Photo by Craig Fritz/Tribune

/Tribune

Judi Mersereau, a theatrical staging specialist at Popejoy Hall, fires up an old carbon-arc spotlight that hasn't been used in nearly 10 years but will play a part in Popejoy's 40th birthday celebration on Sunday. Popejoy, which can seat up to 2,043 people, is the largest multi-purpose venue in New Mexico.

Photo by Craig Fritz/Tribune

/Tribune

Jillian Walcher, a theatrical electrician, checks a diagram while preparing lighting for Popejoy Hall's 40th birthday party on Sunday and for a production of "Willie Wonka" on Tuesday. The University of New Mexico performance venue opened with concerts played by the Utah Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 1 and 2, 1966, and has since been the home to hundreds of shows performed by local companies as well as national and international artists.

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Kathleen Clawson's favorite Popejoy Hall memory is a dazzling, metal man standing on the auditorium's stage.

It was her father, baritone Gene Ives, portraying Lancelot in a 1971 Albuquerque Civic Light Opera Association production of "Camelot."

"He was dressed in silver, and when the lights hit him there was an audible gasp, probably from the women in the audience," says Clawson, who now teaches theater at the University of New Mexico. "It remains a strong visual image to this day."

Popejoy memories are cropping up fast and thick this week as UNM prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the campus performance venue, which debuted on Oct. 1, 1966, under the rather plain name of the University Concert Hall.

It was rechristened Popejoy Hall in May 1968 to honor retiring UNM president Tom Popejoy.

During its four decades, Popejoy Hall has been a nurturing home for local troupes such as ACLOA (now Musical Theater Southwest), Albuquerque Opera Theater, Albuquerque Children's Theater, the Classic Theater Company, the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and the New Mexico Ballet Company.

And Popejoy has been Albuquerque's window into the world of national and international talent, offering performances by everyone from Itzhak Perlman and Mel Torme to Dionne Warwick and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

On Sunday, Popejoy Hall marks its birthday with singing, dancing and sweet things to eat. During the party, which goes from 1 to 6 p.m., there'll be plenty of time for sharing memories.

"I remember seeing an early Civic Light Opera show, (1968's) `Funny Girl,' in which Fanny Brice is on stage after losing the first love of her life," Ives, now 72 and retired in northern California, says during a phone interview. "The lights go almost totally dark, and the spotlight hits the upper torso of the actress, Fran Billings, as she sings `his is the only music that makes me dance.' I can't think of that now without getting chills."

Ives played numerous roles at Popejoy with ACLOA, AOT and CTC, but some of his fondest Popejoy memories are of performances he watched from the audience - such as "Funny Girl" and an early touring show of "Man of La Mancha."

"Another thing that will never leave my memory is the creaking sound of stairs being let down into a cell as members of the Inquisition come down to pull out a prisoner in a scene from `Man of La Mancha,'" Ives says. "That creaking sound was very chilling."

Sound has always been an important element at Popejoy.

It plays a vital role in Hank Nusbaum's favorite Popejoy memory.

Nusbaum, now 61, is an electrical engineer in Albuquerque.

But in the fall of 1966, he was a UNM student and an oboe player with the Albuquerque Symphony Orchestra, which would eventually evolve into the NMSO.

He remembers standing in the Popejoy balcony with Rhonda Beauchamp (now Blech), also an ASO oboist, and watching workmen put the finishing touches on the hall's stage.

"The sound in the hall was so crisp, we could actually hear sand crunching under the feet of the workmen's boots," Nusbaum says during a phone interview. "Rhonda and I commented that with sound that good, we would have to be careful what we said when we missed a note."

Overture

"It begins."

That's how The Tribune's Urith Lucas started her Oct. 3, 1966, review of the very first shows at Popejoy - Oct. 1 and 2 performances by the Utah Symphony.

Lucas called the performances "a brilliant inaugural for the new Concert Hall."

She wrote that the incandescent music was equaled by the sparkle of the hall - "big, beautiful and bewitching."

And she noted that "the superior acoustics made the yearning phrases of violas and cellos sound as silver - sweet as lovers tongues by night."

In his New York Times review of the Albuquerque Symphony's first performance in the hall on Oct. 26, 1966, Howard Taubman expressed more pleasure with the facility than with the performance of the Albuquerque Symphony, conducted by Maurice Bonney.

"It will be some time, one would guess, before the orchestra becomes the musical instrument of a caliber equal to its new hall," he wrote.

Taubman wrote that acoustically, "this auditorium, which is oblong in shape, is satisfactory, if not yet perfect."

Nusbaum thought the acoustics in Popejoy were excellent early on and remembers in particular a March 1967 performance of the Houston Symphony Orchestra in which he says he could just close his eyes and pick out the sound of any instrument he wanted.

Ives, however, thought that it took a while to get the hall's sound tuned to a point where it did an orchestra justice.

Improving the sound in Popejoy was a primary goal when a major renovation of the hall was started in 1995.

But if acoustics has been a variable in Popejoy's history, the one constant in its development was Bill Martin.

Martin had degrees in theater from the University of Missouri and Yale and a solid background in teaching, producing and directing theater when he came to Albuquerque in 1966 to open what would become Popejoy Hall.

He served as Popejoy's director until his death in November 1992 at the age of 71.

A hands-on manager who wasn't above of wielding a hammer to build a set, Martin actually broke his back in the early 1970s when he tripped and fell while helping build an ACLOA set.

But he is best remembered for building local talent by inviting ACLOA, ACT, AOT, CTC and other companies into Popejoy and offering encouragement from the wings.

"Bill never hovered," Ives says. "But you had a sense that he was always there, was always a support."

Growing up in Popejoy

"Some families go fishing or bowling," Kathleen Clawson says. "We did theater, and Popejoy was our theater."

Clawson and her twin brother, Ken, and their younger brother, Jeff, spent many hours at Popejoy while their father, Gene, and their mother, Dorothy, a costume-maker and a performer, worked on productions.

"We knew every nook and cranny, all the secret entrances," says Clawson, who earlier this month celebrated a 50th birthday with her twin brother. "We knew the phone number of the pay phone in the green room.

"I can remember sleeping backstage with a little pillow and blanket when rehearsals went late. I don't think it was until I was in high school that I realized this is not what every family did."

Clawson, a classically trained mezzo-soprano, has performed often at Popejoy as a soloist with the NMSO.

But she made her Popejoy debut as a lady of Oz in a 1971 ACLOA production of "The Wizard of Oz."

Five years later, while acting the role of Abigail Adams in ACLOA's "1776," she gazed down from the stage into the orchestra pit and fell in love with the tuba player.

She and the tuba player, Alan Clawson, have been married 30 years now and are the parents of a son.

On a more somber note, she remembers weeping steadily as she watched her father die on stage in ACLOA's 1970 production of "Carousel" at Popejoy.

Her father remembers wondering if he might actually bleed to death on the Popejoy stage after being accidentally cut on a finger during the assassination scene in CTC's 1977 production of "Julius Caesar."

As the murdered Caesar, Ives lay on the stage, unmoving under his cloak and unsure how bad the cut might be.

"It turned out it was pretty bad but I had to go back on stage as Caesar's ghost, so they bound my hand up with duct tape and sent me out," he says. "One thing about these Popejoy shows is that Albuquerque always got its money's worth."