(nervous music) (nervous music continues) You drive by the Lyric or you walk by the Lyric, and you look in there and you see this abandoned, just awful looking place.

My parents brought me down here, and at that time, African Americans had to sit up in the balcony, but it was still exciting to come here, and it was always a place of wonder, a place of awe for me.

We have to listen to the building.

The building will tell us its history and what, you know, what it needs.

Every time I'm in the Lyric, I feel like there are stories swirling around me.

The Lyric Theatre is an amazing place.

It was built at the very pinnacle of vaudeville times.

For a while, it disappeared from Birmingham's landscape, nobody even knew where it was in the '70s.

And now it's made an incredible comeback.

(dramatic music) [Narrator] It's 1914, and showbusiness royalty is coming to the brand new Lyric Theatre.

A part of the prestigious B. F. Keith Vaudeville Circuit, the Lyric plays host to showbusiness greats like Will Rogers, Mae West, Jack Benny, Sophie Tucker, Buster Keaton, Milton Burl, the Marx Brothers!

At the Lyric, patrons enjoy the widest possible variety of entertainment: singers, dancers, acrobats, dancing dogs, acrobatic bears, cartoonists, comedians.

It all adds up to one amazing show at one amazing showplace.

About the turn of the century, vaudeville was sort of getting started, and there was a pro baseball player in Virginia named Jake Wells who walked into a hardware store, at least he thought it was a hardware store, to buy leather to wrap bats to carry bats with.

And he looked around, he said, "What is this place?"

And they said, "Well, this was an old opera house that we bought and turned into a hardware store."

So he filed that away in his memory, and later, when he retired from baseball, he went back and bought that opera house and he made a vaudeville theater out of it.

And it just was gangbusters, he made a lot of money, it was well-known everywhere.

A guy named B. F. Keith, who was an agent for the Marx Brothers and Mae West and all the top vaudeville national stars of the day, heard about this.

So he went to see Jake Wells, and they decided to build 40 theaters in the South, where there were no theaters.

You know, Birmingham was an industrial city.

In a number of ways, you know, people love to talk about how Birmingham is not a typical Southern city.

In some ways, it was like a Northern industrial city that happened to be in the South.

But there was a great hunger for entertainment.

(lighthearted music) B. F. Keith had been a sort of entrepreneur, he'd worked with P. T. Barnum.

And so he was used to coming up with ideas that would appeal to audiences.

In the 1880s, he partnered with a man named E. F. Albee, and the two of them opened the first vaudeville house in America in Boston.

In its heyday, there were about 1,400 B. F. Keith theaters across the country.

There were three B. F. Keith theaters in Alabama, there was the Lyric in Birmingham, there was the Lyric in Mobile, and there was the Grand in Montgomery.

Now, the Lyric in Birmingham was the most recent of those theaters, the other two had opened some years earlier.

And the Lyric certainly is the most splendid-looking, if you will, of those houses.

The other two really can't compare to it.

The Lyric building, which includes the office building and the theater, was built in 1913, and it opened January 14th, 1914.

This neighborhood was really considered, like, Birmingham's Broadway, the state's Broadway in a number of ways, and it seems unbelievable to us now, but for most of the first half of the 20th century, there were 27 theaters within five blocks of where we're sitting.

In the '20s and '30s, Birmingham had one of the top 10 entertainment districts, theater districts in the entire nation.

And I'm certain that the Lyric played a great part of that.

When you can bring national entertainers like the Marx Brothers or Mae West or others, that was top-tier entertainment.

And to have that coming to Birmingham, you know, fueled the economy, it fueled growth, and it brought a creative class to Birmingham in the workforce that it probably had never seen before.

So it was an important thing to Birmingham, and it still is.

This is a vaudeville stage, this was built for vaudeville.

And vaudeville to me is entertainment.

It's just entertaining, and it's fast-moving.

(snaps) It's one act, next act, and it's sometimes great jokes, sometimes bad jokes, but you don't dwell on it 'cause it is moving.

In some ways, it was considered, like, the least literary of the theatrical arts but with this, would've had the widest appeal.

So much of what our entertainment is today came from the formula that vaudeville established.

You know, about timing and all of this sort of thing.

And so this is the ultimate in entertainment, in my opinion.

Number one, it's live, and you had to be on your game and you had to move.

On most nights in the teens and into the '20s, there were seven acts each night.

The vaudeville bills would begin with what was called a dumb act, that would be either acrobats or animal act, something while the audience was going into the theater, settling down, chatting with each other, didn't require any attention from the audience.

Your first tune is a throwaway.

