After a grueling 10 months of restoration, the historic Malco Theatre in downtown Hot Springs is a little more than a month away from its grand reopening.
Magician Maxwell Blade regained possession of the building last year in August and began the restoration project with plans to relocate the Maxwell Blade Theater of Magic to the Malco from its current downtown location at 121 Central Ave.
This will be Blade's second time occupying the theater. He first acquired the building in 1995 when he and his family moved to Hot Springs. He began performing magic there in August of 1996 and moved out in 2007.
Blade said he originally planned for the Malco to reopen on June 1 of this year but a major rewiring project set the crew back about 30 days.
"You do a project this size, things are going to hold you up," he said. "Especially when we rewired the entire building, because it's four floors. So we're about 30 days late but that's not bad for a project this size. We have a new digital marquee out front, all the neon has been repaired. We wanted to keep it deco and I think we've achieved that, sort of keeping the aesthetics. We'll have brand-new velvet curtains in next week, beautiful new curtains, and then I'll start putting together the show."
Blade said he hopes to open the theater for his first show on the weekend of July 4.
"Next week the curtains get hung, the seats come in next Thursday, we'll paint the floor and by the end of next week, this will be a theater," he added.
The theater will seat 320 on the ground floor and approximately 75 in the balcony area. Blade said he plans to install tables and chairs on the balcony and turn it into a VIP area.
In addition to the rewiring of the building, new lighting and sound and a brand-new, heat-and-air system were also installed.
Large screens will be placed on opposite ends of the theater for close-up magic, and Blade said a third screen will be placed in the center for movie screenings.
"Maybe we'll use the theater for when someone wants to show a film, or during the film festival we'll host some films here. Not only is this my theater but we're going to use it for everything -- it's a downtown theater. We needed a real downtown theater and we've really been able to achieve that," he said.
The restrooms on the second floor have been restored, and restrooms have also been installed on the first floor, for a total of eight restrooms in the theater.
In the process of restoring the building, Blade and his crew uncovered a large mural on one of the walls going up the grand staircase to the second floor.
"We pulled the wallpaper off the walls -- it was big, 6-foot industrial wallpaper and we peeled it off and there it was," Blade said. "We're trying to find the artist. It's like a mystery; we have no idea who the artist is. We'd like to know."
He said that he believes the mural was painted in the 1940s.
"Picasso did an entire series of these characters and that's probably where the idea came from. Surely someone knows who did it," he said.
He added that he plans to paint a frame around the mural and leave it on the wall.
"I've found all kinds of stuff. Nothing quite as cool (as the mural). We've found a lot of little things lying around the balcony, old tickets and all kinds of little signage. I've saved it all. A lot of the stuff we've found we'll have in the museum," Blade said.
Blade's Odditorium and Curiosity Museum will also move to its new location right next to the Malco, though it will not be ready to open at the same time as the theater due to time constraints.
Video producer Eric Manuel has been working on a documentary about the Malco Theatre since October of last year. Titled "The Malco Theatre, A Personal Journey," the film will cover the history of the building beginning in 1910 when it was still the Princess Theater.
"We'll have a screening of it here and we'll probably play a lot of it, a little condensed version, every night before the show just so people can see it and get an idea of what we actually achieved here," Blade said. "Picture it eight months ago and this place was in bad shape."
Local on 06/11/2017