The Washington Center has launched a fundraising campaign to renovate

The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, back in the spotlight after a long and mostly empty 15 months, is on the way to a new look and feel — with new seats and carpeting, a redesigned concessions area inside and a new electronic marquee outside.

“I just saw the first glimpse of 3D renderings of some of the interior. It’s exciting,” said Jill Barnes, the center’s executive director. “It is definitely going to feel different.”

At its virtual gala Thursday evening, the center launched a public capital campaign aimed at raising $946,000 to complete interior renovations. As large as that figure sounds, it’s dwarfed by the $7.6 million the center already has raised for new sound and lighting systems, new rigging, a new film projector and other technical improvements installed over the past five years.

“For the last several years, we’ve been doing things,” Barnes said. “This has been a piecemeal project.”

Now, the pieces are coming together. If fundraising goes as expected, the makeover of the public spaces will begin in July 2022 and be completed within a few months, bringing to a close the first full renovation of the center since it opened in 1985.

This project’s effects will be broadly felt: In a typical year, more than 100,000 people attend events at the center, and more than 10,000 locals take the stage, Barnes said. People from around the region and beyond travel to Olympia to attend events.

“The center is probably one of the most important things about our downtown,” said Tammy Bunn, who is co-chairing the capital campaign with her husband, Alex Bunn, former president of the center’s board.

The city of Olympia, which owns the building, renovated the exterior in 2013 and 2014, but the interior has changed little in the 36 years since the center was built on the site of the Liberty Theater, a 1924 vaudeville house. The theater seats, installed when the center was built, were re-covered in 2001, the same year the carpeting was last replaced.

“Once the exterior was done, many people started inquiring about the interior,” said Barnes, who began leading the center in 2013. “It became apparent really fast that we needed to upgrade our interior to match the beautiful exterior.”

The upgrade has been a long time coming, due partly to the need for work on critical backstage systems first and partly to the pandemic.

“The pandemic added significant uncertainty and stress to an already Herculean undertaking,” Barnes told The Olympian. “The perseverance of staff, crew and supporters during this time has been nothing short of miraculous.”

The public capital campaign was originally set to launch last year. “Our whole country was in flux,” Barnes said. “People were nervous. Finances for individuals were all over the map.”

Much of the money the center has already raised came from competitive grants — from the state Department of Commerce’s Building for the Arts program, the Murdock Foundation and the Cheney Foundation — and from donations by the cities of Olympia and Tumwater, Olympia Federal Savings, Heritage Bank and TwinStar Credit Union.

For the final phase of the capital campaign, the center will expand its outreach to donors large and small, Alex Bunn told The Olympian. Opportunities to get involved include hosting a party to benefit the center and sponsoring one of the approximately 1,000 new theater seats at a cost of $1,000 per seat.

“We invite everyone to make an investment in these improvements to your performing arts center,” Barnes said. “Every gift counts and gets us closer to our goal of realizing a beautiful new interior for our beloved theater.”

This story was originally published July 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.