Here is the report...
Vancouver's last porn theatre The Fox to become live music venue
Opportunity too good to pass up for team from The Waldorf, Rickshaw
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/music/Vancouver+last+porn+theatre+become+live+music+venue/8093126/story.html#ixzz2Nx8UFCuh
The Waldorf production team has found safe haven at the city’s last porn theatre.
Former Waldorf leaseholders Tom Anselmi, Ernesto Gomez and Danny Fazio will join forces with David Duprey and Rachel Zottenberg in turning the Fox Cinema on Main into a live music venue and art space.
Duprey and Zottenberg are co-owners of the Rumpus Room, the Narrow and a soon-to-open Chinatown restaurant. Duprey is also owner of Hastings Street live music venue Rickshaw Theatre.
Duprey said he wasn’t looking for a potential new live music venue, but the opportunity to lease a space on Main near Broadway was too good to pass up.
“I kept saying ‘no, we’re not going to do it,’ up until the day we signed the lease,” Duprey said.
“This came up and it’s such a great location, we couldn’t say no,” Zottenberg said. “We know it’s crazy to be doing this at the same time we have this huge 5,000-square-foot restaurant opening.”
The Waldorf crew had been eyeing the Fox lease at the same time.
“We talked, and decided to combine our talents,” Duprey said. “I think it’s going to a fantastic combination. We’re not just going to be doing live music. There’s going to be DJs, comedy, film, everything that they were doing at the Waldorf.”
Duprey hopes to keep the name, although he doubts that anything else about the Fox is salvageable.
“It needs to be napalmed,” he said. “We were talking about doing walking tours and giving out haz-mat suits, but I don’t know. It’s disgusting.” He said it seems as though the inside of the building hasn’t been cleaned in 20 years. It’s been a porn theatre for the last two decades.
Zottenberg said there’s a painting of TV actor Scott Baio in the women’s washroom that is “epic. It’s the only thing I kind of like that’s on the inside.”
Duprey, who spent over a year trying to get a liquor licence from the city for the Rickshaw, is hoping he won’t have a similar struggle with the Fox.
“I’m a lot more on top of it this time. I’ve already started the conversation and I think I’m a known entity to them. I’m hoping that will expedite it (the application).”
He figures the theatre can hold somewhere around 250 people.
The 520-capacity Rickshaw and the Fox will complement each other, he said. “There are a lot of bands at the Rickshaw we don’t put in there because they can only sell 200 or 150 tickets. If a band looks like it can do 500, I can move them over.”
Before this, Zottenberg said her only experience with the Fox was avoiding eye contact with patrons walking out of the theatre on her way to and from work at the Narrow.
“I’d be coming home at 3 a.m. or going in to work at 10 a.m., and those are like the witching hours of the Fox.”
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/music/Vancouver+last+porn+theatre+become+live+music+venue/8093126/story.html#ixzz2Nx8CaRQC
