Fredericton Performing Arts Centre

Fredericton is replacing its beloved Playhouse with the Ron & Erma Hawkes Centre for the Arts — a 72,000-square-foot building roughly two and a half times the size of the venue it succeeds, sited at King and Regent in the heart of downtown.

The building holds two formal performance venues: an 850-seat main hall equipped for opera, dance, concerts, theatre, comedy, film, circus and Broadway, and a 300-seat flexible theatre that reconfigures for intimate and local productions. A performance-ready ground-floor lobby with an open amphitheatre and a multipurpose studio round out the program.

AV design work spanned all of it: reinforcement systems that hold intelligibility across a hall asked to serve unamplified symphonic work one night and full touring rock production the next, a flexible infrastructure in the smaller theatre that survives repeated reconfiguration, and networked audio, video and production communications tying the venues, lobby amphitheatre, studio, green rooms and dressing rooms into one coherent facility.