You're not trying to project a joke or tell a story, it's just something they can kinda spend, the audience can spend the time saying, "He's kinda funny looking," you know, 'cause when you start, they're sizing you up and they're not hearing what you're saying or singing as far as, you know, getting down with it.

Then you'd have two or three other acts.

Then just before intermission, you'd have the man or the woman who was second on the bill, they would end the first act.

After the intermission, you'd start again with a dumb act, and then you would build up again, and then not your last act but your penultimate act, the last before the final act would be the headliner, who would maybe do 20 minutes, and then you would end with yet another dumb act.

I mean, vaudeville was great for dumb acts and nothing else.

We have this remarkable book that one of our volunteers compiled.

It is a list of every vaudeville performer who ever played the Lyric.

So sometimes that was comedians, dancers, diving acts, animal acts of every imaginable sort, cartoonists.

There were also some really interesting names in that book that I've never heard of.

Claudius and Scarlett, who were banjo players, and Dan the Drunken Dog, and others like that that I find really funny when you go through and read the names of the acts.

So there's just a wealth of stuff that has this, I don't know, this very appealing quality from another time, but somehow it really resonates with people, even now.

(playful music) There's a song that I performed a while back, and I thought of it, and it was the Birmingham Heritage Singers.

They recorded it in 1927, and it's called the "South Bound Passenger Train," and it's about Birmingham, and it is just a cute little old song, and I just love that thing.

And that's the type of tunes that would've been sung in this place during that time.

♪ Gonna ride ♪ ♪ I mean on that south bound passenger train ♪ ♪ I'm gonna buy me a ticket just as long as my arm ♪ ♪ I'm gonna ride that train, daddy, all night long ♪ ♪ Gonna ride ♪ ♪ I mean on that south bound passenger train ♪ ♪ Till I hear that old conductor say ♪ ♪ All out for Birmingham ♪ The wonderful thing about vaudeville, I think, is that each act was different.

So you could be sitting there in the theater and thinking, oh, this is dreadful, but you only have to wait 10 minutes, and something better will come along.

So it's not like, say, television or a movie today where if it's bad to begin with, it's going to be bad for the whole bloody evening, it's a big difference.

-♪ I'm gonna ride ♪ -♪ Gonna ride ♪ -♪ I mean on that south bound ♪ -♪ I mean, that ♪ -♪ Passenger train ♪ -♪ South bound passenger train ♪ ♪ I hear the engineer say ♪ ♪ Put your shovel in the coal ♪ ♪ Take your head out the window ♪ ♪ Watch the drivers roll ♪ -♪ I'm gonna ride ♪ -♪ Gonna ride ♪ -♪ I mean on that south bound ♪ -♪ I mean, that ♪ -♪ Passenger train ♪ -♪ South bound passenger train ♪ ♪ Until I hear that old conductor say ♪ ♪ All out for Birmingham ♪ (train whistles) (uneasy music) (uneasy music continues) From 1914 until about 1927, the Lyric was a vaudeville theater strictly.

Now, there were other theaters in town that were vaudeville theaters, and some of those actually showed silent pictures as well.

In the 1920s, vaudeville had competition from the motion picture.

They'd become very sophisticated, very glamorous, very popular with audiences.

You know, obviously showbusiness was changing really rapidly, especially in 1927 when Al Jolson utters these famous words, "You ain't heard nothin' yet," perfectly synchronized to the picture on the screen.

(playful music) ♪ Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye ♪ ♪ Toot, Toot, Tootsie, don't cry ♪ [Glenny] Vaudeville was already sort of on its way out by 1927.

♪ That takes me ♪ [Glenny] Places like the Lyric, what they began to do was add movies in addition to the live performance.

♪ And then, ow, ow ♪ ♪ Do it over again ♪ ♪ Watch for the mail ♪ ♪ I'll never fail ♪ "The Jazz Singer."

Suddenly, motion pictures were talking.

There was really little way that vaudeville could compete with the sound motion picture.

(lighthearted music) Places like the Lyric, what they began to do was add movies in addition to the live performance.

But suddenly, after 1927, Warner Brothers started offering vaudevillians.

Those would be small amount of money, a thousand dollars to put their acts on film, what were called Vitaphone shorts, to be played with the feature films.

So all these vaudevillians flocked to have their acts recorded on film, and therefore destroyed the act because audiences now could see it in a movie theater, they didn't want to see it again on the stage.

So that also was influential in the death of vaudeville.

In the 1920s and '30s, it's like a combination of live performance and movies.

By the '40s, it's almost all movies.

In the mid-'50s, they decide to try CinemaScope, right?

Like the IMAX of the 1950s.

These beautiful opera boxes really affected the sight lines, so they lopped them off the wall, so we had gaping holes on either side.

