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David O’Leary
With a bit of help from NS Communities, Culture and Heritage, Evergreen Theatre staged its re-opening in February this year with concerts by Ben Caplan, Hillsburn, Rose Cousins, and Hauler. Given our rather small pandemic seating limits (40 or so folks) the shows were almost instant sell-outs and went off without a hitch while following all Covid-19 precautions.
The May lockdown forced the postponement of Sahara Jane and Ken Shorley and a visit from Newfoundland’s Quote the Raven. Those two shows have been rescheduled to July 17 and October 1 respectively. Evergreen is in negotiation with a raft of new artists for the summer and fall and will be putting out a schedule in the near future.
It has been three years since we unveiled our fancy new addition, which brought indoor plumbing to our building for the first time in its 160-year-plus history, as well as a new lobby and an actual performers’ green room (no more costume changes behind the Stage Right curtains). We put our enforced shutdown to good use and focused on our auditorium, which had been relatively untouched by the renovations.
Heating has always been somewhat marginal at the Evergreen, as we were depending on a somewhat dodgy oil furnace that we had obtained second-hand from the Greenwood air force base some 20 years ago. Summer cooling was dependent on leaving all doors and windows wide open, which invited our plentiful biting insects (we are practically situated in the woods) to join our summer presentations. We continued our march from the 19th century directly into the 21st this winter by embarking on a full insulation of our auditorium and a replacement of our dying furnace with a heat pump setup. Our February and March concerts were presented in a toasty warm space and we can’t wait to experience our air-conditioned summer season.
Check us out at evergreentheatre.ca.
Photo courtesy of David O’Leary.
