Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, Theatre venue at Granville Street, Vancouver, Canada
The Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage stands at 12th Avenue and Granville Street, built in 1930 with an Art Deco exterior and a neoclassical interior. Architect Henry Holdsby Simmonds used tindle stone from Winnipeg, Italian tiles, and chandeliers and furnishings from local merchants. It originally seated 1,216 people.
The Stanley opened on December 15, 1930, as a movie theatre built by Frederick Guest with architect Henry Holdsby Simmonds, seating 1,216. Famous Players bought it in 1941 and closed it on September 25, 1991, after a final showing of Fantasia. The Stanley Theatre Society bought it in 1997, and a $5.8 million renovation reopened it as a stage for the Arts Club Theatre Company.
The Stanley is the main stage of the Arts Club Theatre Company, which bought the building in 1997. Its programming has ranged from Broadway musicals such as Miss Saigon and Disney's Beauty and the Beast to Swing! and Irving Berlin's White Christmas. The theatre lost its du Maurier sponsor because of tobacco advertising rules, then took the name of insurer Industrial Alliance Pacific in 2005.
The Stanley stands at the corner of 12th Avenue and Granville Street, south of downtown Vancouver, and is served by buses running along Granville. The auditorium is entered from the street-level lobby; the Arts Club box office handles tickets for the stage season. The building is a designated heritage structure, so the 1930 exterior and the vertical Stanley sign remain in place.
The Stanley's vertical sign went up in 1940 and the stylized script version in 1957. Its last film, on 25 September 1991, was Fantasia, a title the theatre had already screened in 1977, 1979, 1980–81 and 1990. Famous Players had put the building up for sale that spring on condition it never be used as a cinema again.
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