Even this splendid technology could not save the Lyric.

It closed in 1960.

(melancholy music) During the 1960s, as far as we know, nothing really happened in the auditorium.

We don't have a record of any movies being shown, of any live productions.

The lobby became a retail space.

It was a beauty supply company.

At some point, they put in a dropped ceiling and filled the three entryways with concrete blocks.

And the effect was sort of that the theater sat entombed, really, for a while.

It was open again in the '70s for a year as independent film house by a couple of college students.

They called it the Grand Bijou.

And in the Grand Bijou days, everybody came in the back doors.

The Grand Bijou, though, lasted less than a year.

Then in the '80s, the Lyric became a porn theater.

It was first known, I think, as the Foxy, and then the Roxy, or the Roxy, then the Foxy, I'm not sure which or whether it matters.

And under both of those names, it was a house of adult entertainment.

The late, great Cecil Whitmire, who was the house organist at the Alabama for 33 years, the way he liked to tell the story was that the last theatrical presentation here was a screening of the movie "Deep Throat" and that the projectionist was arrested after it had been playing for 10 days.

I several times have laughed, it's like, well, 10 days?

Everybody in town had seen it at that point, right?

But the Lyric's history is colorful to say the least.

(uneasy music) A few times, I have said that the Lyric was like this very interesting urban laboratory.

As if somebody said, "Hey, what happens to a building if you just don't touch it for like 40 years?"

What happens is that you'll get a few leaks, you'll get a lot of pigeons and bats, cats, trespassers, a few sorry graffiti artists, a few good ones.

But you know, this place really just sat empty for an astonishingly long time.

(haunting music) Well, the Lyric, as everybody knows, I mean, it was just there, and people would drive by and you'd wonder what was behind those walls.

And I was lucky enough every once in a while to get to go behind the walls, and it was not a pretty sight.

There were pigeons in there and all sorts of creepy-crawly things crawling on the floor and in the ceilings, and literally, I mean, there were birds and things in there.

Not the most beautiful thing.

For decades, you look in there and you think, my goodness, what happened behind those walls?

Who used to be on that stage?

Who used to be on that screen?

And then you'd think, well, that's never gonna happen again.

I mean, the place is just in too bad a condition.

It couldn't be brought back to life.

(uneasy music) Early in my career, one of my clients was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB MedWise.

It was an event they had annually at the Galleria.

It was a senior citizen's health fair, really.

One of my jobs was to book the celebrity talent for the event.

And they liked to have interesting people that the demographic seniors would be interested in.

Milton Berle.

(playful music) So Milton Berle came in on American Airlines, there was, you know, delays and delays through Dallas.

Got in about midnight.

We got in the limo, which I'd arranged, and we're driving to his hotel, which was way out at the Galleria because where the event was.

And he looked at me and he said, "Big John, do you know the last time I was in Birmingham, Alabama?"

And I was like, "Mr. Berle, I have no idea."

He said, "1927."

I was like, "That's a long time ago."

He said, "I played the Lyric Theatre in downtown Birmingham."

And I'm like, "Seriously?"

Milton Berle was in town, and he had played the Lyric in 1927.

So he came to see the Lyric again.

I got to the office the next morning and said, "You know, there's an opportunity here," so I called my friend who's a producer at FOX6.

And I thought, you guys might wanna, you know, come shoot it 'cause he's agreed to take a tour.

Took a tour of the Lyric, walked all through it, stood on the stage, even pointed over to the left, stage-left audience side, and said, "My momma sat right over here and was a heckler as part of my act."

And he said, "I remember it so well."

And he said, "This theater was as fine a theater as anywhere in this country including New York at that time."

Now, people came to the South, they expected to perform in a barn basically.

And he said, "We got here, and when I was here in '27, and it was like being in a Broadway theater, brand new, you know, theater in New York.

It was phenomenal."

[Reporter] Across the street from the Alabama Theatre is a hidden theater treasure.

The remains of the Lyric Theatre.

All the famous vaudeville performers played here.

Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and Milton Berle.

He hasn't been back since 1927.

He was 19 then.

I'm now (mumbles) years old.

[Reporter] He wanted to come back to reminisce about the genteel days of vaudeville.

But I remember this theater very well.

They had a sign backstage about a censorship, in fact, all the vaudeville theaters, that if you're caught saying the word hell or damn, you were immediately canceled.

[Reporter] Mr. Berle says a lot has changed.

He preaches to young entertainers, "You don't have to be dirty to be funny."

Madonna would not do good here.

[Reporter] Inside, he remembered the stage and the shows.

I remember we did three shows a day.

One in the afternoon, two at night.

-Wow!

-Seven and nine, and an afternoon show.

