CLEVELAND — When the newly renovated Hanna Theatre reopened earlier this fall, the moving set pieces for the opening production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth were lifted by 48 PowerLift Automated Hoists, which were provided by J. R. Clancy, Inc. and installed by Beck Studios. The theatre, which is the year-round home for the Great Lakes Theater Festival, has been transformed from its previous existence as a circa 1921 Broadway tour house with an old-fashioned hemp and counterweight rigging system. It’s now the only theatre in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square with a computer-controlled automated rigging system.
The Hanna Theatre’s history includes six decades of service as the leading Broadway touring house in Cleveland, hosting performances by Noel Coward, Henry Fonda, Helen Hayes, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, among others.
The theatre went dark in 1988 when Broadway tours moved to a newer theatre in Playhouse Square. The venue then underwent a renovation that converted the theatre into a cabaret-style performance space. It operated in this form until December 2007, when it closed for its current reconstruction.
Designed by Westlake Reed Leskosky, the revamped Hanna Theatre’s $14.7 million renovation reduced the house to 500 seats — down from the original 1,400 — with no seat more than 11 rows from the action onstage. Innovative seating arrangements include banquettes for groups, table configurations and boxes as well as traditional theatre seats.
Backstage, along with J.R. Clancy’s automated rigging system, the theatre now has a hydraulic system to add flexibility to the thrust stage configuration.
Atlantic Industrial Technologies, Turner Construction, J. R. Clancy and MG McLaren Engineering collaborated on the theatre’s three hydraulic lifts, which can change the configuration of the stage at two feet per second. The project was made possible by a donation of parts from industrial lift manufacturer Parker-Hannifin.
Great Lakes Theater Festival performs in rotating repertory, so automated rigging helps the company change from one major production’s sets to another.
“We have 48 separate line sets in here, each one of which can carry 1,250 pounds,” noted Charles Fee, producing artistic director of Great Lakes Theater Festival. They’re all electronically operated by computer, and we can move 12 of them simultaneously, each at a different speed or in a different direction. We’ll change over from Macbeth to Into the Woods in two hours — reconfigure the whole theatre with our deck crew in two hours. That is nothing, really. It used to take 10 hours to do a significant changeover.”
The theatre uses J.R. Clancy’s SceneControl 500 motion control system, which can move up to 12 line sets simultaneously, even if each line set moves at a different speed. Since only one person is required to run the SceneControl system, the show doesn’t need as many operators.
The Hanna Theatre is also equipped with a portable pendant, which lets stagehands control the 48 PowerLifts and the three hydraulic stage lifts remotely, moving to whatever spot offers the best line of sight.
Along with the rigging and lifts, J.R. Clancy installed a Zetex fire curtain with a powered brail winch and eight gallery-mounted, moving portable light ladders on HD tracks.
For more information, please visit www.jrclancy.com.
