It’s almost time to raise the curtain at the Lyric Theater in Wooster. After a $3.5 million renovation, the historic venue reopens Feb. 7 as a movie house and live performance space.
“Our first month is going to be heavily Oscar titles,” said Lyric Theater Managing Director Jeremy Thomas. “Our second week, we'll do Oscar shorts.”
On its first weekend, the Downtown venue offers Wooster Children’s Film Festival, curated by the New York International Children’s Film Festival.
Thomas, who took the helm at the Lyric Theater in 2023, plans to offer a mix of entertainment.
“We'll have some mainstream movies, independent films, a lot of classics,” he said. “Then on the live side, basically anything you could think of: Live music and maybe some small stage acts and hopefully some comedy as well.”
Upcoming events include “Love Letters” for Valentine’s Day, magic and comedy by Tim Hill and performances by the Thomas Neptune Band and Shawshank Big Band.
Thomas also worked out a movie arrangement with Disney and Fox. He said the studios allow theater owners to play either classics or new releases – but not both.
“We've elected for the first year to do the classics,” he said. “So, we'll be able to play things like 'Star Wars' around May 4. 'May the fourth be with you.' It gives a lot of flexibility. It's hard to find theaters that play classic Disney."
Other programs in the works include showing 25 films from 25 years ago in April.
The theater traces its history to 1912. The current building was constructed in 1979 and has been dormant since 2010. Since then, with a global pandemic and changing technology, Thomas said the vision is to provide more from the live theater experience.
The Lyric originally had two auditoriums. Now, it’s been divided into three, each a different size and with a variety of tables, couches or recliner-style seats. The dining options include the standard fare of candy and popcorn plus nachos, tacos and a pour-your-own-beer station, stocked with local brews.
Renovating the space to get to this point has not been easy, Thomas said.
“We’ve had a leaking corner at the back of the building; there was water coming in,” he said. “We had to do a lot of checking on the structural foundation, things like that. A lot of our plumbing had to be completely redone once they started breaking up concrete.”
Thomas began working in the theater industry in 1996. He spent much of that time with Cinemark, which has a 10-screen theater in town that Thomas actually operated in 2005. Is he concerned about the competition?
"It was built in the early '90s and really hasn't had a lot of renovations," he said. "We'll do our best to not have the same films, to give people here in Wooster a variety."
Thomas plans to offer sensory-friendly screenings of films in the future, and said it would be a “dream” to someday install film projectors to run alongside the digital projection methods currently in use.
"I've always loved movies and the business," he said. "People walk in here excited, unlike other places. They typically leave happy. It's a good environment to be in."
