The April 3rd performance of Romeo and Juliet by the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre at 8:00pm marks the Grand Re-Opening of the expanded Stanley Center for the Arts.

NEWSChannel 2 News was there with LIVE coverage during our 5:00pm and 6:00pm news with your first glimpse of the world class stage that the Stanley Theatre has become.

TIMELINE

The Stanley Theatre first opened its doors on September 10th, 1928. The very next day, the silent film "Ramona" was played on the silver screen.

Thomas Lamb, a prolific theatre architect, designed this 2,945 seat movie palace for the Mastbaum chain of theaters. The theatre was named for Stanley, one of the Mastbaum brothers.

1958 was a big year for the Stanley and the city of Utica. The Broadway Theater League came to town to perform "Auntie Mame".

The Stanley was actually set to be torn down as part of an urban renewal project in 1974!  But the Central New York Community Arts Council wouldn't let that happen. It bought the theater to keep it open.

Since then, more than $5,000,000 helped keep the theater functional. July of 2006 marked the groundbreaking for the multi-million dollar project being celebrated now.

That brings us to March 27th, 2007, the last show before the major renovation work was set to begin. The Wynton Marsalis Orchestra took the stage in a historic performance that closed one era and opened a new one for the theatre set to become the Stanley Center for the Arts.

While the Stanley Theatre has been renovated over the years for both safety and aesthetic purposes, this is the first major expansion of the original building.  The goals of this expansion included:

This expansion provides the facilities necessary for shows that could only be found in larger cities before.