The historic Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Complex in the heart of downtown Toronto boasts a unique status--it is the world's only surviving Edwardian-period stacked theater.
Elgin Theatre History
The theater was built as Loew's Yonge Street Theatre and Winter Garden in 1913, the former on the lower deck, with the latter atop. The architect was Thomas W. Lambe, and the owner was American entrepreneur Marcus Loew, who founded the Loew group of theaters in 1905. By the time Loew arrived in Canada, the empire had grown from storefront silent movie shows to a chain of lavish entertainment venues featuring vaudeville and live theatrical entertainment.
Seating audiences of over 2,000, the Yonge Street Theatre possessed a luxurious, ornate interior in the classical style, but the rooftop Winter Garden, despite its slightly smaller size, was even more impressive, deriving its name from the flowers, plants and murals adorning its ceiling. Sadly, the Winter Garden was to shut in 1928 as audience interest in vaudeville declined. Meanwhile, the Yonge Street Theatre was rewired to accommodate talking pictures, and it remained open as a movie theater. In 1978, it was renamed the Elgin Theatre.
Elgin Theatre and Winter Garden Revival and Restoration
In 1981, the Ontario Heritage Trust bought the complex, when the Elgin Theatre was still being used as a cinema, despite its increasingly poor condition. In 1982, both theaters in the complex were designated National Historic Sites. Before the trust set about a full restoration, the theater housed the Canadian production of CATS, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that had already proved a smash hit in London's West End and on Broadway.
Following the end of the show's run, the trust began a costly and time-consuming restoration of the entire complex. From 1987 until its reopening in 1989, work on the Elgin Theatre restoration cost $29 million. According to the trust's official website, cleaning the Winter Garden's hand-painted artwork required "hundreds of pounds of raw bread dough" to avoid damage, and 300,000 aluminum sheets were used in restoring the Elgin's gilt plaster detail. The new Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Centre opened in December 1989.
Since then, the complex has become one of Toronto's most cherished cultural attractions, bringing in audiences from near and far for plays, musicals, concerts and comedy shows, as well as thousands of national and international tourists every year. Its most celebrated productions have included Aspects of Love, The Who's rock opera Tommy, Shakespeare's King Lear with British thesp Kenneth Branagh and the hit Broadway shows Rent and Avenue Q.
See Shows at Toronto's Elgin Theatre and Winter Garden
Winter 2010-2011 sees the premiere of Ross Petty's Beauty and the Beast, a new version of the classic fairy tale. 2011 will see the Canadian Christopher Plummer playing screen and stage legend John Barrymore in the play Barrymore.
The theater complex is easily accessible by public transport, with the TTC Queen Street subway station just half a block away. The box office is open from 11am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday. Phone 416-872-5555 for information and tickets.