That's as good as... What are you coming, why you getting that close for?

(reporter laughs) Mr. Berle was excited about the multimillion dollar plans to restore the Lyric Theatre.

How they must have laughed in 1927 at that young Milton Berle here in the Lyric Theatre.

Milton Berle made a surprise announcement today.

He says when those crowds come back to the Lyric Theatre, he'll be back.

When they're completed with this rehabilitation of the Lyric Theatre, just call on me.

Please the Lord, I'm still around.

I'll fly from California Pier for the opening.

[Lee] You'll come back for the opening?

Sir, I'll be here for the opening.

[Lee] Lee Whaley, Channel 6 News at 10.

And a lot of people will be glad that he'll be back.

The Lyric Theatre was closed in 1958 and will be reopened in 1996.

(melancholy music) We acquired the Lyric in 1993 from the Waters family, who owned lots of drive-in movie theaters and theaters at the Eastwood Mall and other places, and they were out of the movie business at that time.

The Lyric was in great need of repair.

The only problem was, and they were thinking about making a parking deck out of it, but it wouldn't fall down.

Part of the reason it continued standing, this was one of the first concrete-and-steel constructions in the state.

Several times, the previous owners, I think, really faced the situation where it would've cost more to tear it down probably than to restore it.

So in that sense, we were really fortunate that it had such great bones and was able to be saved.

So they donated it to Birmingham Landmarks for $10, and we held it.

We were right in the middle of restoring the Alabama at that time, and that took about 10 years.

There was some type of festival going on downtown around the Alabama Theatre.

And at the time, I was trying to start a pedicab business.

And so I would drive around and try to get drivers to do it, but it was too hilly and too hot.

And so I would try to be creative to get people to ride with me.

Brant and I were standing on the corner of 18th Street and 3rd Avenue North, and I think it was the first day of Secret Stages.

One day, I was on the corner over here at the Alabama Theatre sitting in my pedicab, and I decided to dress up and play my accordion to get people's attention, maybe to get people to come and ride with me.

There were people, you know, getting the stages set up and getting ready for music, and Carrie's standing on the corner with her accordion.

I'm sitting there, I'm playing, and there's this guy across the street in front of this building, the Lyric.

And he was trying to, they were trying to wave me over, and I was, like, looking around, like, are they talking to me?

(chuckles) So I'm like, "Play something for us."

So she's playing the accordion, and I said, "Brant, we need to put her on the stage, and, I mean, you know, all I've ever heard is what great acoustics there are in the Lyric, let's put her on the stage and see what it sounds like."

And it was Don Lupo and Brant Beene were standing there, and they said, "Hey, could you come over here and play your accordion on the stage?"

And he's like, "Don, there are no lights in there."

I'm like, "So we'll open up the back doors and let the light in."

He's like, "Well, there's no floor."

And I'm like, "Well, there's gotta be a way to get her in there.

I mean, if we have to, you know, go across something and hoist her up on the stage, that's just what we'll have to do."

Where am I gonna put my pedicab?

(chuckles) And they said, "Why don't you roll it into the lobby?"

And I said, "Okay."

So I rolled it in, and I really wasn't sure what this was all about.

By that time, two or three more people have come, you know, while she's playing the accordion on the corner.

So the five or six of us, how many ever there were, we get the doors open, we take her through just this terrible mess, put her up on the stage, and we go to the back of the Lyric to listen.

(warm music) (warm music continues) I can still remember almost like we were there right now.

It was pitch perfect.

It was just perfect.

And I'm like, "Brant, I don't see any speakers and I don't see anything, but this sound cannot be coming from these walls the way it's coming without some kind of amplification."

And he's like, "Don, there's nothing, I'm telling you, this is the acoustics of the building."

And I'm like, "Man, we need to do something.

We need to have a concert in here."

And he's like, "You've lost your mind!"

-(upbeat music) -(people cheering) "There's no light!

There's no floor!"

And I'm like, "Brant, we can buy some plywood and we can put some lights around and we can sell tickets and we can tell people to bring their lawn chair or their blanket or whatever, and we'll put on a show."

(energetic music) Glenny Brock contacts Chad Fisher and Chad and his swing band.

So we decide we'll sell 200 tickets for 20 bucks a piece.

We coulda sold 2,000 tickets.

People were so interested in going in that theater and seeing what that mess looked like.

They had driven by, they'd seen the darkness, and they wanted to go in there and see the light, and they wanted to hear the sound that I was so fortunate to hear standing back at the back of that theater that Saturday afternoon.

Everybody wanted to be part of that night.

It was purely magical.

(uneasy music) Things were moving away from downtown in the 1980s, and it was really tough to try to get something going for the Lyric.

