When the curtain goes up at East High, the school’s talented musicians, singers, dancers, actors and spoken-word artists have a well-deserved reputation for creating an enchanting world onstage. That’s good, because East’s real-life theater is one of the most awkward, uninspiring performance venues in the county, if not the state.
Consider the orange plastic bowling chairs, bolted to a concrete floor. These backbreakers may have been the height of utilitarian chic when East’s original theater was remodeled in the early 1970s, but they’re hardly conducive to long performances. In fact, after a two-hour play or a 90-minute concert, ardent fans have been heard quietly cursing the theater’s discomfort even as they praise the quality of the performances.
Then there’s the cramped, inadequate size of the theater, also a legacy of the remodeling that transformed the original, elegant Jazz Age theater with a 765-seat capacity into two study halls, one of which now doubles as the theater/auditorium.