Ham Hall facelift

Monday, Sept. 3, 2001 | 11:55 a.m.

The spirit of the late legendary jazz singer Joe Williams will always be seated in UNLV's Artemus Ham Concert Hall.

Recently Williams' wife, Jillean, made a donation to the UNLV Performing Arts Center to help fund a project to replace Ham Hall's 24-year-old seats, and in honor of her gift, a plaque with Joe Williams' name will be attached to a seat.

Other, less well-known benefactors also are contributing money and having their names -- or the names of loved ones -- memorialized in the concert hall.

Myron Martin, director of the Performing Arts Center, says for a minimum donation of $1,000 a person will have a seat named in his or her honor in the main section of the mezzanine. For areas not as well located, the minimum donation is $500.

"A couple of people went a step further and got two seats," Martin said.

One family will have eight seats in a row.

Martin said having one's name on a seat does not necessarily mean a person will get to sit there when attending an event. Having a plaque on a seat is not the same as having a season ticket.

"Having a name on a seat and a ticket to sit there are mutually exclusive," he said. "We have subscribers who have been sitting in the same seats for 20 years. They will have first choice."

For a $10,000 tax-deductible donation, a special plaque will identify the person as a patron of the arts.

"A couple of people didn't care about the plaque, they just said, 'Here's $10,000,' " Martin said.

Similar to Carnegie

Many of the hall's future seats already have names.

"We are now ready to begin another phase," Martin said. "We are going to offer the rows for naming. Each row, instead of just being Row A, might say Row A-MGM or some other corporate sponsor.

"As busy as this place is, having a name at the end of a row on an aisle will get a lot of exposure."

Martin said the Performing Arts Center has raised more than half of the $500,000 needed to replace the hall's 1,870 seats, which are beginning to show their age. The hall opened in 1977.

"The seats are frazzled, torn and not as comfortable," Martin said. "And burnt orange might have been popular 25 years ago, but not so much now."

Martin pointed out that the Hall has a distinguished history, providing Las Vegas with some of the city's best cultural events, from the New York Philharmonic to the Moscow Ballet.

"The concert hall has really served the community well," he said.

It is constantly in use, not only for concerts and other events hosted by the Performing Arts Center, but also by the university's College of Fine Arts, the Clark County School District and others.

Martin said when Kurt Masur, New York Philharmonic Orchestra conductor, was in Las Vegas heading the orchestra two years ago, the maestro commented that "the acoustics are excellent, as good as Lincoln Center. It is a pity that the hall is so shabby."

Wake-up call

Masur's comment was a wake-up call, Martin said.

The university recently painted the hall's interior, renovated the lobby with marble and new carpeting and hung new art on the walls.

"We are doing the renovation in phases," Martin said.

After the seats have been replaced, money will be raised to renovate the hall's sound and lighting systems. Then the women's restrooms will be expanded.

"We thought we would have this (seating phase) far enough along that we would have the seats done, like, right now," Martin said. "This is the time we had set aside for seat renovation."

The next target date to replace the seats is around Christmas. If that one is missed, then it may be next summer before the work can be done.

Krat's efforts

Martin said the bulk of the fund-raising effort has been done by Wendy Krat, who lives in Las Vegas three months of the year and spends nine months in New York raising funds for Carnegie Hall and other venues.

"She is a brilliant lady who understands there is a connection between helping the community and providing a venue for great artists," he said.

Martin said over the past two years ticket sales have more than doubled as the center has brought in some of best-known performers in the world, including the Moscow Grigorovich Ballet, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra and the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra.

"Take the world's greatest performers and put them in an acoustically great hall and the only thing left is to clean the hall up and fix it up a little bit," Martin said.

Jeffrey Koep, College of Fine Arts dean, said the university wants to return the hall to a first-class facility.

"We're not in competition with the Strip," Koep said. "We're a complement to it. I'd say 98 percent of the people who attend performances at the university are Las Vegans."

He said the center doesn't normally book headliners that appear on the Strip.

Culture's home

The Performing Arts Center, which also includes the Judy Bayley Theatre and the Alta Ham Black Box Theatre, has been a home for culture in Las Vegas for 30 years, Koep said.

In some way the environment surrounding a production is as important as the production itself, he said.

"Your theater-going experience begins when you buy the ticket," Koep said.

An unfriendly ticket salesperson or a shabby theater can ruin an otherwise good experience, he said.

"If you've made a commitment as a patron to spend a couple of hours at a performance, the overall experience isn't just those two hours at the theater," Koep said. "It also includes driving to and from the theater, maybe eating a meal. It's a total evening, and you don't want it to be interrupted by rude personnel and when you arrive at the theater.

"This is an exaggeration: You would like not to see the walls falling down, paint peeling and tripping over carpet coming up."

Koep said Las Vegas "deserves a good home for the artists who perform here, a place where patrons can go and enjoy them."

Jerry Fink is an Accent feature writer. Reach him at jerry@lasvegassun.com or at (702) 259-4058.

archive