Anyone who has attended a cultural event at Newnan’s city auditorium over the last 75 years understands why it is such an important part of the community.
Some of that long history is highlighted in a new documentary, “The Wonderful Wadsworth,” which premieres in a free screening 7:30 p.m. Nov. 12 at Wadsworth Auditorium.
Written and directed by husband and wife team Jonathan and Maggie Boudreaux Hickman of JWH Productions LLC in Newnan, the film is funded by the Newnan Cultural Arts Commission. It is this group that is working with city officials to assure the Wadsworth will be a central part of the community for years to come.
The auditorium in its long history has been the setting for many an event from student music and dance recitals to amateur and professional theater, variety show fundraisers, movie screenings, and community and political gatherings to the grand “Wadsworth and Friends” chamber music concerts.
Those fundraising concerts of the last two decades to benefit the hall’s restoration were headed by auditorium namesake Charles Wadsworth. Now Newnan’s own Courtenay Budd has taken the reins and hosted “Friends” events the last two years. Budd also organized a new fall extravaganza, presenting a “Rags to Riches” program Oct. 24 featuring Warren Martin’s comic oratorio “The True Story of Cinderella” to a packed house. “Friends of Wadsworth” is set to return for its spring edition March 12, 2016, with popular violinist Chee-Yun and a lineup of internationally-known artists.
Started as the Lively Arts Series by The Heritage School, since 2007 the Wadsworth “Friends” concerts have been under the auspices of the Newnan Cultural Arts Commission. The series has brought to the Wadsworth stage some of the world’s top performers in classical music.This grand hall, which the internationally-acclaimed pianist Charles Wadsworth says has some of the best acoustics he has encountered, is housed in what for decades was the Newnan Municipal Building. It was the seat of city government before construction of a new city hall on LaGrange Street. In later years the building housed the city’s public safety offices.
Built toward the end of the Depression years, Newnan’s shining new Municipal Building in 1939 was an outstanding example of the sleek, modern Art Deco style.
The local landmark on Jefferson Street was designed by noted Atlanta Architect R. Kennon Perry, who also designed the County Welfare Building that is now the Coweta Administration Building on East Broad Street. Perry’s Newnan-area projects also include the former C&S Bank building that now houses Bank of America on Greenville Street, and the Peniston-Thomasson home on Jackson Street that is now home to Newnan-Coweta Historical Society’s McRitchie-Hollis Museum.
Perry also kept some good company, working with fellow Atlanta architect Philip Trammel Shutze. It is Shutze who designed the famous Swan House, now part of the Atlanta History Center complex in Buckhead. Perry and Shutze worked together on the historic Academy of Medicine at Georgia Tech.
A vote in recent years to fund a new city public safety complex through the joint city-county Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax meant that Newnan’s former Municipal Building would soon be empty.
As cultural arts commission member John Thrasher notes, the clock began ticking as soon as ground was broken for the new public safety complex on a site just down Jefferson Street. He credits Newnan City Manager Cleatus Phillips and Business Development Director Hasco Craver IV for leading work on a study and plan for future adaptive use of the historic building.
As part of the study effort Newnan Cultural Arts Commission members visited public arts facilities in Dunwoody, Roswell and the Little Five Points area of Atlanta to get ideas from other adaptive reuse projects. In initial phases, work will be done at the old municipal building complex to provide second-floor offices for the Newnan Fire Department and to improve behind-the-scenes operations for the performance space. The hall itself, restored in part with funds raised through the Wadsworth and Friends concerts, seats approximately 625.
To be recognized at the Nov. 12 documentary premiere are the people interviewed or who performed for scenes in the documentary. Along with auditorium namesake Charles Wadsworth himself, they include:
-local historian Elizabeth Beers, who was active with the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society when the auditorium restoration effort was taking place,
-Keith Brady, who has served as Newnan’s mayor since 1994,
-Current Friends of Wadsworth concert organizer and soprano Courtenay Budd Caramico,
-Shirley Church, who worked with the Wadsworth Restoration group and earlier the Lively Arts Series of The Heritage School that initiated the Wadsworth concerts,
-retired Newnan Police officer Jimmy Davenport,
-sculptor Carol Harless, who created the bust of Charles Wadsworth that sits at the auditorium entrance,
-Steve Hill, currently vice-president of the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame, who through the years has handled technical aspects of the auditorium sound and lighting operation,
-Dale Lyles, who organized theatrical performances at the city auditorium as creative director of then-Newnan Community Theatre Company and an associated student group,
-local civic club worker Brenda Martin,
-Times-Herald News Editor Winston Skinner,
-local businessman Donald Van Houten,
-Martha White, who worked with Newnan Junior Service League projects including the popular “Follies” variety show and who performed along with her husband the late John White,
-former Coweta County Commissioner Robert Wood, who shares memories of performing at the auditorium,
-and current performers Lance Mapp and Candler Budd, along with Kaitlin Fenninger, daughter of Kristi and Mark Fenninger, who provides the stage performance for the title credits.
