TheatersWestern OhioDayton

Oakwood Theater Renovation

The auditorium at Oakwood Jr. and Sr. High School in Oakwood, Ohio had a familiar split. The iron above the stage was serviceable and repairable. The equipment that controls what happens under it was a generation behind what the school's productions and its daily assemblies were asking of it.

Oakwood City Schools joined the pre-bid TOP-C unit price contract and bought an upgrade aimed squarely at the control end. Audio is rebuilt around a 40-channel digital desk with a networked stage box and wireless control, six line-array mains on wall brackets and two matched subwoofers set behind acoustically transparent fabric under the stage, with a wireless intercom for productions and a custom-built booth desk sized to hold the new equipment and the retained gear together.

Lighting runs from a 2048-output controller, with LED ellipsoidals, color-changing PARs, cyclorama washes and moving heads, plus a new light bar in the cove at the zero electric position that gives the room a front angle it did not have before. The house lights are brought into theatrical control as a dimmable system with five control stations and presets for dramatic and non-dramatic use. Video is a dead-hung 293-inch screen and a matrixed 8,500-lumen large-venue projector mounted at the back wall.

Above the stage, the curtain and rigging are repaired rather than replaced. The district also gets wiring diagrams, startup manuals and in-person training with two system designers, which is the part that decides whether any of it is still being used properly in five years.

Oakwood auditorium stage and projection screen above blue seating

Oakwood auditorium seating and balcony from the rear of the house

Center aisle of the Oakwood auditorium looking toward the entry doors

Oakwood auditorium seating seen from the balcony

Technical Discussion

New control over existing iron

In most school theaters the control end goes obsolete long before the ironwork does. A counterweight system, a line shaft and a set of battens are steel doing a mechanical job; maintained, they outlast several generations of consoles. A lighting controller and an analog dimmer rack age against software, parts availability and what a fixture manufacturer still supports. Treating both ends as one aging system is what makes a theater upgrade unaffordable, because a full rigging replacement will eat the entire lighting and sound package before anyone gets to spend on what the audience actually notices.

This project separates them deliberately. The control end is replaced outright: a 2048-output controller, a 40-channel digital audio desk with a networked stage box, twelve ellipsoidals, twenty-four PAR-type instruments, eight cyclorama washes, twelve moving heads, and a new light bar in the cove that gives the room a front light angle it never had. The rigging is repaired, line by line, against a written list. Shackles are seized, trim chains are rigged back into the thimble instead of standing chain, batten and clew terminations are checked, cradles are re-rigged with rated hardware, new floor and sandbag pulleys go on the main and rear tracks, gear oil in the four-line shafts is replaced, and the main curtain is repaired.

The exception proves the rule. Eight hand winches are not repaired; they are replaced with new units grooved for quarter-inch cable and rated at 800 pounds each. Rated load-bearing hardware is the one place in a theater where repair is the wrong answer, and the contract spends there while economizing everywhere else above the stage.

The result a treasurer can follow is that the money went where the obsolescence was, and the steel got an inspection and a maintenance list instead of a replacement invoice.

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