2008 Official Georgia Travel Guide

demographics along with film-industry policies made it increasingly difficult to keep The Fox afloat. Atlanta had let Loews Grand, host of the 1939 premiere of Gone With the Wind, fall to the wrecking ball after a devastating fire, and the city was not about to make the mistake again. A four-year fundraiser ensued, and by 1976, The Fox was designated a National Historic Landmark. Volunteers and artisans began the $20 million task of restoring The Fox to its original glory, and soon the theater was up and running at a surplus. Today, the Fabulous Fox auditorium, with its faux sky of twinkling stars and drifting clouds, is booked more than 325 nights a year. It hosts Broadway Across America and is home to Theater of the Stars as well as the Atlanta Ballet, the oldest continuously operating ballet company in the United States. There’s hardly a region in the state that doesn’t have a theater “war story” to tell. In Savannah, the Lucas Theatre, built in 1921 as a movie palace with space for road shows, was repeatedly threatened until citizens joined forces in 1986 to save it. Fourteen years and $14 million later (with a boost from the casts and crews of both Forrest Gump and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which shot on location in Savannah), a grand reopening was held in 2000. The Historic Savannah Theatre sits on what is the oldest continuously operating theater site in America. The first theater was built there in 1818; the last, an Art Deco movie house, was built after a 1948 fire. Now, the refurbished venue is more profitable than ever, with audiences packing the house for long-running, recurring performances such as Broadway on Bull Street and Jukebox Journey. Statesboro proudly honors Bulloch County native Emma Kelly (“The Lady of 6,000 Songs,” who gained national recognition from her cameo in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) with a 1936 movie house restored in her name. Traveling inland to Macon, there’s the Grand Opera House, built in 1884. At the time, architect W.R. Gunn guaranteed the visual and acoustical integrity GEORGIA.ORG • 1-800-VISIT GA Folk theater brings Georgia’s everyday stories to life Georgians like to tell stories. Perhaps this penchant comes from our slower pace of life and the fact that, oftentimes, there hasn’t been much else to do! Whatever the origins of our storytelling heritage, the funny, dramatic and poignant stories of our people and places have found new life in the emerging trend of Georgia “folk” theater. It all started with Swamp Gravy, out of the small southwestern town of Colquitt. Local Joy Jinks attended a 1990 arts conference in New York City and chanced to discuss her town’s idea of staging its history with a doctoral student/director from Chicago, Richard Geer. Encouraged by Geer’s interest in directing and bolstered by community buy-in, a team of volunteers set about gathering stories from the townspeople. They commissioned playwright Jo Carson, who specializes in community performance projects, to adapt these stories for the stage. From concept to execution, local talent stepped up, and the first performance, in 1992, sold out. In 1996, when the world came to Atlanta for the centennial Olympics, Swamp Gravy was part of the celebration. Today, the show goes on in a renovated cotton gin, continuing to delight locals and visitors with ever-changing stories, songs and players. Inspired by the success of Swamp Gravy, other Georgia communities began listening for their stories. In Lyons, Tales From the Altamaha now runs every spring during the Vidalia Onion Festival. Calling on the gifts of more than 100 volunteers, the play is created afresh every year from more than 800 narratives by the late Col. T. Ross Sharpe, who captured the character—and characters—of the region. Social Circle Theater offers Stories From the Well, tales of community life in rural Georgia during the 1920s and 1930s. Camden County, on the coast, brought its stories together in Crooked Rivers. Representing the fishermen, farmers and other folk who worked Stories From the Well: The Radio Show SOCIAL CIRCLE ThEATER and played around the Satilla, Crooked and St. Marys rivers, the 2006 project preceded a viable venue and provided impetus for a new theater. Until a theater is complete, performances will rotate among several local schools. Most recently, in the Appalachian foothills, the Sautee Nacoochee Community Association premiered Headwaters: Stories From a Goodly Portion of Beautiful Northeast Georgia as part of its 18th Annual SummerFest in 2007. The town of Sautee, already recognized as one of the “100 Best Small Arts Towns in America,” drew on local talent as well as professional expertise to bring the mountain region’s stories to the stage. In June 2008, the residents of the town of Lavonia will premiere Land of Spirit, a folk-life play written and directed by the internationally known Community Performance Inc. team. The play will include true-life stories about the people and places in this northeast corner of Georgia and will make audiences laugh, cry and return for new performances year after year. As Georgia communities pull together to dramatize and share their unique, yet universal stories, they are gaining a renewed sense of where they came from and, more than that, a renewed outlook for how far they can go with vision, creativity and common purpose. Official Georgia Travel Guide 11 http://www.georgia.org

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