Copious Notes

William Watts, director of the Library Foundation, stands on the stage of the 144-seat library theater. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Doug Tattershall walks to the back of the control booth in the theater at the ­Lexington Public Library downtown, opens the door on a cabinet and rolls out an extra-special item: a record player.

And not just a turntable, but a changer ready for stacks of wax.

It sits right below an analog radio tuner.

Yes, this theater could use some updating.

“Everything is over 20 years old,” Tattershall says.

The antiquated equipment in the control room of the library theater includes a vinyl record player and analog radio tuner.

Lexington Public Library Foundation director William Watts says, “We were told that we couldn’t even get parts anymore for a lot of this ­equipment.”

Thanks to a $268,644 ­challenge grant from the W. Paul and Lucille Caudill Little Foundation, help could be on the way. If the challenge is met by July, $100,000 of the more than $537,000 will go into an endowment to ­maintain the five-story Foucault ­pendulum clock that Lucille Little ­donated to the library in 2001, and the remainder will be used for theater renovations.

“This is a very worthwhile program,” Watts says. “The Little Foundation is very ­interested in arts and the ­theater. They had funded the clock and wanted to protect that investment. We talked to them about how they could also help the theater.”

The library theater is not a major area venue, but it has hosted numerous groups and events, ­including productions by the Jazz Arts Foundation, ­the Apprentice ­Players, ActOut, the now-defunct Phoenix Group ­Theatre, the One World Film Festival and countless political debates.

It can be a boon for some groups; not-for-profit entities may use the theater for free.

Paying for space can be a huge issue for small artists and groups.

Renovations will go well beyond the outdated ­control room.

Backstage, the dressing rooms are being used for storage. The movie screen sits far back on the stage, away from the audience, and the lighting is far from state-of-the-art.

The renovation plan calls for staggering the seating, which now is in ­regimented rows that would make a military officer proud but isn’t great if you are trying to see around the person in front of you on the fairly flat theater floor.

“Sight lines are ­certainly a problem because this ­theater does not have ­staggered seating,” Janet Scott, a Lexington actor who has produced plays in the theater, says in a fund-raising video.

Annette Mayer, ­chairwoman of the One World Film Festival, says, “We would love to have a ­situation where everybody could see the screen.”

David McWhorter, ­president of the Jazz Arts Foundation, says the ­theater’s harsh lighting makes it difficult to produce video of the group’s monthly concerts.

And everyone in the fund-raising video ­emphasize the library’s central ­location: So many people are library ­patrons and know where it is.

Now, they just need to get the theater out of the vinyl era.

WVLK's Jack Pattie, who has been playing Santa Claus the last few years. He will return to his roots, Lexington Children's Theatre, for a benefit peformance April 25. Photo by Matt Goins | LexGo.com.

A 70th-anniversary party calls for more than one ­celebration, and in reality, the Lexington Children’s Theatre wanted to have two anyway.

So the celebrations will commence with an 18-cake birthday party on Saturday, ­followed by a celebrity  retrospective of LCT’s past seven decades on April 25.

“It just makes me feel old,” Children’s Theatre director Larry Snipes jokes, when asked about the anniversary. Then, looking at the Celebrity Curtain Call show that he is directing, he says, “We wanted to look at what this theater has produced over the last 70 years, and we wanted to have some fun with it.”

The April 25 show will feature excerpts from many of the theater’s past plays over the theater’s seven decades, starting with Noah’s Flood in 1939 up to How I Became a Pirate, which will close out the current season.

It helps that numerous local celebrities are LCT veterans, including WVLK-590 AM radio personality Jack Pattie, actor and attorney Pam Perlman, WLAP-630 AM reporter Karyn Czar and Lexington Center director Bill Owen among others.

“Jack Pattie and I always had supporting roles, and Jim Varney got all the good parts,” says Owen, whose job has him in charge of Rupp Arena and the Lexington Opera House among other facilities.

Varney, who grew up in Lexington, went on to worldwide fame as the goofball character Ernest P. Worrell in television commercials and movies. He died in 2000.

Owen will actually reprise one of his roles, from a play called The Goblin’s Goblin.

Among the other celebs in the show will be Lexington Legends president Alan Stein and his wife, state Sen. Kathy Stein, D-Lexington, who will perform the scene from Tom Sawyer wherein which Tom asks Becky to marry him.

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