in the performing arts before.
The investor, who did not return repeated phone calls to his Dallas office and Frisco, Texas, home, reportedly has ties to Monroe, La., and has invested money in New Orleans-area businesses in the past. In July, he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he is "planning to restore the theater and planning to work closely with the (orchestra), hoping they will use the theater a major portion of its open time."
In spite of its hardships, the symphony has managed to hang onto all but six of its 66 musicians and booked a full 2007 season of more than 50 performances.
But lack of a home means it will be performing in at least five different venues, including Tulane University.
The Orpheum Theater was built in 1924, a Beaux Arts style, four-story building that began as a vaudeville house that once featured the Marx Brothers. It went on to become a movie house and adult-movie theater, and finally became a performing arts space for about 1,200 spectators. It was designated as a historic building in 1980.
"Not a day that goes by that I don't get a phone call from someone asking when the Orpheum's going to reopen, or when the symphony will start playing there again, or if it will," said Babs Mollere, the orchestra's director.
The demise of the theater is heartbreaking, said violinist Burt Callahan, 53, who has been in the orchestra for almost 15 years.
"When you consider that a huge chunk of our life has been in that theater - and we're talking thousands and thousands of performances - it's like someone took a part of your heart and threw it out and stomped on it," said Callahan, who was evacuated by helicopter from his Uptown neighborhood. "Living in New Orleans right now is so frustrating. We're depending on an audience, and you don't even know if you're going to have basic services in parts of the city."
Hurricane Katrina did more than soak the basement wiring and cover the seats, which are below the street level, in floodwaters. It scattered the orchestra's musicians across the nation and destroyed most of their instruments, which were in the basement.
Harrowing personal stories and a nomadic, uncertain existence as an orchestra characterized the next 12 months.
"Many of these musicians have such a huge investment in this orchestra making it," she said. "They've been very resilient and very determined."
Callahan said the fact that someone could restore and reopen his theater is "unbelievable."
"We really believe in this orchestra," he said, "and to be able to survive this catastrophe with the city and for the arts to be able to come back, it's simply amazing."
Their hope has burgeoned to the point that performers and others envision an entire neighborhood revival led by Weyand.
Some of them would like their new - though as-yet uncommitted - benefactor to buy up the rest of the block and build a hotel around the theater. Nothing indicates that he will, but the rumors are circling - a sign, if nothing else, of the arts community's fervent hope that something good will come out of all the destruction.
"We can always use a quality hotel, certainly something that would be on the scale of the Fairmont or the Ritz. ... It would be a clever way to address a problem," said Robert Lyall, general and artistic director of the New Orleans Opera. "And if it also preserved and restored one of our important concert halls, that would be a beautiful thing."
Orleans Parish records show no other purchases by Weyand after the storm.
Since he created and licensed Weyand Properties Inc. in Louisiana in late April, he has borrowed at least $3.3 million, according to court records, to purchase the theater and three homes in the upper-end Lakeview neighborhood - most of which was destroyed by Katrina. Two million of that was for the Orpheum, more than double what he paid for the building - an indication that he plans to invest in its renovation.
Economic-development leaders say they welcome outside investors and were glad to hear about the purchase, particularly near Canal Street - and particularly in the theater district.
"We welcome the Orpheum back," said Cynthia Connick, executive director of the Canal Street Development Corp. "We were happy to see that someone did buy it, and that they do want to put it back to use as a theater."
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(Dallas Morning News correspondent Amy Eiermann contributed to this report.)
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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
