Downtown Hamilton gets major boost with opening of NZ’s most beautiful theatre

Economic boost: Hamilton’s BNZ Theatre is now open. Photos / Supplied

On a historic site above the Waikato River, Hamilton’s new theatre replaces the city’s crumbling venues. Dionne Christian was there on opening night.

Just a year ago, the Hamilton Hotel, at the south end of the city’s Victoria St main drag, was dominated by cranes and teeming with workers in
hard hats, high-vis vests and steel-capped boots. The hotel’s 1923 façade was held in place by 13 steel supports and had been for two and a half years as a concrete behemoth grew behind it.

Now the sign out to Victoria St still says “Hamilton Hotel” in the font that greeted Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip when they stayed there in 1953. But the royal suite is no more.

The hotel is the frontage of the new BNZ Theatre and it’s a testament to those workers – not to mention architects Jasmax and international theatre designers Charcoalblue – that there’s now not a chipped tile, a scuffed piece of carpet or stain anywhere in a building that smells of wood, fresh paint and excitement.

Can a building smell of excitement? You betcha, when it throws open the doors to its community and the local great and good for the first time and the air becomes charged with champagne, perfume and oohs and ahhs.

Waikato’s regional theatre, now the BNZ Theatre, brings to the dairying capital an $80 million state-of-the-art, 1300-seat venue. Its lyric theatre can be used for music, opera, kapa haka and theatre shows. Take out the seats in the auditorium and it’s good to go for standing concerts.

The performing arts centre is expected to inject about $13 million a year into the local economy, support 48 permanent full-time jobs and allocate 30c from every ticket sold to a community fund that subsidises local use. The staff of a nearby restaurant, mopping the floor and locking the doors just before 9.30pm on a Friday, might soon have to think about keeping those doors open a little longer.

But a theatre is never solely about economic gains. Just ask singer-songwriter Teeks, the first act to perform at the new venue. “I grew up in a rural coastal town in the Far North so I know first-hand how important it is to have venues like this. Living in smaller towns usually means limited access to quality live music. This theatre can change all that. It will not only benefit the current music and arts scene but it has the potential to inspire an entire generation of artists and visionaries.”

Much is being made of the building’s acoustics – “equipped with an acoustic halo and acoustic shell for unamplified performance as well as variable acoustic drape system and distributed acoustic sound system to ensure a world-class auditory experience for all types of live performance in every seat”.

Teeks on the opening night of the BNZ Theatre. Photo / Supplied

Teeks and supporting pianist and string sextet sound fantastic – clear, crisp and powerful – and even more so when Maisey Rika joined them on stage. As Teeks repeatedly said, “beautiful”.

That’s an apt description of the building itself, with its postcard views across the Waikato River, a taonga of Waikato-Tainui, and the incorporation of heritage features from the Hamilton Hotel. The hotel, first opened in the 1860s, was twice destroyed by fire before being rebuilt in 1923 with concrete masonry. So flash was it that HRH stayed there and she and the prince would have walked up the now 102-year-old American oak staircase that has been incorporated into the new development. The hotel closed in 1980; the neighbouring Embassy Theatre was demolished in 1994.

But there’s another reason to visit, even if there’s nothing playing. The theatre is now home to a mural created by Ralph Hotere in 1973. Hotere won a commission from the Hamilton City Council and the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council to create work for Founders Theatre, then a decade old. Five artists, including Colin McCahon and Paratene Matchitt, vied for the opportunity and Hotere’s work, an 8.5m wide by 5m high three-panel painting, was chosen. It hung in Founders until the theatre’s abrupt closure in 2016 when the building was deemed unsafe because of seismic risk and its failing flying system – the rope and pulley backstage mechanics.

Ralph Hotere’s painting once hung in Founders Theatre, but has been restored and installed in the new building. Photo / Supplied

Its closure kickstarted the BNZ Theatre development, so it’s fitting Hotere’s work should have a place in the new venue. The work, insured for $3 million in 2020, could have gone the way of other homeless public artworks and been taken down and stashed in a council work depot.

Local art critic, collector and philanthropist Nancy Caiger stepped in, sponsoring the work to be included. Now it hangs on the wall of the theatre’s Caiger Landing. There, the horizontal blue lines at the bottom of Hotere’s panels that reference the Waikato River, now stand above the awa. But it’s the multicoloured bolder vertical lines that declare the work to be really in its right place. They look like the ropes of a theatre flying system, the backstage rig for shifting painted backdrop landscapes and audience perspectives and creating new worlds on the stage of the country’s shiniest new theatre.

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