You’ve probably seen “under new mgmt” on its marquee – or a different look on its website – or you read this thread or this thread on WSB. Now, we have details on the Admiral Theater‘s management change, after talking by phone today with its new operator – who is also one of its old operators. We’re going to write this up in two parts – the first part is the shorter one, but it’s got the answer to the question several WSB’ers asked in comments here – what about the $40 donations for new seats?
Jeff Brein is now running the Admiral Theater – as of a little more than a week ago. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because he ran it until about a year ago. The second part of our report will have details on why the change and what happens next to the theater — but one important thing we wanted to get out quickly was his answer to the question about the donations.
Previous Admiral manager Steve Garrett had solicited $40 donations to get new seats for the theater (as reported here; the page on the old Admiral website is cached here), and promised free passes to those who donated money. Brein says he does not have records of who made donations and how many were made — though he says Garrett has promised to provide those records and also to contact the donors and reimburse them — so Brein wants to hear now from those donors.
Though he says any renovations to the theater will be handled in different ways — his company, which runs eight other theaters in the state, doesn’t solicit public donations for renovation work, he notes — he does want to “do something” for those who gave money, so he asks that you call the theater (office number is 206-938-0360) if you were among those who made a donation in the campaign to pay for new seats.
Our conversation with Brein included a lot of other information about what’s happened, what’s going to happen next, how he’s hoping to improve the quality of its movie offerings, and a key timetable for decisions on who’ll be running the Admiral — which is an official city landmark — in the long term; we’ll be putting that together within the next few hours.
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