There were three or four efforts to start a campaign to help raise the money to redo the Lyric.

There was actually one in 1964.

An architect from Nashville came down and took one look at the Lyric and said, "Don't waste your time, you don't need to do this," and that sorta killed that effort.

As things have moved back toward downtown, we've got Regions Field, we've got a brand new park.

The momentum shifted, you know, in the '90s and then the 2000s, and we're seeing people moving back downtown now, and that gave us the momentum we needed to start another fundraising effort for the Lyric, and this time, we caught the wave.

Well, I think when you look at any historic restoration project such as the Lyric, the challenge is the unknown, the challenge is not knowing what you did not know, the challenge is setting aside enough contingency funds to take care of what you find that you didn't think you would find.

We set a goal of $7 million, and we knew that that would not complete everything that we wanted to do, but the main goal was to get it open.

Pretty quickly, we realized we needed another million dollars, and so we added another million to our goal, and that's really where the local fundraising ended, was $8.1 million.

Subsequently, we figured out that we needed about three or four more million dollars, but we were able to apply for and receive tax credits from the state and federal government, which is gonna bring another 3.7 million, so we will spend 11.8 on the Lyric.

The second challenge behind contingency in the unknowns is finding the craftsman to do the work.

When we put the Alabama Theatre back together from about 1987 to '98, we'd found a company through the League of Historic American Theatres called EverGreene, run by a fellow named Jeff Greene.

They specialized in plaster work and paint.

(lighthearted music) EverGreene Architectural Arts is a interesting place to work.

(chuckles) We've worked on close to 400 theaters, 42 years.

The the Lyric, you know, it's a very unique place for a lot of reasons.

It's a little bit like a time capsule of the vaudeville era, which sets it apart from later theaters, which were built just for movies.

We did not think that we'd be able to hire EverGreene because of the budget, but lo and behold, they actually came in lower than any other bidder, and we were ecstatic about that.

Restoring the Lyric Theatre was a very special project for a lot of reasons.

Cecil Whitmire, who would save the Alabama, took me to look at it literally decades ago, and it was just this wonderful evocative ruin at that point in time.

And, you know, someday we're gonna get this thing done.

The restoration of the Lyric Theatre happened after Cecil was gone, but he set everything in motion.

And I would say that the Lyric has a special place in my heart because of having worked across the street at the Alabama, but also some projects have a kind of special quality in terms of who's working on them.

When all the pieces came into place, the contractor was wonderful, architects were good, everybody just worked well, and there was this kind of esprit de corps.

You know, even with our workers, you know, they felt like they were doing something special, and in point of fact it was kind of extraordinary in that regard.

And that energy, I think, can be felt in the restoration.

It was not just another job.

EverGreene has people who live Florida, New York, California, all over the place, and they go to the site where they're working.

But they know that they're gonna be on site for, you know, six months, a year, however long it might take.

So we had a team of folks here from all over the country actually.

How do we find the people?

It's harder and harder, whether they've come up through the trades.

And, you know, plastering is essentially a dying trade, the wet trades are.

Young people don't wanna come into them very much at all.

We have people from all over the world who come to the United States looking for opportunities, and there's a group in New York, NYANA, New York Association for New Americans.

Then people would come off the boat or the airplane, and they'd say, you know, "What did you do in the old country?"

"I'd paint those churches."

And they'd go, "Go talk to Jeff Greene."

And so we would get a number of people that way.

But it's kind of like a little UN here with people from all over the world with different sensibilities, you know, some have advanced degrees from, you know, Ivy League schools and preservation, some, you know, have, you know, barely high school educations, but they have great hand skills and they have a different kind of knowledge.

We even had some folks from the Caribbean who came here and worked, and I thought that was very significant that we would have immigrants who brought those skills to the US.

And I think that was true back in 1914 when we had the Italians who were here working on the plaster and paint.

The Lyric was falling apart when we got here, the ceiling was falling apart.

I know they were just putting a roof on, but at the time I was there, it was actually raining in the building.

(laughs) So it was crazy job site at first.

I went up there and had to clean the plaster that was, you know, still there and it's not broken.

Once I got everything cleaned, then I primed it, base coated it, and then start glazing.

Glazing is you put a base coat on, and it's transparent paint, put it on, you wipe it off, and then it goes into the cracks, and it brings out the ornament, and you can see the whole thing now.

You know, Albert Fountain, who's a master plasterer, I think he's been doing it since he was literally a teenager, and he's close to 70 now.

And this was, the Lyric was of his last jobs.

I mean, he retired shortly thereafter.

You know, every now and then, we'd pull him out of retirement, and if his wife lets him, you know, leave his garden, he comes and does 'em, because he's such a good plasterer.

