| (First in a series). It's Richard Doty's favorite trick, and he never tires of performing it. "Stay here," he told my wife Gail and me last Friday afternoon, "and I'll go down and give you a demonstration." Before descending the two flights of stairs from the Academy of Music's upper balcony, however, he took a couple of small pieces of metal out of his pocket and dropped them on the floor. They made a faint sound on the wooden boards, less than you'd expect from an Academy mouse. Doty grinned like a magician getting ready to saw his assistant in half. Moments later, he peered up at us from the temporary stage more than 100 feet below. "Remember those little pieces of metal?" he asked. He dropped them again, and we heard the same sound — proof, Doty has repeated over and over, that the Academy's acoustics are among the best in the world. "There's very little steel in here," he said. "Steel is notorious for deadening sound." For several minutes, our conversation leaped from stage to upper balcony and back again, carried out in normal speaking tones. I used to read about Richard Doty's efforts on behalf of the faded old theater, and I imagined someone with a tweed jacket and pipe. Instead, the man waiting for us outside the Academy wore jeans and a sweatshirt and an old baseball cap. Doty is a hands-on Academy buff. "I'm an electrician by trade," he said, "and every light that works in here, I put in. I'm just too dumb to know that it can't be done." "It" being the restoration of the place to its pre-1920s glory, when it hosted Paderewski and Pavlova and Houdini and Sarah Bernhardt and John Philip Sousa. When "Ben Hur" was performed there, before Charlton Heston was born, and eight brawny stagehands hauled live horses up from the railroad siding in back so they could be used to stage the chariot race scene. Doty (who says he's interested in theater because his daughters are) never even heard of the Academy until 1990, when someone gave him a tour. Now, he'll show up at the drop of a hint, greeting visitors with the gusto of Fantasy Island's Mr. Roarke. "I collect stories about this place," he said, "and I'm always looking for more." According to Doty, the news of victory in Europe in 1945 was first announced on the Academy stage during a movie, whereupon the patrons poured out onto Main Street in mid-film. "Eleanor Roosevelt stood on this stage once," he said. Well, sort of. The stage she stood on is gone now, and wooden shards of the "fly tower" above it lie shattered in a grassy alley behind the building, and a temporary bandage of sheet metal is protecting the rear of the Academy from the elements (the roof was wrenched off by the now-infamous 1993 windstorm.). Dust lies thick on the old theater seats and in the upper balcony once reserved for black patrons. The Academy of Music was first a performance hall, then a movie theater, then a municipal corpse. It sat decaying for years near the intersection of Main and Fifth streets, until the Friends of the Academy was formed to prevent its demise. It almost came down, anyway, but that's another story. What I couldn't help thinking about, as Doty led us up and down the rickety stairs and pointed out the magnificent art work masked by 75 years of grime, was how many uses this building could be put to — music of all kinds, plays, dance performances. Petrus Bosman, dance director at the Virginia School for the Arts, almost salivates when he talks about it. Someone should put up a big sign over the Academy entrance with two words: "Why not?" What's a few million these days for something that would be unique to our city? "I'd like to see it finished in time to have one hell of a blowout on the night of Dec. 31," Richard Doty said, "but I'll settle for 2002." Wednesday: The Virginia School for the Arts. Laurant is local columnist for The News & Advance. He can be reached via e-mail at todurl@hotmail.com. |