Timelapse Of Houston Grand Opera Building The Resilience Theatre

When Hurricane Harvey flooded The Wortham Theatre Center, home of the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet, with twelve feet of water, HGO decided to host their 2017/2018 season in Exhibit Hall A3 in George R. Brown Convention Center. Watch the video as the crew turns the 150,000 square foot empty cave into an opera house.

Five dozen people worked 15-hour days to build the impossible. “We took a barn and put up a theatre in it,” Vincent Ferraro, HGO master electrician. Two large plastic shells border the front and rear of the theatre to improve acoustics. Rows of two hundred chairs begin as close as five feet from the stage, while another 1,500 blue, plastic stadium seats rise above the crowd. Curtains draped on pipes divide dressing rooms, and portable restrooms sit near exits. They called it The Resilience Theatre.

Read more about HGO's 2017/2018 season and its trials and tribulations at the Resilience Theatre.