But I mean, here's a fellow who's been in the trades for, you know, 50+ years.

He enjoys working with us, as we enjoy working with him because we value his knowledge and his experience, and it shows in the work.

Plastering is something that I started, and from the first day I ever started doing this work, I fell in love with it, and I've been doing it for all these years.

And special part of it is when I met up with EverGreene back in '97 and started doing restoration work.

And restoration is different from just regular plaster, you get to now do mold and really get do work that was done years and years ago.

So it's been a great pleasure to be able to do this work, and I think it made my career complete.

The plaster in the theater was highly degraded.

There was a lot of water damage, and there are more or less two kinds of plaster that you can think of.

There's the flat plaster on wood lath, which had been badly destroyed by water, we were able to consolidate some of that.

A lot of it had to be completely replaced on the flat surfaces.

And then there's the ornament, which is the cast plaster, which is the more artistic part of things, and that had to be reinforced and replicated.

Fortunately, we were able to find almost every single type of plaster, you know, that is plaster pattern or ornament, take a mold from it, recast new pieces, and then put them back.

And then those pieces which were in good enough shape to preserve was just a question of stabilizing them in place, reattaching them, pointing them up, and that kind of thing.

One of the really interesting things to me about the plaster work is some of it was broken, of course, and you can see it, and it looked like there's hair sticking out of some of the plaster, and I thought, what in the world?

Then I found out that it was horse hair that was used to reinforce the plaster back in those days.

Later on, I went upstairs to talk to some of the plasterers and I noticed, you know, they had some things they were putting in the plaster, and I said, "Well, now, if horse hair was used in the teens for this, what are you using now?

Do you have to use anything?"

They said, "Well, plaster's a little different than it was back then but not too much.

We use hemp now inside the plaster."

And I said, "Now, wait a minute, you're telling me that the Lyric is gonna be rebuilt with marijuana?"

They said, "Well, the marijuana plant, that's exactly right," so let's just hope it doesn't burn.

Most of the plaster that's in the Lyric is original.

If you look at the faces of the balconies, both balconies, all of those except one is an original cherub face.

And that's how well-preserved and how well done that plaster work was to be 100 years old.

One of the interesting parts about the Lyric was recreating the box fascias, which had been removed.

And so what we did is we took the molds from the balcony fascia and did 'em in a soft rubber material, silicon material, built a form so we could bend them into the shape of the new boxes.

And they would do a section, they would pour a section that curved a little, and then they would do another one that curved a lot so that when they put that up on the opera box, they'd fit together, and then they had to blend 'em.

But that was a fascinating way, I thought, to rebuild that opera box.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) I knew Glenny Brock, who worked for Birmingham Landmarks, and in January 2015, I asked her if I could come, get inside the Lyric, and start taking pictures.

And she said, "Sure!"

And so I did and was just blown away with it, the opportunity to see a building before major restoration had started.

And so I said, "I would like to come down here on a regular basis and keep doing the photography."

And it all worked out.

(mysterious music) On August 12th, 2015, I came down to the Lyric, and I'd already been taking pictures down here for about eight months at that time.

And not much was going on, so I was just walking around looking for something to photograph.

And Morris, the plaster man, mentioned I should go take a look at the alcove that goes up to the balcony.

And he said, "Well, I'm really proud of that because it's a perfect radius."

He said, "It's better than the original, and it's just a really nice curve."

I said, "Okay, great, I'll go take a picture of it."

And you know, I went and looked at it and took a picture of it.

I said, "Well, okay, that's interesting."

So afterwards, I walked down the block to the coffee shop and was sitting there looking at my photos, and I saw on the screen this image that was, like, really interesting.

It wasn't just plaster on a wall.

There was something, there's some sort of detail to it, what looks like a human figure just really came out of the plaster.

And people were just fascinated by it, you know, all the workmen got it, got copies of it, you know, everybody copied it and sent it to everybody else.

And you know, months later, even stage crew people would ask me, say, "What's the deal with that?

Did you see this?

What happened?"

So I had to tell everybody the whole story.

So people to this day are fascinated by it, and it's really quite remarkable, the image, how human it looks.

And honestly, I didn't see anything when I looked at the wall, but every time I walk by that area now, I always put my hand on the wall and just say, "You're safe, you're gonna love the show, you're gonna love the music, but everything's okay."

You know, every part of the Lyric is historic, and every theater nowadays has got to have a bar.

When we decided we wanted to put in a concession area, we called Gary Sasnett.

He's a local Birmingham craftsman whose specialty is in reclaiming wood and repurposing wood and other things.

Gary asked us about the rigging that goes up above the stage.

