Christened by a Queen
The Queen Elizabeth Theatre opened in early July 1959, and Queen Elizabeth II christened it during a Vancouver visit on July 15 that year, giving the hall her name. It was the first project of the Montreal firm later known as ARCOP (Affleck, Desbarats, Lebensold, Dimakopoulos, Michaud and Sise), chosen through an international design competition and built as a large opera and ballet house.
The Opera and Ballet House
The QET is the home stage of Vancouver Opera and Ballet BC, and it anchors the Broadway Across Canada series in the city. Beyond opera, ballet, and musical theatre, the roughly 2,765-seat proscenium hall regularly takes large touring concerts, which makes it one of downtown's principal seated rooms.
The 2009 Acoustic Rebuild
The stage offers about a 70-foot-wide by 40-foot-deep performing area behind a proscenium opening of roughly 67 by 34 feet. A major acoustic renovation completed around 2009, with Toronto's Aercoustics Engineering leading the sound work, raised the auditorium ceiling to add volume. The original room had been built lower than designed to save money, leaving it dry and thin, so the work added reflecting surfaces to warm the reverberation. Reported costs for the wider project vary, from about C$45 million up.
One of Three Civic Houses
Vancouver Civic Theatres runs the QET for the City alongside the Orpheum and the adjoining Vancouver Playhouse (about 668 seats), which shares the same Hamilton Street complex. As the civic system's large proscenium house, it carries the bigger end of the city's seated programming, from resident opera and ballet seasons to touring Broadway and concerts.
