Lyric to be renamed for Modells 

Posted: 7:02 pm Tue, September 7, 2010
By Ben Mook
Daily Record Business Writer

It’s been known as the Music Hall, the Lyric and the Lyric Opera House, but this month it will be renamed after the former owner of the Baltimore Ravens and his wife, who donated $3.5 million to the historic theater’s building campaign.

The naming ceremony for the Patricia & Arthur Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric will be held on Sept. 21. In addition to the Modells’ donation, the Lyric’s $12.5 million campaign received funding from private donations and public bonds.

“The Lyric is a Baltimore treasure, a core cultural asset and its oldest continuously operating theater,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in a prepared statement. “The City of Baltimore is proud to support The Lyric’s capital project with $3 million in bond bill financing.”

The campaign is the last phase of a 35-year plan to restore and modernize the Lyric, which opened in 1894. This phase will expand and modernize the Lyric’s stage house, which is the structure that surrounds the main performance space.

“They have been incredibly supportive of us, and other organizations throughout the community,” Sandy Richmond, executive director of the Lyric Foundation, which is mostly funded by ticket sales and rental fees from opera companies, said of the Modells.

The work will include removing obstructing structural columns in the wings and replacing the wooden roof grid of the stage house with a steel grid. The stage’s headroom will also be raised to 80 feet, which will allow the Lyric to attract larger productions, which have greater demands for set space.

Richmond said the Lyric’s sandbag system will get a modern overhaul as well. The system of hemp sandbags used to raise and lower set pieces dates to the time the theater was built. It will be replaced with a modern system of counterweights.

The Lyric Opera House’s architect, T. Henry Randall, modeled his design after the Neues Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany. The Lyric’s auditorium was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

Construction is scheduled to be completed in fall 2011. Richmond said the work will affect the number of performances at the Lyric until it is completed. The Lyric will celebrate the project’s completion with special events, including a full-staged presentation of the opera “La Traviata.”

“There will be a limited amount of events, but we will maintain the continuous operation we’ve had since 1894,” Richmond said.

Modell, 85, moved the then-Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in 1996. He sold the team to Steve Bisciotti in April 2004.