It's in a grid system and it was made of wood, and it was still in pretty good shape after 100 years, but it wouldn't hold all the motors and things that you'd have to have in a modern theater.

So we had to take that wooden rigging down and put up steel rigging.

But Gary took the wood from that rigging and he created this bar.

And he took some steam radiators and took the fronts of those as well as some of the pulleys from the stage, he took some marble from outside the stage, and he made the bar out of those pieces.

It's such a great conversation piece.

People ask us about it all the time.

And if you look at this last piece of marble from a distance, you can see that it's got two dips in it.

This piece of marble was right outside the stage door.

So for 75 years, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, and other people came across this threshold and wore down this marble, this Alabama marble, which you'll see all throughout the Lyric.

Here's another thing that's pretty interesting, at least it's interesting to me.

It was actually in the basement of the Lyric under the stage, and it was the mechanism that allowed a platform at the top to go up or down to the stage.

So if the Marx Brothers came in the stage door and had a trunk with them, which they usually carried, put it on top of the platform, and then let it down with this gear mechanism to the floor.

There were 14 dressing rooms underneath the stage.

This was there, and if you look at the bottom, you can see where it's rusted, where there was water probably standing in the basement for who knows how long, 20 years maybe.

But this was on the sidewalk, and when we saw it, we said, "This has gotta be in the bar somewhere," it's just too interesting to make scrap out of it.

(playful music) The Links is an organization of professional women that service the community.

Our pillars are service and friendship.

It was established in 1946, and we have about 17,000 members across the country in 41 states and beyond.

So we're very, very proud of our organization.

We knocked a hole in the wall, in that white marble wall that was on the other side of the colored entrance from the outside, and we put a glass door there, and we talked about how it was back in those days and that this was historically known as the colored entrance.

And we felt that it was very important to talk about that.

May of 2015, it was Birmingham's turn to host the Southern Area Conference.

One of the things we do, aside from all the other things on a continuing basis for the betterment of the community, is a service project.

I called around and spoke to someone at the city of Birmingham at City Hall to try to find out what projects was going on, and they told me about the Lyric Theatre was doing some renovations.

So I said, "Lemme just check and see what that's all about."

We were fortunate enough to have a group of professional women known as The Links who came to us and said, "We'd like to make a contribution to the Lyric."

And we said, "That would be great."

And we talked about it, and we decided that the contribution we wanted them to make was to sponsor that glass door.

And they did that.

We sat down with other people in the community to actually draft what was going to be etched on the door.

It's a sore subject, but it's one that we felt strongly that that needed to be talked about and something that we wanted to preserve so that people could see the way it was.

So he handled that aspect of it.

In the meantime, I'm talking to my Link sisters, and they were just so excited.

We had a ceremony with the mayor, and they were all here when we unveiled that door.

And it was a great day.

The first time when I came in and actually saw the door, I was almost overwhelmed.

Brant was with me.

We both just kinda looked at each other, and I said, "Oh my God, we actually did it.

This is perfect."

If you read the etchings that's on the door, it speaks for itself.

It addresses the stain of segregation and what took place during that time, but it also commemorates and celebrates progress that has taken place in the city of Birmingham as a result of the civil rights movement.

When we actually did the unveiling and the dedication, my Link sisters were there as well as some of the local politicians, the elected leaders, and other folks.

They had tears in their eyes, actual tears.

And I don't know if Brant wants me to tell this or not, so did he.

(lighthearted music) That mural up there may look colorful and bright right now, but when I saw it for the first time, it was black.

It had about (chuckles) three coats of varnish on it that through the ages and probably years and years and years of cigarette smoke, cigar smoke, and everything else had literally turned black.

I talked to the EverGreene people, and I said, "Is there any way you can restore this thing up there?

We're not sure quite what's under there."

And they said, "I don't know, we might be able to clean it, but we don't, you know, restoring, it's another matter, it's costly, blah, blah, blah."

They cleaned it.

And it was like cleaning a window that had 100 years of dust on it.

You know, when you wipe a circle and you look through glass for the first time and then you see, that's what happened.

They were actually using some sort of solvent that was special, and they were able to remove that varnish, and then underneath, there were all these characters.

There were these women dancing around and a guy holding some sort of a harp that I learned later was a lyre.

Lyre for Lyric, of course.

And those dancers were muses.

And the name of that 39-foot wide, nine-foot tall painting's called the "Allegory of the Muses."

It was painted by a Birmingham guy named Harry Hawkins, who I understand was a student of John Singer Sargent from Chicago.

