Wits Theatre Facility Tour Part One

Lobby,  Loading Bay,  and Wits Proscenium Theatre
I have to confess.I got lost a few times going from venue to venue and office to office in my first days at the Wits Theatre. What follows is a photo journey of the theatre complex.

The Wits theatre lobby services 3 theatre spaces and the workshops. There’s a coffee shop/bar, candy and snack counter, and a home-cooked breakfast lunch or dinner counter with your basic roadhouse toasts and fries.

From the lobby you can get into the main proscenium theatre’s lighting grid through these locked doors. You can also get out to the rooftop terraces, often used for small performances and outdoor banquets.

From the lobby you can go through the “Authorized Personnel Only” door into the backstage area of the Wits Main Theatre, the Downstairs Theatre, scenery storage, loading bay, and workshop. There is even space for the theatre’s bakkie. (All pick-up trucks whether farm style of flatbed are called bakkies.)

The loading doors accommodate larger trucks, too. A human-sized entry door helps to keep out the weather.

Rostrum (platform) and stair storage is in several locations throughout the building, but the main storage is in this wing of the loading bay.

The large sound doors are the loading entrance into the Main Wits Theatre from the Workshop (Sceneshop is what Americans call the Workshop) The proscenium theatre’s upstage cross-over is through the greenroom. The cherry picker in front of the loading doors is not used very much in the theatre, but often used to change out lamps in the workshop.

The Wits Main theatre is a proscenium with 370 seats. It has a large apron extension that makes it a bit more of a thrust theatre, and the seating is great for the thrust portion. The thrust is on a hydraulic lift so an orchestra pit or lower forestage configuration can be had.

Prompt side (Stage Left) is the Assistant Stage Manager’s area – the Stage Manager runs shows from the booth The fly operations are on the opposite side. in a gallery above the wing.

Just upstairs from the Prompt Side is the patch bay. It contains the neatest patch panel I have seen in a long while.