The Tampa Theatre's centennial anniversary will arrive in October with a relatively new leader heading up the historic venue.
George Levesque started his role as the CEO and president in June after John Bell retired. Before this, Levesque was the executive director at the Paramount Theatre in Abilene, Texas, since 2018.
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," the new man in charge gives insight into how the historic renovation is going, what brought him to Tampa and more.
The interview below was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Tampa Theatre is considered an atmospheric theater. What exactly does that mean?
You should be sitting in the theater and looking around and feel like you're outdoors. So if you let me just digress momentarily, people used to watch something called a nickelodeon around the turn of the century, right? Nickelodeon, five cents. Nickel. Odeon was French for something like video or film.
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So people would pay their five cents; they'd go into some warehouse, and there'd be a sheet against the wall and someone would show them a magic movie. Well, lo and behold, Paramount Theaters, all these fabulous theaters, wanted to change the image of movies. So they started building these movie palaces all over the United States.
It was a very short amount of time — maybe 15 to 20 years — and there was a subset of these called atmospheric theaters. There's about 100 left in the United States, 140 left in the world, and there's only 18 were built by John Eberson. He's the guy who invented them. He built 18 of them, and he says that his finest is Tampa Theatre.
"The fact that the theater is still in such incredible shape through those hard decades is a testament to the people of Tampa."Tampa Theatre CEO and President George Levesque
So as a director, I imagine it must be a real kind of prize to actually be leading this place now.
It is a prize. I hope everybody in Tampa — and I think Tampa knows this — but maybe everyone in Florida, in the United States, knows too that this is a very architecturally significant building. It was so significant to me, I wanted to see it before I started working here.
About a year before I even applied for the job, I had come to Tampa Theatre just to see Tampa Theatre and spent a weekend there; watched a show; met John Bell, the outgoing CEO; the marketing director; had a ball and fell in love with Tampa Theatre and thought this is just a magical place.
Back to the restoration because the theater is closed at the moment. It's going to reopen fairly soon, though. Can you kind of give us a sense of the cost and what exactly has been done?
It's about $30.5 million. Right now, we're in the middle or the end of phase one, which is $24.5 million, and then very soon, we'll try to come up with that other 6, 6.5 and begin that second phase.
But right now, it is just top to bottom. So when you walk in the theater, all of the walls are being repainted. They're going back to the original colors. Inside the Tampa Theatre, the number of colors that John Eberson used to make it look the way it did is ludicrous.
He said he was inspired by Florida fauna. He looked around and saw all the living — the flowers, the trees — and that is what spawned his interest in the colors that he put all over there. But they went through there a few years ago, going through forensically, looking at each layer so that we could get back to the original colors. And that was a big portion of what they did.
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But instruments have been taken off — big, huge lighting instruments that hung down. They've been sent off to St. Louis, where they have been completely restored. They're about to go back up. The list goes on and on.
But the thing that I might be most excited about, and I know our marketing director is most excited about, Jill, is the Florida Avenue side. So, at the back of the theater, there are two floors back there or three floors back there, that used to be sublet, basically, in 1926 to a haberdashery or some kind of business.
They've just been unused for the last few years, and we have restored those, and we're going to make it an education center. We can't wait. We've had wonderful luck over the years putting together, and we've teamed up with the University of South Florida to put on fabulous camps that so many kids have been able to experience over the summer for film camp. How do we expand that? And we'll have the space to do it year-round. So education is going to be a part of what we do.
You've come here from Abilene, Texas, where you were the longtime leader of the historic Paramount Theatre. What are some of the similarities between there and Tampa Theatre and what made you want to come here?
They're both atmospheric theaters. That was my favorite place on the face of the earth was Paramount Abilene. It is a lovely theater — about the same number of seats. It's about the same size. It is a fabulously gorgeous theater.
And the people of Abilene, I think, like the people of Tampa, love it. It is beloved. It is dead center downtown. It is the only theater that survived. And that's exactly the history of Tampa Theatre.
There used to be five or six theaters just in a couple-block radius of that theater, and it's the only one to have survived. So they have that in common. They're atmospheric again, so stars and clouds, and you're supposed to feel like you're in a courtyard at night watching a movie. They have that in common.
But I think the thing that is most in common is that they're beloved by their communities, and somehow the community saved them.
And I can't express how rare that is because most of these theaters are gone. Most of them are either mowed down to turn into parking lots. You get into the '60s and '70s, and downtowns all over America suffered. People wanted to go to the outskirts to multiplex theaters. They wanted to go to malls. Downtowns were vacant ghost lands, and Broadway suffered the same kind of fate in the '60s and '70s.
So the fact that the theater is still in such incredible shape through those hard decades is a testament to the people of Tampa.
This story was compiled from interviews conducted by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.