That theme sort of was carried out through not just that mural but through the plaster, if you look at the arches above those opera boxes there, you see those three dancers up there in that arch and the two ladies on the sides with the harps and the lyres and the faces on the balcony fronts are muses, inspiring the artists of all kinds.

18th Street, which here at 3rd Avenue and 18th North, where the Lyric is located, was really the line of demarcation between Black businesses and White businesses.

And west of 18th Street, you had the Carver Theatre, which was traditionally all Black, and other theaters that were east of 18th Street on 3rd and 2nd and others were White theaters.

But the Lyric was in the middle.

The Lyric was sort of unusual because it was one of the first and one of the only theaters where a Black and White audience saw the same show at the same time for the same price.

This should not be mistaken for integration, really, because the audiences did not see each other and really, to a great extent, would not have interacted with each other.

On 18th Street, there was a door with an awning above it outside that said colored entrance.

When the Black patrons came to the 18th Street entrance, they couldn't even see the lobby, they couldn't see anything.

The only thing they saw was a concrete wall and, I assume, some type of directions telling them where they should go, and that's what they did.

So the Black patrons were to come in through that door, up a set of stairs, down a hallway that runs the length of the auditorium, up another set of stairs to a landing, up 11 more stairs before they got to the topmost balcony, the Gallery, which was called, of course, the Colored Balcony.

The Colored Balcony, that's the third level up there, was almost straight down.

And from newspaper accounts, I've read that the original seating in that area was like baseball bleachers.

Now, I've never seen that.

In fact, when I came on board, in all the pictures that I've seen showed regular theater seats, but research told us later that those seats were from the 1940s.

The first movie I ever saw here at the Lyric was the movie "King Kong."

It had been made many years early, but they brought it back, and my parents brought me down here.

And at that time, African Americans had to sit up in the balcony.

But it was still exciting to come here, and it was always a place of wonder, a place of awe for me because we didn't come all the time.

But when we did come, it was like a special occasion.

And I can recall in horror when "King Kong" first appeared on the screen, I covered my eyes and hid behind my parents' shoulder or something like that to keep from seeing the dreaded monster.

Now when you look back on "King Kong" with the claymation or claymotion that they have, it seems kinda funny, but as a child, it was awesome.

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) (cheerful music continues) People ask me all the time, "What are your plans for the Lyric?"

(chuckles) I think to myself, my plans are to keep it alive however we can.

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) We want the Lyric to provide a variety of things for the community.

You know, the community built the Lyric.

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) (cheerful music continues) (gentle music) The restoration of the theater had this kind of special place in my heart.

Having seen it in its completely dilapidated shape where you had to watch where you walked so you didn't go through the floorboards into the basement, and then seeing its complete and total revival.

So there's all these different dimensions, which makes it incredibly rewarding for me to be involved on so many levels that are fulfilling and satisfying and gratifying.

And I feel very fortunate and lucky to, you know, get to do that every single day.

I tell you, there's something else about standing on this stage here in the Lyric Theatre that it doesn't, it doesn't wash over you, you absorb it, you have a special feeling because all these greats in showbiz that you've heard of or seen or seen on television or seen in documentaries were right here on this stage.

History was made right here.

And if you play on this stage, you're part of that history, and, you know, what a cool feeling that is, there's nothing quite like that.

Until television came along, the movies was the place.

And before that, vaudeville was the place, the only place that you could see entertainment.

And to see it in a palace like the Alabama or the Lyric made it even that much more special.

I think in terms of the Lyric as being a place that was a transition in and of itself because it was that bridge between our communities.

Yes, you had the Alabama Theatre across the street that no African American could go in at all under any circumstances.

And then on a couple of blocks from here on 4th Avenue, you had the Carver Theatre that, you know, rarely if ever you saw anybody White going into that theater even though they could go anywhere they want.

But the Lyric represented someplace that everybody could come and enjoy either a movie, or, prior to it becoming a movie house, live acts right here in this facility.

And so it became a bridge in the community that people laughed at the same thing, people cried at the same thing, people got excited about the same thing.

And it was a place that everyone could express themselves in a unified body, so to say, without fear of retribution or without looking over your shoulder.

And even though we had to sit in the balcony of this facility as the White patrons sat down below, it was all one big happy family without any stress, without any concern of being in violation of any type of law.

(lighthearted music) There is a certain type of person that this building just works on them.

I can't explain it other than that except to say some people walk in here and there's something about the energy, it just fills them up, they can't leave it alone.

And that was absolutely my experience.

I have not been able to leave this place alone.

Every time I'm in the Lyric, I feel like there are stories swirling around me.

(cheerful music) I love this place.

(playful music) (playful music continues) (playful music continues) (playful music continues) (playful music continues) (playful music continues) (playful music continues) (playful music continues)